Liberal Democrats leader Nick Clegg leaves a Sheffield polling station yesterday after casting his vote in the local government election and the alternative vote referendum. Picture: AFP Source: AFP
HAS Catherine Middleton breathed new life into not just one but two creaking, time-worn features of British government?
There is little doubt that she has pumped up the Aston Martin tyres of the monarchy by turning her seven-year de facto marriage with Prince William into a church-approved union to give the Windsors a new-generation pairing that is attractive and uncharacteristically well-balanced.
The surprise is that the feel-good mood surrounding her wedding also may have made British voters more comfortable with retaining another institution that was designed for another century.
London Mayor Boris Johnson says he has a hunch the new Duchess of Cambridge "may have inadvertently played her part" in killing off an attempt by electoral reformers to replace Britain's centuries-old first-past-the-post voting system.
Britons voted overnight - the result will be known tomorrow morning - on a proposal to ditch that system, in which voters simply put a cross next to a candidate's name and the candidate with most crosses wins.
The alternative on offer is a version of the slightly more complicated and slightly more representative voting system used in most lower houses of parliament in Australia.
Australians call it preferential voting because voters number candidates in order of preference, but the British call it the AV or alternative vote system.
"I would say the pro-AV camp has had to contend with the zeitgeist, the public mood of the last few weeks, when we have all been focused in loving, lingering and intensifying detail on a part of our constitution that may have its flaws but that served this country well for hundreds of years," Johnson says.
"If it ain't broke - and it patently ain't - then don't fix it. Or as we conservatives put it, if it is not necessary to change, then it is necessary not to change.
"I would not be at all surprised if that thinking has contaminated the AV debate."
Johnson is a small-c conservative whose instinctive preference for inertia made him a natural supporter of the existing voting system but the polls suggest that, after much dithering, most voters have taken his side of the debate.
Voters seem highly likely to reject the AV push, which is only the second referendum of all British voters, following a vote on European Economic Community membership 36 years ago that comfortably backed staying in what is now the European Union.
The no campaign has taken a lead of more than 10 points in the polls, prompting bookmaker Paddy Power to pay out in advance on bets for a no result, having pushed out the odds on a no victory to a forbidding 16-1 on.
There is no way of knowing how much the happy distraction of the royal wedding contributed to this apparent willingness of British voters to stick with a voting system that does not cope well with the multi-party reality of modern politics but we do know the debate has not been based on carefully reasoned arguments about the two voting systems.
Prime Minister David Cameron, the biggest name in the no campaign, complained the AV debate too often involved "a language of proportionality and preferences, probabilities and possibilities [but] for me politics shouldn't be some mind-bending exercise. I just feel it, in my gut, that AV is wrong."
John Reid, a no supporter and a former Labour Party home secretary, claimed sticking with the old system was "the British" thing to do and was about "defending the right of one person, one vote".
Yes campaigners produced television advertisements claiming that what is actually a less than radical change would somehow clean up politics, drive lazy, corrupt MPs out of business and rule out the large safe-seat majorities that give some MPs jobs for life.
The old first-past-the-post system was responsible for slavery not being abolished earlier and for the worst excesses of Margaret Thatcher's rule, according to those seeking to change the system.
Senior Conservative Party cabinet ministers made even less honest claims in support of the no campaign, vowing that the system that had functioned quite well in Australia since being introduced in 1918 was too complicated for voters to understand, highly expensive to operate and would allow extremists into parliament while ruling out any chance of single-party majorities.
A no campaign pamphlet mailed to voters warns that AV "is used by only three other countries in the world - Fiji, Australia and Papua New Guinea - and Australia wants to get rid of it".
Those claims may amuse Australian voters, whose experience suggests otherwise, but they provoked fury among the main sponsors of the yes campaign, the Liberal Democrats.
The junior coalition party insisted on the referendum after last May's general election as one of its most important rewards for making Cameron prime minister and even its most battle-hardened ministers have seemed genuinely shocked to find their Conservative coalition partners could tell such fibs. Chris Huhne, the Lib Dem Environment Secretary, has accused Conservative Party chairwoman Sayeeda Warsi of "Goebbels-like" dishonesty and "the politics of the gutter".
Former leader Paddy Ashdown said Chancellor George Osborne had used "cynical smears" and "downright lies". And even Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg warned that the Prime Minister has been deliberately inventing false "facts".
The problem for the Lib Dems is that the referendum battle is about party self-interest and electoral advantage rather than any analysis of which system may be fairer for Britain.
Clegg's team wants a yes result because as a strong centrist party it would gain a couple of dozen extra seats by winning the second preferences of Labour and Conservative voters who are often determined to keep out each other's candidates.
Even Clegg admits AV is a "miserable little compromise" rather than a radical change to a fairer system, but he sold it to his MPs on the basis that it would make the House of Commons slightly more representative by boosting their party, which suffers most from the existing system's bias towards larger parties and geographically concentrated voting blocks.
