El Gordo knows that there will be tens, if not hundreds of thousands of traditional Labour voters casting protest votes in the next election. Their only hope of clinging on to any sort of power is through the Alternative Vote system where rebellious voters can cast their protest vote and still vote Labour as second choice.
UKIP was criticised in some quarters for asking voters to lend them their vote during last year's EU elections because some people thought it might make the party look weak but Labour aren't even asking for people to lend them their vote, they're asking them for their second choice! Desperate doesn't even begin to describe it.
There is an advantage of the the Alternative Vote system, though. For some reason, most people still vote for the LibLabCon even though they've let us all down over and over again because they still, for some bizarre reason, want one of the LibLabCon to win. But as we've seen in EU elections, if they don't think the result matters, voters will vote for someone different and if they think they can vote for UKIP and whichever faction of the LibLabCon they normally vote for then we could see a significant number of UKIP wins based on second preference votes. It worked for the English Democrats in Doncaster, imagine what the fourth biggest party in the UK could do with a voting system that wasn't inherently biased against anyone who doesn't belong to the LibLabCon coalition.
If he can rush this bill through Parliament and get the referendum before the election this year, Brown's desperate attempt to cling on to power could be the biggest gift UKIP has had since ... well, since humiliating Labour and the Lib Dims in the EU elections last year!
wonkotsane is an author at Bloggers4UKIP.
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