What would Charles Kennedy have been doing now?

It’s three days until we have our much vaunted referendum; but in my mind we are having two referenda for the price of one that day and they are both about the same thing.

We SHOULD be voting on whether we want to change the voting system from a strangely  adversarial process known as ‘winner takes all’ (or ‘life’ if you want a shorter phrase) to a much more cuddly system known as AV (or ‘ the least unpopular person wins’ if you want a cynical phrase for it) – that’s what we should be voting about but it won’t be.

The YestoAV folk seem to have just about accepted defeat. Despite the clear appetite that the UK has for proportional representation (and that shows in all the polls done over the last 10 years) this time the British voters will say “no thanks” and stick with what they have already. That may seem very odd – the majority of people when asked about PR in May 2009, in a survey funded by the Labour Party, said they were in favour; in fact we know that the majority of people in this country are in favour and it is, in effect, only Tories who oppose what is a fairer system.

Yet we will get a clear NO vote this week.

At the same time we will all be voting for our local councillors and here the protest vote will be seen in the shattering of the Liberal Democrat stronghold on Councils across the country. It is suggested that many LibDem candidates could come last in their local vote, even the allocation voting system won’t save them, and they could lose every council where enough seats are up for grabs to allow that. Many seats around the country won’t even have a LibDem candidate fighting in it – such is the lack of willingness to be humiliated by grass roots supporters.

And here is where the LibDems have truly let us all down. They have stayed out of the way during the AV debate as much as they can but we all know it’s the cornerstone of their coalition deal. Many people believe they went into an untenable relationship with the Tories PURELY to get AV. So the problem is that many voters see voting YestoAV as voting Liberal Democrat! Of course it isn’t it’s a vote for a system that certainly works for them in General Elections, but at the end of the day we should be voting on whether we want a different system of not.

But we won’t be doing that.

So the referendum vote and the votes cast in the local elections will all be about the same thing. The universal discontent felt by the majority of Labour AND LibDem voters at the last election, for what Clegg & Co have allowed to happen. The AV system, for 50 years something the LibDems have campaigned for, is going to be rejected by a public desperate to show Nick Clegg what they think of him.

Ironic really that Mr Clegg, the man who was supposed to transform the Liberal Democrats, could destroy their most important principle and policy - there is no doubt it will be another 50 years at least before we have this referendum again – and one has to ask...........

Would Charles Kennedy have made the fantastical mistake that Clegg’s naivety led him to make? Kennedy was a statesman (albeit a drunk statesman) who could see the bigger picture – as a result he didn’t need to listen to fools like Paddy Ashdown – he read the political and economic ramifications of things and made his own decisions. Kennedy was a s savvy as Clegg is naive. I wonder where we would be now.............

And I wonder if Kennedy would be about to win the AV vote – or maybe even a PR referendum!