Skip to main content

Tom Harris's big lie

Ludicrous nonsense here from the establishment's friend, Tom Harris MP, who has a poster up on his site which argues against AV... by saying it gives more power to politicians not voters.
The big lie. The very reverse of the truth.

To set the record straight, here's the truth:


AV would drastically reduce the number of safe seats in this country, because all those MPs who get a plurality and not a majority of votes (that's almost all MPs) would now have to worry about everyone's 2nd preferences.

It would be much easier for voters to 'gang up' against the incumbent, if they wanted to.

In the expenses scandal, the worst offenders were virtually all MPs with safe seats. Because THEY DON'T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT WHAT THE VOTERS THINK, so they thought they could afford to break the rules - and, in many cases, they have been proven right.

It is really low of Tom Harris to try to pretend that AV would be good for politics as usual. AV would in fact be a genuine political reform. Not as good as PR, but a real start. AV would enable we the people to punish politicians who abused their positions.

The road to clean politics in this country is via AV.



P.S. Harris's awful line on AV makes more sense, in the context of this useful public service announcement, from the recent general election: http://www.thestraightchoice.org/leaflets/1976/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

More on why 20's plenty -- without need for any further 'trials'...

There are a number of reasons for setting a default speed of 20mph throughout the 'unclassified' road network in residential parts of a city such as Norwich. Most important perhaps is that of driver recognition as to what the speed limit is. If you have 20 mph as the default then you not only establish this limit clearly, but you also adjust the driver's recognition as to what is the "normal" speed in such residential areas. The most important aspect is that drivers set 20 mph as the norm with those 30 mph areas or roads being seen as 50% faster, rather than seeing 30 mph as the norm with 20 mph as 33% slower. The psychological adjustment of normal speeds in residential areas is key to the success of reducing speeds and therefore danger to pedestrians and cyclists. Therefore any trial, pilot or whatever, that only implements 20 mph in a tiny proportion of the city is not modelling 20's Plenty in any realistic manner.   When considering the val...
2 comments
Read more

Stansted: a reflection

The key question, in relation to protsts like that at Stansted last week, is: which side are you on? Are you on the side of big corporations profiteering from completely unsustainable climate-destructive behaviour? Or are you on the side of people with no vested interests just making a non-violent stand, at considerable cost to their own time and money, for the sake of all our futures? It doesn't seem to me a hard judgement to make... Rupert Read Green Party Councillor, Norwich, and Lead Candidate for Eastern Region for the Greens in the 2009 Euro-elections. DID YOU KNOW: A vote of about 10% across Eastern Region on June 4 2009 would be enough to get me elected to the European Parliament... http://rupertsread.blogspot.com
2 comments
Read more