Tomorrow the first UK referendum for years will take place giving citizens of that country to increase the opportunity for more direct involvement in their democracy.
The referendum on its own is rare in comparison to the regularity of such votes in similar democracies such as the USA, Canada and France. However, the opportunity to change the UK voting system to a more proportional one gives the nation further opportunity to pull alongside it's peers, many of which established proportional voting systems at at least some level years ago.
Alternative Vote means that more votes will be relevant as it is actually relatively rare for candidates to gain 50% of the vote. Although many Tories have tried to paint this negatively it is impossible to ignore that it is normal in the UK for 65% of votes to be entirely wasted. Clearly this system will further democratize the UK.
However, it remains to be seen how campaigning has affected the referendum. What I have noticed from canvassing friends is that many of them are simply ignorant of many of the details of both systems. The best place to get information is the BBC news website that has comprehensive coverage of the vote: I urge you to read this if you are at all unsure before using your powerful vote tomorrow.
I'm not sure that 'democratization' is a fair word to use. If you use the idea of votes needed to get one MP into parliament as a measure of fairness, then AV is much fairer for the Liberal Democrats, slightly fairer for Labour and significantly less fair for the Tories. The real democratic deficit in the UK is caused by the progressive depopulation of urban constituencies and the growth of rural ones. It's the work of the boundary commission that will address this, not AV.
ReplyDelete