May 5th 2011 referendum for the alternative voting system resulted in what's been called a resounding NO. It led politicians and newspapers to believe that the British people do not desire change in something that already works just fine.
But if there was any truth in that statement, the change would not be the appealing core of persuasive political language. For always during election campaigns political leaders promise of change so they can appeal to voters. The reference of this change is always in context with some revolutionary idea, but no change will ever take real occurrence, for there are only a finite number of ways to sail a ship. In this sense, the rhetorical ship would be Britain, and its management will only change how they sail it. It may be suggested that the ship (constantly said to be sinking) needs a complete reform. People are romanticized by change, but nobody was moved by the idea of an alternate vote, regardless of the AV reflecting a more accurate result from the individual voter. But we don't need to look very far to see why this happened.
THE NO CAMPAIGN - Supported financially by the Conservative Party, almost two million was spent on this campaign, to try and convince people that the vote was dangerous. The posters and flyers associated with this campaign can be seen with the insert to the article. They parallel an infant with the words "She needs a maternity unit, NOT an alternative voting system", a staunch reminder to what's really important. Could this same statement be said when taxpayer's money bailed out national banks? "She needs a maternity unit, NOT a national banking system". This is the power of propaganda and advertising. Moreover this message carries a covert threat! "Vote AV, and nobody will look after your children", and with the onset of the NHS being privatized or "reformed" to put it another way, the message holds that its supporters, the Conservative Party, care about infants. So successful is this threat that the same techniques are employed to smear the Labour party. (It may be significant to point out that this is not Gordon Brown's debt but the debt of the banks loaning money they didn't have to customers based on speculative income, and from consistent deregulations within business, as well as tax evasion on capital gains). Gordon Brown is used as a scapegoat, a diversionary tactic of blame, so the Conservative Party can up their score. It's quite appalling that conservative propaganda is willing to stoop so low as you provoke the public with an emotive image and juxtapose it with Gordon Brown's sole responsibility. This country has been on collision course long before Brown took office. These very actions are the actions of people who want to have it their own way. If you don't do this, then this will happen. If you don't do that, then this will happen. David Cameron has made it clear that he is against the AV, so it comes as no surprise that the NO to AV campaign aims to scare people away from it. Cameron was quoted as stating that:-
Nobody should lead a country with their gut, and yes, political decisions are sometimes complex and demand one to put extensive thought into it, even if it is a mind-bending exercise. When a reasonable thought crystallizes it doesn't happen in the gut. As for whether or not AV is right or wrong is irrelevant. Its just another way of voting, there is no right to it, there is no wrong. If that was a fact we'd have to tell the Australians that they've been voting wrong for the last thirty years. This is an option to vote differently, the main difference being is the AV concludes a more individually ACCURATE result, namely by including individual's second preferences. This would certainly motivate more people into political decisions instead of FPTP, which leads people living in certain constituencies to become apathetic about their choices. It should always be the people's decision, and in a free democracy these decisions should have been made without the influence of a NO campaign to misguide opinion. But, as I cleared up in my earlier blog, we do not live in a democracy in England. A NO campaign will aim at altering decisions, it will also be met with another campaign, a YES campaign in order to draw the public into an expensive tug of war.
THE YES CAMPAIGN - Further absurd amounts of money and funding was pumped into the yes campaign. Collectively, the YES and NO campaigns could have probably sorted that maternity ward problem out over a few hospitals in towns where it was most needed. To put right what the governments see as the people's priorities, it clearly unbalances its own. The YES campaign argues that the AV vote would assure that the BNP would never get seats. But this isn't even an issue. The fact that the BNP exist at all in a pluralistic country like this only demonstrates that social turbulences have not been resolved and that our alienation is subject to the selfish will and irresponsible decisions of the powerful unwilling to sooth racial divide, but instead exploiting it to carry out their own ends. It's these left and right, yes and no idealogical perceptions that are wedging us apart. The YES campaign can't promise that a BNP would never get into power on the simple premise that perceptions are ephemeral and nothing is certain. Furthermore Nick Clegg claimed AV would stop another expenses scandal. The suggestion that an expenses scandal, one that almost every constituent representative made ACA claims for, could even happen again is something of a huge indication that this system is outdated.
But the overarching problem today is the financial crisis, and with an AV system being proposed to cost £250million to install, the suggestion was enough to intimidate the public from accepting it. But if there was any truth to an AV costing this quantity of money to implement during a financial crisis, then the very suggestion would not have been called for in the first place. To implement such a system would cost nowhere near this sum of money, Islands don't cost as much. But it really doesn't matter which system we have, FPTP or AV when the people can be influenced this way. The dichotomies of YES and NO, reflect the two party system attitudes of our culture. Our need to divide things into dualities, LEFT and RIGHT, GOOD and BAD, RIGHT and WRONG, YES and NO! Goldhagen reasons that "the human condition is one of agency, namely the capacity and burden for being able to say yes, which means also being able to say no." But the freedom to make these choices within the campaigns are being impinged upon and covertly veto'd. These are our attitudes to over simplified political questions, when much bigger questions lie in wait to be asked, one example being: why do we allow our country to be robbed again by the rich, who are no more or less deserving of government than it's people? It's the choices of the individual political leader in charge that must always be questioned. If you flip a coin you may get heads or tails, but you won't get neither. The power of suggestion shows that individual opinion can be directed one way or the other and through the power of mass media and digital information, it's easy to wing opinions one way or the other, when they flow through only two channels of thought.
Lets start thinking outside of these divisions and come together to start thinking about making the largest effort in history for reform, one that could shape our future for the better.
