On Only Voting Once

We may pass over this morning's execrable Woman's Hour piece on AV, which Jane Garvey began and then regularly interspersed with "our pretty little heads can't cope with this", and which would have been a very good argument against allowing women to vote at all if any of the contributors had been remotely typical of anything or anyone. Was the whole thing a spoof?

The approval of AV next month would not be a staging post on the road to something else, either STV or closed party lists, which are indistinguishable in principle, since the whole point of either of them is that voting is fundamentally and ultimately for a party rather than for a person, and that on purely tribal lines, as evidenced by many or most votes cast for party lists in Germany, and by practically all votes cast, at least other than in this highly exceptional year, under STV in the Irish Republic.

Rather, angry or bored voters would never stand, either for anything other than that which had they approved, or for being asked all over again. A Yes vote next month would mean a system which retained the single-member constituency link while also enabling the emergence of new formations that more accurately reflected public opinion, and while at least potentially giving the permanent balance of power to parties that combined patriotism, social conservatism, and a positive celebration of the economic role of the State in those causes.

Vote Yes.