UK Politics
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!ukpolitics@lemm.ee appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(
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Labour are the ones to convince. LD doesn't have the power to bring it to fruition.
Didn't they play this game when Nick Clegg ran the party? After which they gave up on it as soon as they entered into a coalition with the Tories?
The Coalition agreed on a referendum on AV as a compromise. The Lib Dems' (and most electoral reform campaigners') preferred voting system is Single Transferrable Vote, which is effectively AV but with multi-member constituencies instead of single-member. STV is used in the Republic of Ireland and delivers proportional results whilst maintaining the existence of geographic constituency links - generally considered two desirable features of a voting system (along with preferentialism, a feature AV and STV both have).
If we could have made the switch to AV then it would have been only a short step from there to STV a few years later. But the Tories campaigned heavily against it, and Labour were highly divided on electoral reform so were officially neutral but in practice a majority of Labour MPs backed the 'no' campaign. So the referendum failed.
@theinspectorst @i_am_not_a_robot @Syldon @jonne
Exactly, which is why I voted for it in 2011. It deserved to succeed, but the degree of apathy was high. People didn't bother to get off their backsides to vote, and it was lost. A great pity in many ways. It was a Lib-Dem red line for joining the coalition, together with the raising of the income tax threshold. The Tories now pretend that was their idea. It wasn't.