The AV Vote - The Country Says No

Well another years elections have been concluded, Unfortunately my wife was not successful in her campaign to represent Langley Green on Crawley Borough Council but it was otherwise a good night for the Conservatives with their share of the vote holding up well possibly indicating that while people are unhappy at the cuts that the coalition are doing the electorate do not have as short a memory as Labour would like them to have.

The AV referendum when all said and done wasn’t much of an event with the public rejecting thoroughly the concept of electoral reform. (Backing up the No2AV camps claims that the only thing the vote did was waste money, but hopefully we can put this to bed for a while now.) Only a few hours after the result became clear a “Yes” supporter said to me that this result showed that the British Electorate were clearly stupid and wanted to hand over power to an unaccountable elite – nothing like being a bad loser! However I read a different message into the win for the No vote. Clearly there have been a great deal of problems with the entire political environment in the last few years (and longer) and a great deal of the trust that is needed for a democracy to continue has been lost. What this says however is that the electorate do not think that the problem sits with the system but rather the politicians themselves.

I was unable at any point to fully understand what AV would offer, I was told that it would

“Make MP’s work harder for your vote!” – How? In a safe seat AV makes no difference and in a marginal they take nothing for granted.
“Help the smaller parties to get more votes!” – But would not help the BNP and wouldn’t actually change the results as the likely winner would still be one of the big three.
“Give us a real democracy!” – Again, what does this mean?

In the end I think that the Yes campaign was simply too disjointed and too unsure about what they were offering and what it offered, that said the Yes people I spoke to were passionate and thoughtful and in local politics this can make a very pleasant change.