The Conservatives back the no campaign because they would lose the most seats in a switch to AV. Having more Lib Dem MPs would also make it harder for the bigger parties to win clear majorities and the Tories fear the supposed "progressive majority" of Labour and Lib Dem voters would gang up to put Conservatives low in their preferences.
That left Labour with the potentially decisive hand in the referendum, but the main opposition party was deeply split because its MPs could not agree on whether to try to embarrass Clegg by advocating a no vote or to concentrate their fire on Cameron by advocating a yes vote.
Labour leader Ed Miliband is a long-time backer of AV and does seem to be a genuine supporter of the reform, but this has been the first issue to expose the fact that after seven months in office he still has little sway over his party.
Miliband and his top shadow ministers have firmly advocated a yes vote but only 86 Labour MPs have followed his lead while 130 have backed the no campaign.
The heat in recent weeks has focused on the following arguments by the no campaign, many of which fail to stand up to scrutiny.
? Exorbitant cost: Osborne declared the switch to AV would cost pound stg. 250 million ($384m), which other Tories said Britain couldn't afford when it was struggling to fund the health system and to arm its soldiers in Afghanistan.
Osborne reached this figure by ignoring the fact pound stg. 81m of his total was already being spent on holding the referendum and claiming that another pound stg. 130m would have to be spent on buying electronic voting machines.
An outraged Clegg said no such machines had been needed in 80 years of preferential voting in Australia and, as the minister responsible for the British voting system, he could promise "there will be no electronic voting machines; it will not happen".
Cameron simply ignored Clegg's promise, repeating days later that he believed voting machines probably would be needed.
? Confusing: The no campaign has insisted that numbering candidates by preference is too complicated for voters and that when it was introduced in Australia it led to such a collapse of turnout that compulsory voting had to be introduced to force people back to the ballot box.
Not so, historians say. Compulsory voting was introduced in 1924 after turnout fell from 71.6 per cent in 1919 to 59.4 per cent in 1922 but preferential voting had already been in place for the 1919 poll.
Yes campaigners have spent quite a bit of time in recent weeks arguing that "if the Australians can understand it, we probably can".
l Undeserving winners: Supporters of a no vote say AV can turn losers into winners, with advertisements complaining a horse that finishes third should never be declared the winner.
Tory MPs even warned that in one seat during last year's British election the eighth-placed candidate could have won with favourable preference flows.
In fact in most cases the AV system would still see the top-scoring candidate win but there would be two or three dozen cases out of 650 seats in which the runner-up was pushed into the lead by preferences. An eighth-ranked candidate has never won in Australia.
It is technically possible but it is also possible under the first-past-the-post system to win a seat with just 5 per cent of the vote, if 24 other candidates evenly split the rest of the vote. It is possible but it is not going to happen.
? Extremists: Warsi says AV would open the door to the British National Party winning seats by gaining second preferences of other parties' supporters.
This is nonsense, as the racist BNP is the least likely party to get preferences from mainstream voters. Which is why the BNP advocates a no vote.
AV actually encourages parties towards centrist policies to try to attract the preferences of a broad spectrum of voters instead of being able to rely on mobilising a party's own hard core of supporters.
? Too many coalitions: The presence of a viable centrist party in Britain, the Lib Dems, does make it likelier that the second preferences of other voters would help the Lib Dems and make it harder for Labour and the Tories to win single-party majorities.
The problem is this argument has been deployed with a fair dash of hypocrisy.
Cameron has spent the past year praising the effectiveness and unity of his coalition government, which was elected under first-past-the-post, but is now telling voters coalitions are a disastrous recipe for indecisive government.
Cameron's colleagues also have published a pamphlet listing Clegg's "broken promises" in government, without conceding that Cameron had insisted that Clegg break those promises as part of their coalition agreement.
The expected victory for the no campaign will leave the coalition harder to manage now that cabinet ministers have called each other liars and found they can't trust their colleagues.
One possibility is that Cameron will have to placate and shore up Clegg with a concession such as faster reforms of the archaic House of Lords, but Cameron can't fully protect his partner from the anger of Lib Dem MPs and members who are already sceptical about the benefits of working with the Tories.
That anger is likely to be exacerbated by a poor Lib Dem performance in elections for local councils and regional assemblies to be held with the referendum.
Some analysts warn Clegg's party is in for its worst results since it was created in 1988 by a merger of the old Liberals and Labour splinter group the Social Democratic Party.
In Scotland, the Lib Dems could end up for the first time with fewer members of the Scottish parliament than the Greens.
The danger for Cameron is that if Clegg then faces internal dissent and even rumbles of a leadership challenge, the coalition government could suddenly be left creaking and prematurely time-worn.
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