Would the Alternative Vote be good for the BNP? Nothing could now be good for the BNP. Its vote halved between 2009 and 2010, when it lost 36 of the 38 council seats that it was contesting, including every seat in Barking & Dagenham, where it had thought that it was going to take control. AV offers the BNP nothing, anyway. Its candidates would be eliminated in the first round, and its voters would have expressed no second preference. Assuming that it still had any voters by 2015, that is.
Meanwhile, consider that they have the Alternative Vote in Australia. The National Party (provincial, rural, protectionist, church-based, conservative, mind-our-own-business, pro-Commonwealth, ardently monarchist) is all the stronger for being separate from the Liberal Party (metropolitan, urban, capitalist, secular, libertarian, make-the-world-anew, pro-American, at least fifty per cent anti-monarchist). AV also enabled the Democratic Labor Party to flourish. Bring it on.
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Mr Lindsay, I'm afraid your description of Australia's National Party (or, as it was called until 1982, the Country Party) is way out of date. When ex-Prime Minister Sir John McEwen retired as the party's leader in 1971, the notion of any serious differences with the Liberals departed with him. All McEwen's successors as federal party leader, from the witless Doug Anthony onwards, have been nothing more (although, in addition, nothing less) than Liberal stooges. There is no joy to be found in them.
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