Voting Alternatives

Dear Reader

If you were a supporter of electoral reform then you must be hurting from the almighty pimpslap you received from the British electorate, which knocked you seven ways sideways or, as some commentators claim, thirty years into the future. The debate was conducted with about as much good grace as a late night punch-up in the high street, with David Cameron hitting Nick Clegg over head with a metaphorical traffic cone whilst the Lib Dem leader then hid in a mini-cab office and called the police. In this analogy, the cone represents smear tactics, Paddy Ashdown is a mini-cab and Ed Milliband is the police.  Hang on, that made more sense in my head.

The British voters decided that in the middle of three wars, yes three - Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq (not over yet), the greatest economic downturn for seventy years and national debt on course to double, that changing the not-obviously-broken voting system should figure low on everyones' to do list. One tip for any future reform campaigns is beware the celebrity endorsement. Much as we may cherish and admire screen and stage work of comedians and actors, no one is really going to trust them on political issues as they quite clearly could not be left in charge of a box of pencils.

Both sides in the AV debate used and abused the word 'fair', as if it proved their respective case. There can be few words more misleading than 'fair' when used in a political debate other than perhaps 'radical'. 'Radical' should be removed from all policy documents and media is coverage as it is nearly always redundant. Using the simple Pol Pot sliding scale of radical policies, with zero being not radical at all and 10 being Year Zero, totally-bat-shit-mental-radical, most policies count as one or two out of 10, namely more of the same with a few tweaks. Be grateful that radical policies are nothing of the sort, real radicalism tends involve working in a slave labour camp with only mud soup for dinner. (If you work in a call centre in the North East, this may sound like an improvement, but for the rest of us it isn't).

'Fair' when employed in a political debate  is often another way of saying that the speaker prefers one set outcomes to another, so the Liberal Democrats claimed that AV was fairer because they would get more seats. The Tories on the other hand, said that first past the post was fairer because there would be less Liberal Democrats and regardless of the Coalition most Conservatives would like to bury the Liberal Democrats at sea, before they are dead. The Lib Dems want to do the same, but in sustainably sourced coffins.

There is no commonly agreed standard of 'fairness' in elections and voting systems. They all have flaws and all produce outcomes that some resent. For those readers in favour of proportional representation then there is one image to bear in mind:  a Viagra-charged Silvio Berulsconi naked in a hot tub with four women whose combined ages still don't equal his own. First past the post has numerous problems, not least that you are forced to elect someone, even when you think a random person plucked of the street would do a better job. In some cases that is clearly true, Nadine Dorries,  come in your time is up, the man who stacks the trollies at Asda wants to have a go.

So this typing ape concludes that whatever your preference for voting: FPTP, AV, PR or CTDAPP (chimps throwing darts at a piece of paper), there's no such thing as fair. Life isn't, why should voting be any different?