More last minute FPTP lies

Baroness Warsi was quoted in today's Metro, I can't track down that article but she was quoted as saying the same thing by the BBC about a month ago:

Generations of British reformers have been inspired by that principle. They believed that because each person is equal, everyone should have an equal vote. It took many years for that principle to become part of our politics. But today it stands as the cornerstone of our democracy.

Look around the world and we see the legacy: 2.4 billion people use our voting system. It's the most widely used voting system in the world.

*ahem*

i. World population 6.8 billion (I assume she's referring to total population, rather than electors, which might be 5 billion*).

ii. The USA and India use FPTP, that's 1.5 billion accounted for. The USA appears to have a two-party system, in which case it doesn't matter whether they use FPTP or AV, adn I have no idea about Indian politics.

iii. So that leaves 0.9 billion people in countries using FPTP, and 4 billion people in countries using 'something else' (to the extent they have elections, which most countries do, even single party states).

iv. So as a simple matter of fact, FPTP is not the most widely used voting system, especially if you work on the basis of "number of countries using it" rather than pure population size. Proportional Representation (in one of its many guises) is the most widely used system, and apparently the most widely used type of PR is full-list PR.

*/ahem*

* If she's working on the basis of 'electors', then she might or might not have a point, depending on whether you count "number of countries" or "total population".

"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".

Baroness Warsi

How come she's allowed to say this... oh, I see.

From the BBC:

The Conservatives failed to win an overall majority at the general election because of electoral fraud, Baroness Warsi has said. The party chairman told the New Statesman that Labour benefited from the alleged fraud. She said it happened with at least three seats but would not say where.

A Labour spokesperson said the allegations were "unsubstantiated" and urged Lady Warsi to share any evidence she had with the authorities. Lady Warsi said: "It is predominantly within the Asian community."
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UPDATE, re JuliaM's comment, they are all at it, here are the top five Google hits in no particular order. As you will see, a disproportionate number of the guilty parties appear to have 'Asian' names:

Conservatives.
Labour
Lib Dems and Labour
Labour
Conservatives