Jesus Christ, I'm furious. I don't know why. I've known for ages that the No to AV Campaign was going to win the referendum. Their campaign was bigger and more attention grabbing. The polls have predicted a defeat for people who want a non-shit voting system for months. So I should have already been resigned to it really.
Except, somehow I'm not. I guess there was just a little bit of hope in me that the UK electorate was not wholly made up of sheeplike, idiotic wankers and self-interested Tory cunts. I thought about various times when the pollsters have got it wrong and I suppose I was swayed by the fact that most people I've actually talked to said they were voting yes to AV, not to mention most of the people on my Twitter and Facebook feeds.
This doesn't just piss me off, it actually fucking hurts. Yes, yes, I'm being a drama queen again, but with good reason this time. The referendum on AV was the most important vote any of us will cast in our lifetimes. This was not just the best chance in a generation to reform politics, but the best chance in centuries. This should have been a defining moment in British politics. It should have been the start of the decline of the Conservative party, who have unfairly benefited for decades from the way that the left-wing vote is split between Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Electoral reform is something I deeply believe in because the current system is completely immoral. How can anyone justify a system where a party with 36% of the vote share gets to rule the fucking country? How can anybody think it's fair that the other 64% are effectively told to fuck off until the next general election in 5 years time.
It's true that the No to AV camp ran a very effective campaign, but their methods were underhand and despicable. They told despicable lies at every turn, pretending that AV systems lead to a coalition everytime (not true), claiming that AV would cost the country £250m (a government minister admitted it would be no more expensive than the current system), scaremongering that it would help parties like the BNP get into power (not only did the facts not support this argument, but the BNP themselves campaigned against AV) and, most insulting of all, telling the British public that they were just too thick to understand this very simple, very straightforward and much fairer voting system.
If the No to AV campaign was despicable, the proponents of AV were almost invisible. Their first fuck-up was choosing the campaign name "yes to fairer votes." If you type the word "AV" into Google, the No to AV campaign is one of the first results to come up. The Yes campaign doesn't feature until the second page of results. Whilst the No to AV campaign was noisy and belligerent, the Yes campaign was virtually unseen. Months before the campaign started, Ed Milliband stated he wouldn't even consider campaigning alongside Nick Clegg because Clegg was "toxic." The Yes campaign should have paid attention - it was largely because Clegg is such a despised, unpopular snivelling little worm that the country overwhelmingly chose to make the wrong decision. They voted against AV out of spite.
Of course, all parties involved (the media as well, the Yes campaign and the No campaign) are guilty of failing to outline both the facts and the arguments properly They made AV look unnecessarily complex and difficult (as did the leaflets sent out by the Electoral Commission). They allowed politicians from the No campaign to spread smears and lies without challenging them. They failed to expose the vested interests in keeping the current system. They failed, basically, in drowning out the likes of the Daily Mail and all the small minded, ignorant cunts who have run this country for too long despite the fact that evolution should have killed them off by now.
There may yet be an upside to all of this: the Liberal Democrats have been well and truly trounced in yesterday's election. Not only have they lost the AV referendum, they've also lost thousands of council seats across the country. If the party had any integrity at all, they would now pull out of the ConDem coalition (which has done nothing to achieve Lib Dem aims in the last year) and force the Conservatives into trying to govern with a parliamentary minority. But this won't happen, because the Liberal Democrats have no integrity. Like any other party in power (even though the power they have is meaningless), they will cling on to the bitter end. Because they're a bunch of tools. And if you voted against AV to spite the Liberal Democrats, remember this: a better voting system would have punished them just as much as it would have punished the Tories.
So if you voted No to AV, this is my message to you: SHUT THE FUCK UP. You don't get a say in politics anymore. None of us really get a say, but when we had a chance to make things better, you chose instead to close your ignorant tiny minds. Your ill-informed, unresearched vote cancelled out the votes of all those people who actually did bother to find out what AV is all about. You have sacrificed our best chance to make politics better. From now on, you get what you deserve.
