Verbal

Why? Do you need 60 million cuddles?

Then what possible connection do you have to these people that you emote so much about?

So you are a personal friend of Kate and Wills?

Unlike sponging, work-shy royalists, lolling around in front of the telly making weirdly faux-expert comments about wedding dresses, I spent a very productive day getting some work done. Apparently the gushing BBC commentators have been going on about this nonsense being watched on 'five continents'. There are actually six, on this planet at least. So which was the lucky continent that missed out on all this?

That's a bit much scotty. How dare you suggest our royal cap-doffers read something.

Good idea. I just looked up the latest earnings figures for Disneyland Paris - around 245m Euros. So we just merge Buck House and its inhabitants into Madame Tussauds and we're done!

So it seems. A celebratory Botox party is apparently underway on The Only Way is Essex. Get yourself down there now!

From land and property expropriated without compensation in Victorian times.

Off with their heads.

That would be a twelvesome. Or do you mean Chelsy?

Much like the Royal Family then.

Would your Lordship like to reenter the debate on here in some slightly more substantive way? You were given very comprehensive rebuttals to some pretty weak arguments or supporting FPTP. If you've now switched sides as a result, welcome to liberal elite.

Oh dear. Did that not work?

I can see 40 years of hurt coming, so let me put you out of your misery. Combining your avatar with your clear enthusiasm for starting threads like this and the anti-semitism one - all about what you prefer to call 'political correctness' around the subjects of race, ethnicity and religion - led me to the obvious conclusion that the subtext of all this is that you wish to reserve the right to be a racist scumbag without actually being called one. I didn't call you a racist scumbag. How could you possibly be offended by that?

Quite. I blame the OP.

Any psephologist worth their salt - even that Tory nitwit Norton - would tell you that parties like BNP and UKIP are what they define as 'single-issue' parties. They attract, by definition, protest votes, and their fortunes rise and fall with those issues race, Europe, etc). We know it won't galvanise support for single-issue minority parties because AV requires more engagement - politicians with electorate and vice versa. AV may well give greater representation to minority parties with genuine, stable political agendas (like the LibDems and the nationalist parties) - but that's the price of democracy surely worth paying, that people's votes are proportionately represented in elected representatives. At the risk of sounding controversial, the ONLY fair way to vote on the merits or otherwise of AV is not to hold a referendum on it, but to impose it by executive decision. Introduce it for one Parliamentary election and one or two rounds of local elections. THEN have a referendum on AV vs FPTP. That way, people won't be facing a choice between something they know and something they don't. Maybe even the most spooked of No voters, like our doom-laden Lord Tender, would change his mind.

Is this a joke?

I don't owe you an apology but a vote of thanks (delivered, as per AV, as a last choice). I use you to develop some of my key, and very important, political ideas, which are then published to glowing reviews in New Left Review and the London Review of Books. I could credit you as 'that ***t on the football forum' if you like, or is that too on the nose?

My point is that with the electorate's greater engagement in the political process, the noddy parties like UKIP and the BNP, who have ALWAYS been little more than vehicles for protest votes, would fall away.

It's not a paradox at all, just simple logic. The overwhelming reason people give for supporting the BNP is their feeling of disengagement and disillusion from the political process - and FPTP is fatally implicated in this. It's actually why the BNP opposes AV - they WANT a corrupt and broken system that disenfranchises people to continue, because that's the core of their 'protest' support. A more representative form of democracy at the ballot box would diminish support for the BNP and other extremists - and they damned well know it. So contrary to the scaremongers in the No campaign, the BNP would struggle to get a look-in in AV. Vote for AV; vote against extremists. (And also, unlike the No campaign, actually do something radical - trust the electorate.)

I don't think the yes campaign was exactly waiting with baited breath. Go on Sergei, surprise yourself, make yourself happy, and do something that brings joy to others. Vote yes, and drag Wes 'I don't want to talk about it any more' Tender in with you.

That's it then. 'Yes' it is.

His birthplace has never been in doubt among the sane, non-racist majority in the US.

This thread has made my afternoon. Keep it up Turkish.

That phrase is like a curtain the No campaign dare not look behind - because if they did they'd find an electorate disillusioned by the political process, about being disenfranchised in 'safe seats' (latter-day rotten boroughs), and marginalised by politicians whose security in their own safety means they start scamming the system to pay for their moats. And FPTP stands as a guilty contributor to all that. AV won't be an overnight cure, but it is the start of a long process of reform in a country which by its nature has evolved its constitutional changes rather than go for full-scale revolution.