seen from Australia
seen from Australia
seen from Australia
seen from Egypt
seen from United States
seen from Australia
seen from Australia
seen from Australia
seen from Australia
seen from China
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from Oman
seen from Germany
seen from Australia
seen from Romania
seen from China
seen from Australia
seen from Australia
seen from Brazil
You may remember the opposition the Alternative Vote faced before it lost the referendum, with Cameron going so far as to call in "undemocratic".
Well, today the Lords used it to elect their speaker. My feelings about the referendum are now too bitter for me to say any more but details of the vote can be found on Lords of the Blog.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
The first ever national UK referendum on our voting system was always going to be a difficult affair. But the size of the loss cannot just be attributed to the political environment we were in. Those who ran the Yes campaign must take a long hard look at themselves.
The less said about certain recent elections the better. And, yes, referendums are always hard to win (2/3s don't, I seem to recall) and electoral reform is more complicated than most. The status of the cuts, the LDs and Ed Miliband were less than helpful too. But it seems to be accepted that the referendum result was partly due to the NO2AV campaign being a well-oiled machine. This should perhaps be unsurprising given that it was basically the Tory campaign machine, with plenty of money and excellent strategists. I've seen it said that the No campaign was like that of a political party, while the Yes one was more like an NGO. Another article states that Grassroots campaigns don’t win national elections while it seems to me that, like many NGOs, it was too aimed at a certain middle-class fraction of the population.
Yet another article advises on where the Yes campaign went wrong as well as explaining that NO2AV put out the lie that AV would cost £250m in response to their first focus group which "flagged up cost as a strong argument". So these elections have helped open my eyes somewhat to how campaigns are run, with the importance of having both money and the capable staff needed to direct it. The main lesson, however, from this and 'Prop 19' seems to be that referendums are terrible ideas (though I may change my mind if similar cannabis measures pass next year!). Rather than give more power to the average person, they can largely be determined by the richest and the media, with dead-children scaremongering being used in both the AV and Prop 19 campaigns. It's not to hard to see how so many people become disaffected with politics.
To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity. ~ Oscar Wilde
Hackney has highest Yes to AV vote in the UK
On the day of the Alternative Vote referendum, I conducted a simple exit poll in our office foyer. We have about 50 people working in our building and while the poll might not have been scientific or statistically significant, the results showed that AV was certainly favoured in our neck of the woods.
Interestingly, this seems to chime with the official results. The Hackney Citizen reports:
Hackney has bucked the trend, voting 61% in favour of the proposed changes to the parliamentary electoral system.
The ‘yes’ vote beat the ‘no’ vote in only six London boroughs (Camden, Haringey, Islington, Lambeth, Southwark and Hackney)
At least this gives me some sort of affirmation that the people around me are like-minded. I think there's a silver lining in that.
Food for thought: FPTP- Hung Parliament (Westminster). PR- Stable Government (Holyrood)
Our fight for reform is not over.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Well, we lost.
On AV
The sheer number of people I've seen saying they're voting NO on the AV election because it's ~complicated~ or ~unnecessarily confusing~ is beginning to worry me. Like, seriously? It's not that difficult.
The Guardian's got a handy interactive guide to it, in a short 5 slides.
And why are so many people buying the dead babies and ousted nurses bullshit? Even if we spent zilch on this referendum I still doubt they'd see any of that money with the way things have been going lately. Not to mention the blatant lying from the No2AV side over money.
Yes2AV should've found a way to shoehorn a cute white baby or stony faced soldier into their campaigns. Obviously it seems to work.
Have you voted yet?
You still have 3 hours. Go go go!
