Assorted bollocks heard since May 6 (pt.1)

The most uncertain post-election outcome since 1974 has spawned an industrial amount of myths and assorted bollocks coming from the press. Here is misconception no.1.

Deborah Orr in the Guardian is the most obvious example. She reiterated the myth that people don't want a change in the voting system because, I quote: "[H]ello!? Only 23% of "progressives" voted for the party that is committed to genuine proportional representation".

Similarly, the electorate allegedly voted down "a renewed commitment to the protection of civil liberties", as well as pretty much everything else the Lib Dems are associated with, purely because Nick Clegg's party got 23% of the votes.

In recent days, the right-wing press has been packed with this kind of unadulterated manure. Melanie Phillips, for instance. She wrote: "[t]he Lib Dems were rejected by more than three-quarters of the population. They have no authority to demand anything".

Or Janet Dailey in the Telegraph. She remarked that "[W]e are still talking about “electoral reform” as if it were the great issue of the day: the change whose moment has now irresistibly arrived, when in fact it is the change that the country definitively rejected".

It looks like Deborah Orr is on their side completely.

But theirs is a very peculiar way of reading an election outcome. Look at it:

- Step one. Pick (selectively, of course, the readers are too dim to clock it, aren't they, Orr?) a party that did not make it to 50%.

- Step two. Pick any of their policies that you dislike or hate.

- Step three. Decide that the general election was in fact a referendum on that specific policy and write that the public turned it down because the party in question only got [enter figure below 50%].

Readers are treated like a bunch of dim retards.

Because you can apply The Orr Method to anything and anyone then. You could argue that 97% of the British electorate want the UK to remain in the EU as it is because...just look at UKIP's result. Or that 99% really don't give a toss about the environment because all the Green Party got was a rickety 1%.

You can argue (as indeed many are) that whatever the Conservatives stand for was turned down by an impressive 64% of the electorate. Etcetera Etcetera. You get the general idea. Except it's not how it works.

The Orr Method is politics for imbeciles. A general election is not a referendum on anything. If May 6 had been about choosing between the current first-past-the-post or proportional representation - check this out, Deborah - it would have been called a REFERENDUM. But it wasn't. It was called an ELECTION.

An election is one thing, a referendum is another.

And elections don't generally mean "do you prefer policy A or B?". They mean picking a certain political party on fairly complex grounds, including tactical choices, national policies, local policies, foreign policies, history, personalities, etc. Without forgetting tribal allegiances too.

So cut the crap and accept the blatant obvious. First-past-the-post is an obsolete system. It's out of kilter.

It may have served its purpose back in 1951 when the combined Tory/Labour vote was a massive 96.8%.

But the undeniable truth is that the Big Two's result has been declining sharply ever since.

In 2005, Labour and Conservative were voted by 67% of the electorate. Last week the percentage was even lower: 65 per cent.