Purrlease vote for AV!

It's probably too late, but these kittens will explain it for you:

Vote vote vote

I can confidently proclaim a 100% majority for Labour and Yes to AV in the Dark Place. I know this because this is how I voted, and I was first this morning. It is, of course, downhill from here.

As is also traditional, my votes were reluctant. AV is a miserable compromise compared to proportional representation, and the only contact I've had with the Labour candidate - despite being a party member - was when he phoned me repeatedly to enlist my  support for his adoption. His general tricksiness was apparent from the first moments:

Him: 'Oh, am I disturbing you watching the cricket? Poor England, I feel really sorry for them'.
Me: 'I'm supporting Ireland, I'm very happy'.
Him: 'Me too, brilliant result'.

OK, so that's his general approach to life established. One day, just once, I'd like to vote for someone I trust and respect ideologically, rather than for the least worst option. I gave the previous council candidate a chance: he knocked on the door and I asked him if he was a socialist: he refused to answer, which I thought was shameful for a Labour candidate.

At some point, I'm going to have to stage a coup. I've even got a practical book on how to do it: Coup d'Etat, by a very nasty neo-con called Edward Luttwak. Very useful if you haven't the time or inclination to gradually convince the proletariat of your intentions.

First up against the wall is the student who got out of the lift as I entered it this morning. He deliberately pressed the buttons to every floor, which I'm sure I'd have found hilarious were I 5, but somehow don't find endearing in a 19-year old. If I get my hands on any of his academic work, his grades will descend to the basement and remain there.

Vote early, vote often

It's local elections day tomorrow, and the referendum on whether to replace first-past-the-post to Alternative Vote. I'm voting Labour in the absence of any socialist party, and Yes to AV as a minor improvement on FPTP. Here's why:

Thoughts, schmoughts

Our Dear Leader, who inexplicably bothered acquiring an Oxford degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, has announced that from now on, intelligence and reason are no longer required to be a politician.

"For me, politics shouldn't be some mind-bending exercise. It's about what you feel in your gut – about the values you hold dear and the beliefs you instinctively have. And I just feel it, in my gut, that AV is wrong."

Lovely. I look forward to the return of hanging, book-burning, paedo-lynching and all the other manifestations of nice, decisive gut-following. Clearly having an ideological vision of the ideal state is old hat. We just want knees jerking in unison, not mature reflection in response to changing events and contexts.

Unless… you don't think that he's posturing as a populist simply to pander to the prejudices of the Sun and Daily Mail readership do you? Surely not. That would be desperately cynical.

Anyway, I'm keen to hear what his 'gut' tells him about the Public Sector Borrowing Rate, what the maximum PPM CO2 level should be, where interest rates should be and all the other intricate decisions that need a little more thought than an instant 'reckon'.

He agrees with Nick

This is David Cameron. Unfortunately, he's the Prime Minister. He's campaigning against the Alternative Vote electoral system. He says it will let in extremist parties like the BNP, Britain's Nazis.

This is Nick Griffin. He's the leader of the BNP. He's campaigning against the Alternative Vote system too. He probably thinks it's foreign.

This is Paul Uppal. He's not campaigning on anything because he's got money to count, but if he was, he'd be supporting his leader and the racist BNP because he does what he's told without the teensiest hint of mental activity behind his eyes.

Personally, I tend to think that the Conservatives are wrong about everything. When they're agreeing with the British National Party, they really need to reconsider their ideological positions.

Choosing sides

I agree with Nick. For my overseas readers, this is an ironic echo of the 2010 UK election, in which the Labour and Tory leaders found themselves using the phrase every time Nick Clegg, Liberal Democrat party leader, said something reasonable. This was before it turned out - to everybody's surprise - that the multimillionaire financier was just another smooth-tongued liar. But that's another story.

I agree with Nick about the upcoming referendum on the UK's voting system. The choice is between the current first-past-the-post (meaning that if there are three candidates in a close race, you can get elected with 30% of the vote) and Alternative Vote, in which you list the candidates in order of preference. If nobody reaches 50% on the first go, the last place is eliminated and his/her voters' second choices are counted. And so on.

Nick described AV as a 'miserable little compromise', which is true. We both want Proportional Representation, as they have in the Scots and Welsh parliaments: it gives you a house of representatives exactly matching the wishes of the electorate.

However, AV will do for now. Anything that the Tories oppose is a good thing, I find. David Cameron's wandering around shouting that extremist parties will win big with AV, which is a lie. We can test this.

What side are the Nazi British National Party on?

Oh dear. Seems like they agree with the Conservative Party on this, as with so much else. If you ever want to know whether something's a good idea or not, see what the BNP are doing, and vote the opposite way.

Second-raters win with AV?

The Prime Minister came out strongly against Alternative Vote, the weak reform of Britain's electoral system. His main argument was that

It could mean a Parliament of second choices. 

Which is weird. Because if we look at his own party's rules, it's a slow-motion form of Alternative Vote: MPs vote in rounds, with the candidate lagging behind being eliminated each time, until only two are left. At this stage the remaining candidates are put before the wider Conservative Party membership.

In the first ballot of Conservative MPs, held on 18 October 2005, Cameron came second with 56 votes to David Davis' 62 (though Cameron gained more votes than expected and Davis fewer). Liam Fox came third with 42 votes, Ken Clarke last with 38 votes and was eliminated. 

In the second ballot (20 October 2005), Cameron came first with 90 votes to David Davis' 57, and Liam Fox was eliminated with 51 [4]. All 198 Conservative MPs voted in both ballots. The next stage was for the Conservative party membership across the country to be polled on whether Cameron or Davis should be Conservative leader.

