UK AV Referendum Poll

[minionofmidas]

Thatcher was more right-wing than Foot was left-wing.

Yeah, but Foot had no real support in the media. The Mirror was Labour, yeah, but right-wing Labour and not at all favourable to Foot. The BBC was theoretically neutral, but in practice was favourable to Alliance/Wet Tory discourses and was pretty hostile to Foot most of the time. The Guardian wasn't exactly hostile, but obvious preferred the Alliance. Everything else was pro-Thatcher

What about Tribune?

[minionofmidas]

That's weird, considering how splintered the unionist vote is I'd presumed they'd support it - obviously not.

What they really want is province-wide winner-take-all.

[minionofmidas]

Clegg brands NO as a "nasty, right wing clique." I'm sure he'd know a thing or two about right wing cliques.

He does and he's right.

[minionofmidas]

So another of the No campaign's arguments is that AV could lead to more votes for the BNP.  I guess democracy truly must be terrible in their eyes.  (Unless it's just fear-mongering propaganda, of course...)

What's ironic (beside the fact that you're entirely right) is that the BNP is far less likely to actually win a seat under AV than under FPTP.

Quite. They actually have a reason to be opposed, beyond kneejerk reaction.
Well, if you assume that what happens at Westminster is likely to be reduplicated in local elections. How many BNP local wins would have happened with AV, I wonder? Not many.

[minionofmidas]

Nicely done!

[minionofmidas]

I disagree with your latter assessment; pretty much anything is better than FPTP.

From the point of view you have, PR with two seat districts would be worse (actually that's dreadful from almost all points of view), as would FPTP with multi-seat districts (which we have in local elections in some places, notably London).

Well, yeah. But no one is thinking of introducing these things anywhere. It is only a matter of not enough people understanding that they need to go where they exist (the Chilene parliament and UK and some US local elections, respectively. Don't think they exist anywhere else in the world.)

[minionofmidas]

You have one vote. Top two votegetters elected in every constituency.
I'm not sure, maybe it's D'Hondt and you can have a running mate and get both seats if you poll twice as much as the nearest opposition. Anyways the result is that parliament is always almost exactly half Conservative and half the Left Coalition (which really is a coalition, not a single party), with the occasional stray indy.

EDIT: Looks it up and yeah, that's right. Two candidate "lists", and D'Hondt. Oh, and they're open "lists", at least.

[minionofmidas]

Five seats? Crikey. I thought Welsh wards were small, mostly? (Okay, so not in Cardiff.) Where be these five member wards?

[minionofmidas]

Lol.

[minionofmidas]

Lol.

Offtopic, but I just realized that with lots of people mixing their vote between parties or just voting for part of the slate of their preferred party and letting their remaining votes go to waste, it can be argued as if voters behave much as if under open list pr already. So it seems reasonable to count results on that principle to see what it would do to seat distribution.

I'll start with Swansea (obviously, the single seat wards don't need counting.) Brum might be interesting to do, too.

[minionofmidas]

Note: I used D'Hondt.

Well, the overall composition change isn't huge:

Labour 26 (-4)
LD 23 (no change)
Con 7 (+3)
Independents 6 (-1)
independent@Swansea 6 (no change)
PC 3 (+2)
People's Representative 1 (no change)

Of this, 18 are elected in single-member seats anyhow:
Con 4, Labour 3, LD 3, Independents 3, i@Swansea 3, PC 1, People's Rep 1

For the remaining 54 councillors from 18 wards with 2 to 5 seats, it's

Labour 23 (-4), LD 20 (0), Independents 3 (-1), i@Swansea 3 (0), Con 3 (+3), PC 2 (+2)

by ward:
West Cross (2)
Labour 1 (-1), Con 1 (+1)
Dunvant (2)
LD 2 (no change)
Penyrheo (2)l
Labour 1, i@Swansea 1 (no change)
Pontarddulais (2)
Labour 1, i@Swansea 1 (no change)
Sketty (5)
LD 3 (-2), Con 1 (+1), Labour 1 (+1)
Uplands (4)
LD 3 (-1), Labour 1 (+1)
Townhill (3)
Labour 2 (-1), LD 1 (+1)
Castle (4)
Labour 2 (-2), LD 1 (+1), PC 1 (+1)
Cwmbwrla (3)
LD 3 (no change)
Cockett (4)
LD 2 (-2), Labour 1 (+1), PC 1 (+1)
Penderry (3)
Labour 2 (-1), LD 1 (+1)
Landore (2)
LD 1 (-1), Labour 1 (+1)
Mynyddbach (3)
Labour 2, i@Swansea 1 (no change)
Morriston (5)
Labour 3 (-2), LD 2 (+2)
Clydach (2)
Labour 1 (-1), LD 1 (+1)
Llansamlet (4)
Labour 2 (-1), Independents 1 (0), Con 1 (+1)
Bonymaen (2)
Labour 1 (0), Independents 1 (0)
Saint Thomas (2)
Independents 1 (-1), Labour 1 (+1)

[minionofmidas]

Well yeah, seems like NoToAV read the British people's mental age right.

[minionofmidas]

YesToAV seem to have a very "if you support No, you're uneducated" tone. Very much a turn off for people.

Isn't one of the No campaign's key arguments that AV is "complicated"?  I guess they are relying on people being uneducated if that's the case.

No contradiction.

[minionofmidas]

...exactly, which makes the "Display Name" (the one in bold) just another way to make your account prettier - additional sig space, basically. And I'm using for all that it's worth.

[minionofmidas]

Does anyone care what Miliband thinks of this anything.

No, which is a good sign for Cameron I'd guess.

On what basis? Labour, under E-Mil, have been leading in near enough every poll this year; I doubt any Labour leader could've stopped Labour voters giving the Lib Dems a kicking,  via the AV referendum, after a year of provocation.

Ed Milliband just seems like a weak, uninspiring leader to me. From what I can tell he seems unable to catch any real media spot light, has very weak preformances during PMQs (of course much better than Nick Clegg who is beyond terrible) and the speeches I've seen from him seem mildly exciting at best.

I believe Ed has as much to do with Labour's strong polling numbers at the moment as he does with NO's poor one's. I saw the Swedish-left lead by Sahlin ahead of Reinfeldt's goverment by more than 10% in his early years, but in the end they still lost by 5% due to the fact that their strong showing in polls was built on disapproval of the Reinfeldt goverment rather than actual support for their own policies, or their own leader.

Now I'm not saying Milliband is Sahlin, she was out-right loathed while Ed seems to simply be irrelevant.   

Well, I guess this is the kind of leader AV gives us Labourites.

While under fptp Clegg would have been cloned and made to lead both parties.

[minionofmidas]

Al, what are the plans for tomorrow night? Are we going to keep all the UK results to one thread, or to multiple threads for each election?

There will have to be a lot of threads in order to avoid confusion. So...

1. Wales

2. Scotland

3. Northern Ireland

4. English Municipals

5. That Miserable Compromise

Well... technically six... but there's obviously no need for a new thread on the Leicester South by-election.

Nor the 4th and 5th really - the English Municipals thread is but a few pages long, and this one won't get all that much longer.