{"id":9179,"date":"2011-05-05T08:32:12","date_gmt":"2011-05-05T12:32:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=9179"},"modified":"2011-05-05T09:37:40","modified_gmt":"2011-05-05T13:37:40","slug":"brendan-oneill-on-why-britons-should-vote-no-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/05\/05\/brendan-oneill-on-why-britons-should-vote-no-today\/","title":{"rendered":"Brendan O’Neill on why Britons should vote “No” today"},"content":{"rendered":"

For some reason, British governments for the last decade have found it utterly impossible<\/em> to organize a referendum on whether Britain should stay within the European Union, but they’ve been able to whip up today’s Alternative Voting referendum in double-quick time. Brendan O’Neill<\/a> has a few last-minute words for those of you eligible to vote:<\/p>\n

\n

But now that we\u2019ve been landed with a referendum for an electoral system that a majority of the public are savagely uninterested in, it\u2019s paramount that we vote NO to AV.<\/p>\n

Because AV would accentuate some of the most degenerate trends in politics today.<\/p>\n

Through its invitation to voters to express their views about all candidates, it would turn voting from an impassioned statement of political desire or attachment to an ideal into a relativistic process of erming and ahhing.<\/p>\n

And by making aspiring politicians potentially reliant on second- and third-preference votes, it would nurture even more public figures who refuse to say anything surprising or provocative for fear of alienating their kind-of constituencies.<\/p>\n

In short, AV would water down the act of voting and reduce risk-taking and ideas-making in mainstream British politics – a trend that is already underway but which would effectively be institutionalised under AV.<\/p>\n

So go out and say NO.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For some reason, British governments for the last decade have found it utterly impossible to organize a referendum on whether Britain should stay within the European Union, but they’ve been able to whip up today’s Alternative Voting referendum in double-quick time. Brendan O’Neill has a few last-minute words for those of you eligible to vote: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,84,53],"tags":[86,458],"class_list":["post-9179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-government","category-politics","tag-criticism","tag-parliament"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2o3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9179"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9179\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9180,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9179\/revisions\/9180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}