Voting Yes But Saying NO
A Bunch of Mugs
Today it is my great pleasure to unveil the newest page on Vote No To AV, Voting Yes But Says NO. This new page documents all the times Nick Clegg and other Yes supporters, organizations and press have said No to AV.
We all know Clegg’s famous…
Miserable little compromise…
Yet Surprisingly who has said No more times then any other? Clegg often gets the wrap for this, but what of the other Yes supporters and the organizations backing them up? To finally reveal the truth and to nail the lid in the coffin of the idea that AV is a ‘fairer system’, I have trawled the internet and in only a day discovered 31 articles from people all across the Yescampaign. So here it is the Voting Yes but Saying NO League Table, it’ll be updated weekly and currently stands at:
Voting Yes but Saying No League Table
This easy to use table ranks the Yes to Fairer Votes supporting newspaper, organization or person against the number of press releases, stories or quotes that they obviously were happy to release to the wider media and the world.
As we can see little old Nick finishes joint 5th place with the former Chief Executive of the Electoral Reform society, tough luck Nick! Who else is on this list?
- Chris Huhne – Energyand Climate Change Secretary and lost the Lib Dem leadership to Clegg
- Caroline Lucas – Leader of the Green Party who has stormed the table with an impressive 8
- Ben Bradshaw – Head of Labour Yes campaign for AV
- The two supporting AV papers – The Guardian and Observer
- Unlock Democracy, Power 2010, Take Back Parliament and Electoral Reform Society all supporting AV
- Several prominent #Yes2AV twitter supporters; Guy, James and ISupportAV.co.uk
Some of the more surprising entries on the list include Peter Facey, direct of Unlock Democracy and Pam Giddy former Power 2010 chair. Peter is one of the six strong Yes to Fairer Votes steering committee and Pam Giddy is the Chair of the campaign!
Pam told Liberal Conspiracy:
By voting ‘Yes’ in the referendum we can take what works with the current system and improve on it, and give politics a long-overdue upgrade.
But Pam said of Labour’s AV referendum:
Gordon Brown would deny the public the chance to vote for proportional representation and restrict the choice to the Alternative Vote, a system hand-picked by ministers which allows voters to rank candidates but would do nothing to end the unfairness in the current system.
Once off you’d think we can all change our minds:
Without troubling the public for their views he [Gordon] has hand-picked a voting system which will not really offer more choice to voters or open up the political system.
Okay… maybe she had a road to Damascus moment:
We are in the midst of a political and financial crisis – will these reforms [Labour's AV] deliver an accountable Britain?
Ah, so the Alternative Vote is to make politics fairer, open it up to more choice and too end corruption and lies that are symbolic of the Expenses Scandal, or so the Yes to Fairer Votes website tells us and so does ISupportAV.co.uk (even if Anthony didn’t).
Yet the same people campaigning, debating, emailing, phoning, canvassing, tweeting and running the campaign are telling us to vote Yes, and they all have said No repeatedly.
Maybe today marks the start of this new AV style ‘fairer’ British politics? Or is this just the FPTP corruption affecting their jugdement 31 times?
“Yes”, they want AV rather than _______
“No”, they don’t want AV but they would rather have _______
I’ll let you fill in the gaps, using the words “FPTP” and “PR” once each
Anthony, I like hot chocolate, I don’t like coffee but I don’t mind tea.
If I was stuck with coffee, and out of no where someone offered me tea, I wouldn’t say tea was terrible, wasn’t any better than coffee, etc only to start saying how nice and better tea is to coffee when I find hot chocolate is off the menu.
They have their true opinion of AV. They want change for change sake in the belief it will lead to PR. I think (hope) that most AV supporters must see how flawed it is.
The ER
…as I was saying, … the ERS didn’t think it was good either
Anthony
If they want _____
Then why don’t they hold out for _____
Instead of saddling the country with _____
Which they freely admit is _____
I’ll let you fill in the gaps, using the words PR, PR, AV and SH*T
I have done a table of people who actively support FPTP.
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I NAME I
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I I
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I think its complete, it didn’t take me long.
BTW: As far as I can see the ‘Miserable little compromise’ was Clegg’s comment on Labours offer of limited electoral reform in return for LibDem support in forming a coalition – in the same breath he said that AV was a step in the right direction.