"First past the post plays into the hands of extremists like BNP." claims Baroness Warsi

From The Evening Standard:

Unelected Baroness Warsi is to issue a direct plea to London's ethnic communities to oppose Britain's* First-Past-The-Post voting system by giving a speech near the site of brief skirmish which took place seventy-five years ago.

The Tory Party co-chairman will give an address tomorrow at Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel, close to Cable Street which saw a brief skirmish between pro and anti-fascist demonstrators on a Sunday afternoon in 1936. A few East Londoners took to the streets to oppose a march by a few of Oswald Mosley's blackshirts, setting up barricades and clashing with police trying to maintain order.

Lady Warsi will argue that First-Past-The-Post puts pressure on the two mainstream parties to adopt the policies of extremist parties like the BNP in order to secure the tactical votes of natural BNP supporters who are realistic enough to accept that the BNP are unlikely to ever win a seat. She will point out that the first-past-the-post system has served generations of immigrants badly.

Aides said the issue was of personal importance to Lady Warsi, a patron of "No to FPTP" who failed to win the seat of Dewsbury in the 2005 general election - the only election she ever fought before being elevated to the House of Lords as a token coloured woman - where the BNP secured 5,066 votes - more than the difference between the winning candidate and her own turnout.

"Under AV, it is quite possible that many of these BNP voters would have reluctantly given the Tory candidate, i.e. me, their second vote and I would have been duly elected," the Tory appointee will sigh wistfully, "You wouldn't believe how thick they are."

* There's no such place as "Britain", there's an island called "Great Britain", and the political unit they are referring to is more correctly referred to as "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland".