Yes or no

[altariel]

OK, f'listers, let rip. In 100 words or less, and without reference to the other case, tell me why I should vote either 'yes' or 'no' to the following question:

"Do you want the United Kingdom to adopt the 'alternative vote' system instead of the current 'first past the post' system for electing Members of Parliament to the House of Commons?"

Non-UK perspectives welcome.

Comments

[azalaisdep.livejournal.com]

I saw this today and thought of you, and specifically of this discussion.

In particular, with regard to the ease or otherwise of getting rid of unpopular governments with FPTP, point 14: (yes, it's a wordy - and in some places mathematical - post, but I think it's worth it)

The idea that FPTP has made it easy to get rid of unpopular governments is one that you can hold only if you wilfully ignore history. Mrs Thatcher’s government was deeply unpopular but proved to be extremely hard to dislodge. Blair was loathed after the Iraq war but went on to win another election, and his successor, Gordon Brown, though defeated in 2010, came close to having enough seats to form a viable coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Under AV it would have been much easier to get rid of Mrs Thatcher, for reasons I have already discussed: she would not have been able to exploit the split on the left.... [snip]

Perhaps it’s worth having a look at the results of another election, the one that took place in 2005, not long after Blair’s decision to invade Iraq. A large number of people were furious with him for misleading them about weapons of mass destruction, with the result that his share of the vote dropped substantially. The results were

Labour, 35.2% of the vote, 355 seats

Conservatives, 32.4% of the vote, 198 seats

Liberal Democrats, 22.0% of the vote, 62 seats.

With barely over a third of the votes, Blair still had a comfortable majority in the House of Commons. It is difficult to reconcile this with the idea that FPTP makes it easy to get rid of unpopular governments. Under AV, the most likely result would (I am guessing) have been a hung parliament with Labour the largest single party. There is no chance that Charles Kennedy would have formed a coalition with the Conservatives, so we would probably not have got rid of Blair. But he would have been properly punished for Iraq by being forced to cooperate with the Lib Dems, who were the one strongly anti-Iraq-war party.

and so on. I did think it was a well-reasoned and logical, albeit partisan, post.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link. My reading of voter will in the 2005 election is: "You may be bastards, Labour, but at least you're not Tory bastards." There was a much less popular option in 2005 than returning Blair to power, and that was making Michael Howard Prime Minister.