Another reason Labour members might vote No

David Herdson at Political Betting asks, “How much has Ed’s win boosted the pro-AV camp?” Which mistakenly assumes that it has boosted it at all.

As I said at a Progress fringe meeting in Manchester last week, I thought Ed Miliband’s victory under the Alternative Vote system that the Labour Party uses for its internal elections would set back support for a Yes campaign in next year’s referendum.

I support AV, but Labour Party members, who are already sceptical about preferential voting according to YouGov (page 4), will be even less likely to support a system that produced the wrong result as far as they are concerned. They voted by 54-46 per cent for David Miliband after transfers, only to be overwhelmed by the 40-60 per cent vote in the trade union section.

If the ballot had been a “first-past-the-post” election, and if people voted only for their first preferences, David would have won by 38-34 per cent in the whole electoral college.

Stephen Twigg (above), the former chairman of the Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform who was chairing the session, was not convinced.

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