It took me several months to make up my mind, and initially I was for the change of our general election voting system to the alternative vote method (the system explained by Peter in an earlier post). However as the months went by and the coalition made life worse and worse, largely due to propping up of bad policies by the LibDems MPs desperate to be in government, I changed my mind and the decision to vote NO in the referendum was sealed last week.
Here is my reasoning in more detail:
1. The YES camp, particularly the LibDems, claim that AV would allow the “progressive” parties to mobilise the majority left of centre UK voting population to unify under AV and beat the Tories. But there are two things wrong with this assertion:
(a) Labour beat the Tories 3 times in a row under our current voting system, and
(b) we would need to be able to trust the LibDem MPs to switch to backing labour in the event of a hung parliament under AV. But we have seen them do the opposite and also break many of their promises to the electorate whilst going with the Tories. So why should we trust them to be any different if we get a hung parliament under AV?
Therefore
2. My overwhelming feeling is that we need firstly to be rid of Clegg and the other LibDem MPs who have poisoned parliamentary politics with their broken promises and their indiscriminate propping up of all of the Tories’ socially unjust and economy destroying policies (see my earlier blog posts on those issues). So they firstly need to be out of Westminster before I could trust them again.
Then
3. Once the current bad crop of LibDems is out, hopefully with a win for Labour at the next general election, we would need to see LibDems win trust of electorate again before we look at any new proposal of reforming of voting system from them.
I am actually in favour of change to voting to something more proportional, but I am not willing to compromise with the reasons professed by the largely LibDem desire to change to AV first in the upcoming referendum. So I would prefer the debate for change to start under a new Labour government, or if the next election is a hung parliament under current voting system, i would want to see that LibDem MPs, if any are left, to join Labour to bring changes that are beneficial to all of UK, and not just the rich, and then I might trust LibDems again and consider what they have to say re electoral reform.
