Yet more dodgy claims from No2AV
The latest dodgy figures to come out of the No2AV campaign implies that introducing AV will cost the British Taxpayer £250 million. This claim is based on three mistaken assumptions. The first is that introducing AV would require the UK to introduce counting machines such as those used in US elections. This has been clearly refuted by Australia’s foremost election authority, Antony Green, who says that:
“We’ve used AV for 90 years at all levels of government. And Australia has never used voting machines to conduct its elections.”
The No campaign has today had to admit that they do not know if counting machines will in fact be used if AV is introduced.
The second assumption is based on the cost of educating the public about the change which is based on educational spend when Scotland changed to using STV – a more complicated system than AV which simply requires people to list candidates in order of preference. Given that many voters will have already heard about the Alternative Vote as part of the referendum campaign, there is even more of a reason to think the educational spend will not be as high as the No2AV campaign suggests.
Finally, the No campaign rolls in the whole cost of holding the referendum into their £250m figure. This is simply unfair – they cannot attribute the cost of a referendum to the Alternative Vote – this isn’t a direct cost of supporting AV, it’s a cost of giving an important national and constitutional vote to the public. So, apart from the educational costs of introducing a new voting system (over-estimated by the No campaign to be £26m), what else of this £250m figure stands up? Nothing.
This isn’t the first time the No2AV campaign have made up stuff. Since their launch, 6 Labour MPs who were previously on their list as supporters have come off since they were never asked to be added and that’s not forgetting their embarrassing climb down after their launch when they had to remove Michael Gove’s name since he hadn’t agreed to be one of their patrons. Their gross factual errors about Australia’s use of AV has also been exposed on Left Foot Forward.
It’s also a disgrace that the Tory-backed No campaign uses the cuts that the Government is making as a backdrop to their calls for a No vote. They cite their (erroneous) AV costs as equalling 2,053 doctors, 5,719 police officers, 6,297 teachers, 8,107 nurses, 36,000 hip replacements or 60,000 school places and their script says ‘our country can’t afford it’. This is particularly ironic coming from a campaign that is headed up by Matthew Elliott, former head of the Taxpayers’ Alliance. We don’t remember the last time they were squealing about cuts to public sector staff. In fact, their raison d’être is to campaign against the public sector. But then, we are on familiar ground with the use of dodgy arguments to back up bold claims as Unite the Union demonstrated in a Taxpayers’ Alliance attack on local government pensions last year.
Moreover, the No campaign is the same campaign which is “licensed by David Cameron”, and whose key spokespeople are members of the Tory-led government – William Hague and Baroness Sayeeda Warsi. The Government that is behind a £300 million per year tax cut for corporations while cutting spending across the board including frontline cuts to police numbers, Sure Start, older people’s care and the Education Maintenance Allowance. So while a better democracy and a fairer society may be too expensive, tax cuts for business are not. If No2AV are so worried about the cost of educating the public, why don’t they ask David Cameron to take a bit more money from the banks to cover it?
This Tory-led campaign can’t pull the wool over our eyes. We know that this Government is rushing through ideological cuts. It’s just extraordinary that their campaign against a change in the voting system is using those very cuts to argue against a step forward for our democracy. Cameron doesn’t want the Alternative Vote because he knows there’s a progressive majority in this country which will make the Tories life a lot harder if we win the referendum. The fact that the No campaign has gone so far with their dodgy claims shows just how desperate the Tories are to keep the status quo.
Tags: Alternative Vote, Australia, counting machines, David Cameron, Government cuts, No2AV, referendum, Tories
The NO2AV campaign appears desperate already. It’s very sad that we cannot have a genuine debate on the pro’s and con’s of both FPTP and AV in order the the public to make an informed decision. It will no doubt come down to hysterical tabloid like rhetoric.