MEMO
TO: Nick Griffin
FROM: Your chief strategist
RE: The implications of a ‘Yes’ vote in the AV referendum
It is vital we tell our supporters to oppose the Alternative Vote. It would kill any chance of the BNP winning any seats in parliament. If it were then applied to local council elections, it would wreck our chances there, too.
Our ideal system is proportional representation. This has given us seats in the Greater London Assembly and the European parliament. But first past the post can also be helpful. It allowed us to win our first council seat in 1993, and gave us victories in more recent years in Burnley, Oldham, Barking and elsewhere.
In general, however, we have won seats with only around one-third of the vote. Derek Beackon’s initial victory in Tower Hamlets in 1993 was typical. He won just 34 per cent support, but this was enough to defeat Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. If we could match that percentage in a parliamentary seat, the BNP would have its first member of parliament. We would have broken through – just as the Greens have raised their profile by winning Brighton Pavilion last May with 31 per cent of the vote.
AV would make life far harder. To see why, consider the fate of our friend Pauline Hanson in Australia. She was an MP for that country’s Liberal party (equivalent to our Conservatives) in the 1990s, but left it to form One Nation, a nationalist party with similar policies to ours. In Australia’s 1998 elections she stood for the Blair constituency in Queensland (It was a new seat, formed following boundary changes, but included many of her own former constituents).
When the first preferences votes were counted, she was well ahead, with 24,515 votes (36 per cent of the total), more than 7,000 ahead of her nearest (Labor) challenger. Under FPTP, she would have been declared the winner by a comfortable margin. But Australia elects its MPs by AV, and Hanson didn’t stand a chance. First, the candidates from the minor parties and the National party were eliminated. The main beneficiary was Cameron Thompson, the Liberal party candidate, who overtook Labor’s Virginia Clarke.
Her elimination brought the later preferences of Labor voters into play. Most preferred the Liberals to One Nation. In the final count, Thompson defeated Hanson by 4,632 votes. Overall, Thompson added almost 22,000 to his first preference tally; Hanson added only 7,000.
The lesson is clear. Voters either love us or hate us. We are unlikely to win any contest for second preference votes. One-third of the local vote can give us victory under FPTP, but guarantees defeat under AV. A ‘yes’ majority in the coming referendum will bring to Britain the worst possible voting system for us: one that benefits parties that belong to the political mainstream and punishes those that the media libel as ‘extreme’. A ‘no’ victory is essential if the BNP is to thrive.
Nick: very privately, should we use trusted intermediaries to see if we can campaign in parallel with Respect and other far-left groups? AV will punish them in the same way and for the same reasons. If Ribbentrop and Molotov could get together, why not a Griffin-Galloway pact? Just a thought.
For more on AV read…
A marriage of principle and politics – Progress editorial
Stephen Twigg MP: Why Labour should support AV
AV and the PLP by Luke Akehurst
Miliband should lead on AV – Paul Richards
AV and reducing MPs are not the same says Denis MacShane MP
Yes to AV, no to PR says Samuel Walker
Nice smear by association, really. Here’s a balanced look at the pros and cons of AV for far right parties. http://theoldpolitics.blogspot.com/2011/01/end-of-av-week-would-av-help-bnp.html
So both the No and Yes camps have a Demon Nick of their own. Somewhat puerile me thinks. Funnily enough though, the other Nick(Clegg), shared the same view, he too wanted true PR, calling AV a miserable little compromise.
Few things to clear up on an otherwise well researched piece: Hanson was never an official Liberal MP. She was an independent and was not allowed to sit with the Liberals in Parliament. The next part is correct about the preferencing that led to her demise BUT you didn’t mention once that the system that provided that was compulsory preferencing which is NOT the AV on offer in this referendum combined with ‘compulsory’ voting. In QLD who have the AV system nearly identical to the one on offer OneNation was able to get 11 MPs elected because people didn’t have to preference and as such didn’t. Only when preferencing was compulsory was OneNation able to be defeated at the height of their popularity. It took years of campaigning to bring around their voters to the idea that OneNation were not a viable option and some critics argue that the Liberals coopted some of the OneNation policies to garner extra support. Labor always had the firm line the OneNation should be preferenced last. This highlights the problems when you are not obliged to preference the full ballot or for that matter any other candidates beyond your first choice. If voters don’t then the winner could still be elected on an amount not to dissimilar those achieved under FPTP. So all this effort time and money on a system that still has the marginally bigger %’s for the winning candidate. Only the Australian federal system means candidates get close to 50%+1 as a winning total. The systems used in QLD and NSW for example don’t require full preferencing and as such the winning %’s are quite often lower. This referendum needs serious investigation beyond the calls of fairer votes and expense from the respective sides. Is this radical reform or is this a step we will need to modify or rectify in the future or is it the final step?
Yet more nonsense which, to borrow a phrase from another post, sickens me to my stomach. AV will not deter one single BNP vote if anything because of the preference option it may actually increase it. While they may well be defeated at the preference count they are defeated now at general elections, something this stupid campaign never mentions. The yes campaign may well feel that allowing the BNP vote is good as long as they give us their preference vote but I don’t. They can peddle as many smokes screens and myths as they want to hide the reality that AV is all about party economics and the belief that safe seats exist because we can’t afford to campaign in them but if this lazy campaign can not be honest, it can not be seen as anything other than a safeguard for the political elite to have a role and one which most certainly isn’t progressive.
Peter Kelner sums up well why the BNP are a (silent) part of the coalition that is No2AV. The BNP have won many council seats because they can gain about 25-30 % of the vote in certain coucil wards based on a very low turn out. Under AV they would need to get 50% and all the other voters could vote for their own party as their first preference and unite afterwards to keep out the BNP. After this Referendum has been won (hopefully) we should bring AV in for council elections.