Monday, March 15, 2010

Jackie Ashley gets it - FPTP is a heap of electoral dingoes' kidneys

Jackie Ashley in today's Guardian says "The obsession with swing voters is strangling politics". Both "Lord" Ashcroft and the Unite unions are concentrating their fire power, with impeccable logic, on the swing voters in key marginals. Forget what's best for the nation, what will attract these swingers (whose numbers reputedly amount to 0.16% of the electorate).

Jackie concludes "If, out of a hung parliament and a certain period of political confusion, we got real change in the voting system – goodbye to sugar daddies and sweetheart union deals – that would be the best outcome of all."

Right on. The voting system is the precondition for the radical political and economic change that this country desperately needs. So - we must gird up our loins for pro-democracy demonstrations, and spread the word about an audible protest in the polling stations. It would be naive to suppose that MPs alone might give us electoral reform.

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