Start Again: Vote Yes

The Lib Dems are entirely a product of First Past The Post. They do not do very well for Strasbourg or for Holyrood, and do really rather badly for Cardiff and for the Greater London Assembly. When their alleged Holy Grail, multimember STV, was introduced for local government in Scotland, their number of Councillors there went down. The BNP's 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. Under AV, BNP candidates would be eliminated in the first round, and their voters would have expressed no second preference.

A Yes vote in this year's referendum would greatly accelerate the secession of the already existing, and rapidly growing, right-wing party nominally still comprised of Conservative backbenchers. They would not join UKIP. Rather, they would expect UKIP to join them, as surely as the Social Democratic Alliance was expected to join the SDP. Meanwhile, the Old Labour half of UKIP's Strasbourg vote would have been thoroughly alienated, but right at the time when a major party representative of their views across the full range of issues had been called into being by electoral reform.

A party for those whose priorities include the Welfare State, workers’ rights, trade unionism, the co-operative movement, consumer protection, strong communities, conservation rather than environmentalism, fair taxation, full employment, public ownership, proper local government, a powerful Parliament, the monarchy, the organic Constitution, national sovereignty, civil liberties, the Union, the Commonwealth, the countryside, traditional structures and methods of education (including grammar schools), traditional moral and social values, economic patriotism, balanced migration, a realist foreign policy, and a base of real property for every household to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State.

For those who are aware of, who understand, who value and who draw on the Radical Liberal, Tory populist, trade union, co-operative, Christian Socialist, Social Catholic and Distributist, and other roots of the Labour Movement, rejecting cultural Marxism no less comprehensively than they reject economic Marxism, and vice versa. For those who, with Herbert Morrison, have never seen any conflict “between Labour and what are known as the middle classes”, and who, with Aneurin Bevan, denounce class war, calling instead for “a platform broad enough for all to stand upon” and for the making of “war upon a system, not upon a class”. For the socially and culturally conservative, strongly patriotic tendencies within the British Left’s traditional electoral base. Within the alliance of the traditional Right and the traditional Left against the neoconservative war agenda and its assaults on liberty at home, including against any new Cold War with either or both of Russia and China.

Recognising that we cannot deliver the welfare provisions and the other public services that our people have rightly come to expect unless we know how many people there are in this country, unless we control immigration properly, and unless we insist that everyone use spoken and written English to the necessary level. Refusing to allow climate change to be used as an excuse to destroy or prevent secure employment, to drive down wages or working conditions, to arrest economic development around the world, to forbid the working classes and non-white people from having children, to inflate the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, or to restrict either travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich. And therefore able to co-operate as closely as possible with the forces of provincial, rural, protectionist, church-based, conservative, mind-our-own-business Toryism, forces set free by electoral reform from tendencies variously metropolitan, urban, capitalist, secular, libertarian and make-the-world-anew.

Bring it on. Vote Yes.