This exchange ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12491641 )
between the excellent Jonathan Bartley of #Yes2AV and the spinning sneering smearer Charlotte Vere of #No2AV was on the BBC this morning. As you’ll see if you watch it, in the course of a general swipe at ‘minor Parties’, Vere comes pretty close to suggesting that Green voters' second choice is likely to be…the BNP! Specifically: The ‘example’ Vere gives of how AV is ‘unfair’ (!) to large Parties and partial (sic.) toward small Parties is of a voter whose first preference is Green and whose second preference is BNP and so on...
She's a repeat offender regarding this sort of thing, as Greens know from her often-dreadful campaign against Caroline Lucas in Brighton, and as anyone knows who follows for instance the seemingly-endless string of misrepresentations on her twitter-feed in the course of this AV referendum campaign.
The truth of course is that there is very little demographic intersection between Green and BNP voters (See Pat Dade’s work in Cultural Dynamics, for confirmation of this; the geodemographic profile of the BNP is, for illustration, quite similar to that of Tea Party supporters in the States - who are hardly like to be Green-leaning!: http://documents.campaignstrategy.org/uploads/campaignstrategy_newsletter_66.pdf). Potential BNP voters are proportionately more likely to vote Conservative (or UKIP, or indeed Labour) than they are to vote Green. Not, presumably, the kind of fact that Ms. Vere, a Conservative, likes to broadcast… So, on live TV, she smears small Parties in general and the Greens in particular (perhaps she is still smarting at having been beaten by one?), instead…
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