If AV falls, the idiots will say "That's settled then. The people have voted for FPTP. End of."
And we will be stuck with FPTP for yet more dreary decades.
If AV, for all its pusillanonimity, wins, the FPTP log jam will have been broken.
This will be a symbolic change.
We can then campaign for its upgrading for AV+, a kind of PR, which will mean that the will of the people is represented in Parliament.
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I suspect that it's likely that, even if the vote goes in favour of AV, we'll be told that the question has been settled, and we'll have to make a lot of noise to get further reform.
A couple of weeks ago I was talking to a LibDem candidate who tried to persuade me that AV is the same as STV. If the party proposing the changes doesn't understand them, I'm not sure what the rest of use are supposed to do.
I think this leads to a question: do you think that AV+ is a better system than STV?
Yes, we'll have to make a lot of noise to get AV upgraded to AV+.
Let's face it, electoral systems are like the 1960s classification of renal diseases. You can understand it while someone is explaining it, but it's gone the moment they stop talking.
The Green Party favours the German AMS system - or did last time I looked. In the end though, it is a matter of what is possible. Jenkins advocated AV+, so the Civil Service will tend to continue rolling in that direction. So whatever the theoretical advantages of this or that, my Taoist instincts tell me to go with the current, and aim for AV+.
This is a top-up system. We will have a bunch of MPs without constituencies, allocated to make Parliament represent the wishes of the people in proportion to their vote. Stuckists will criticise this, but therre is an advantage in having representatives free of peoples' worries about dog-poo, able to do some strategic thinking.
See you on the coach on the 26th March?
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