And what happens if the Tories abandon AV? Why, Mr David Davis would have won the first round and become party leader because he got most votes. Cameron initially came second, then picked up the votes of the losers' supporters. In his own words:

It's not so much that the winner has half the electorate behind them...as that by virtue of a weird counting system, they have crawled over the finishing line.

So is Cameron accepting that he's a second-rater? After all, the system does tend to select the candidate who appeals to the losers' supporters (an 'anybody but X' system). Or as Cameron puts it:

Supporters of unpopular parties end up having their votes counted a number of times…

Leading to a situation in which

…someone who's not really wanted by anyone winning an election because they were the least unliked… those who are boring and the least controversial limping to victory.

Like Cameron, who has used his narrow victory in his party and his non-victory in the general election to apply Pinochet economics to a country which voted for moderate reform.

He also claims that AV leads to marginal and unstable government, despite Australia having two coalitions in 90 years of AV and the UK having many, many more under the current system.

Finally, he argues that - despite his party using this system, you're too stupid.

It's not my job to tell you exactly how the system works - that's for the 'yes' campaign to explain. But even if it was my job, I'll be honest with you, I don't think I could.

So: he's clever enough to win a campaign using it (and a man with an Oxford First Class degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics probably is bright enough to understand it really, but oiky voters are too dumb to list preferences 1 2 3). Makes you proud, doesn't it?

(Read the whole slippery and dishonest speech here). Though I doubt you'll have the intellectual resources to cope with his prose, you morons.

How are you going to vote in the great AV referendum?

The Liberal Democrats, when they were a real political party - one with stabilisers on mind - spent all their time declaring that we needed Proportional Representation to produce parliaments in which the number of MPs matched the preferences of the voters.

They agreed to prop up the most malicious Tory government in decades if they were allowed to hold a referendum on the Alternative Vote - a weak version of the voting system which allows us to rank candidates in order of preference and transfer votes until one reaches 50%. It's not proportional but it's better than the First Past The Post system.

So the referendum may or may not be in three months. The Lib Dems didn't want AV. The Tories don't want it. Labour doesn't want it (some want FPTP, some PR). I think it's better than the current system but not good enough. I also think an easily lost referendum on something you don't support is an insultingly cheap thing for which to sell your soul. It's like the Tories have tossed their spare change on a girl's bedside table: they should either pay their prostitutes properly or treat the coalition like a mutual encounter with benefits on both sides. Buying them so cheaply is simply an insult, but clearly one the Lib Dems were happy to take.

So. Do I vote for AV because it's a mild improvement? Or do I vote against it because it might help bring down a disgraceful and damaging government? I have my doubts that it will, actually: the Lib Dems are going to be punished massively at the next election, so won't want to bring down the wrath of the people 4 years earlier than they have to. Their current strategy is to support everything the Tories do - however evil - in the hope that the financial situation will improve by 2015 and claim some of the credit. They're politicians: they crave power above all things.

What are your thoughts?

All my Christmases come at once

Today's greedy porker is Bill Cash MP. I punned about him last week and you all ignored me ('Did Bill Cash in?').

I particularly hate and despise him because he's my parents' MP, and was mine when I lived on the lovely Shropshire/Staffordshire border. He should have been turfed out in 97, but the Tories hurriedly removed the only urban area in the constituency, leaving only subsidy-sucking farmers and feudal barons. When the locals hang shot magpies on trees rather than Christmas lights (yes, they do), you know that they're going to vote Tory even if Fred West stood.

Anyway, Cash is one of the absolute, raving loons who made poor John Major's life a misery. I saw Black Beauty the other day. It's a terrible film, and in it, a bigoted old general shouts 'God, I'd love another crack at the wog'. Bill Cash would consider him a lily-livered liberal. Cash (who made millions from inheriting 'Cash's Name Tapes') wears those horrible, loudly striped blazers and thinks that foreigners think in English really, and pretend not to just to annoy. Though as a Catholic of a particularly rancid variety, I suspect he thinks in Latin. His delightful son William is a dubious 'journalist' famous for anti-semitic articles about 'culturally nihilist' Jews running Hollywood: he's married to one of the revolting rich currently trying to overthrow Chavez's government in Venezuela.

Anyway, the Daily Telegraph has caught him subsidising his delightful daughter.

Despite owning a posh London flat and claiming to live in his 'gentlemen's club', he charged the taxpayer £15,000 per year to rent her London flat - which she subsequently sold for a massive profit - which seems rather odd. Laetitia (I know, we should have some sympathy) is clearly a lovely human being too. Despite being a Conservative councillor for Bridgnorth (about as challenging as standing as a racist in 1980s South Africa), she seems to need a London base, and she's simultaneously standing against Hazel Blears in Salford (the setting for Coronation Street, only it's less pleasant in real life). She has a Facebook page, seemingly packed with Hooray Henrys and the idle rich.

Now, there's a race you wish both of them could lose. I actually didn't think there was anyone less working-class than Blears, especially in Salford - but I do have a mental image of lovely Laetitia turning up dressed in her hunting pinks, shouting 'Hallooo' and treating everybody much as Melchett treats Baldrick. What's her slogan? 'Hello Paupers! How would you like some Cash?' (Though according to Labour Mancunians, she spends a lot of time in posh London nightclubs and rather little in the northern city) and even the Daily Wail thinks she's a waster.

I'm loving this. Lots of rightwing Labour MPs are proving that they're corrupt and greedy - but far more Tories are proving that they haven't changed since the 18th Century: servants, stately homes, assuming that they'll be elected forever whatever they do (as this analysis proves), even hereditary politics. This is why PR or AV is needed: they abolish safe seats, thus making the candidates and sitting MPs work hard and keep their noses clean.