alternative vote Articles

The budget was just a staging post in George Osborne’s long-term plan. As much political as economic, this strategy should compel Labour to re-examine its own past and prepare for the political fight of its life, warns Anthony Painter

Extrapolating the results of a local council by-election to draw conclusions about the state of the parties nationally is a fool’s game. Last week’s by-election in Witney town council is a case in point. No sooner had Labour supporters begun celebrating our 67 per cent landslide in a Tory ward in David Cameron’s own backyard, it was pointed out that the Tories had failed to field a candidate and turnout had been very low. The main lesson from the Witney by-election is that the easiest way to beat the Tories is to stop them fielding candidates!

Progress is backing a ‘Yes’ vote in May’s referendum on the Alternative Vote. To show our support we are presenting a selection of recent articles on why the switch to AV will be good for British democracy; how the current first past the post system is broken, and likely to continue to keep on producing coalition governments; and how AV is not the same thing as proportional representation; and much more…

In a meeting of the democratic reform committee last year, a fellow cabinet minister said he could happily support the Alternative Vote but not a more proportional system. Gordon Brown turned to me, as one of the cabinet’s known electoral reformers and asked, ‘What do you think, John?’ My response – consistent with what I had argued for a couple of years – was ‘some change is better than none.’