A new poll has thrown up a curious result:
In a poll of over 2,000 British adults, just 29% wanted to keep the current voting system, with 20% in favour of the Alternative Vote system (the subject of a national referendum on May 5th 2011) and 45% wanting some form of proportional representation.
The research by ODC was commissioned by Lindsell Marketing, a business consultancy, and hasn’t appeared anywhere else yet. You can read it in detail here.
The writing is not absolutely clear: blue is first-past-the-post, purple is PR and yellow is AV.
It appears to suggest that Nick Clegg would have been more likely to win next summer’s referendum if it had been for PR rather than AV. You may remember it was Clegg himself who once described the alternative vote as a “miserable little compromise”.
Alternatively, this could just be proof that public opinion on such issues is far from fully-formed and there is still all to play for. How many members of the public would die in the ditch for any of the options?
Jim Pickard
Kiran Stacey
