Reorganising Scottish Enterprise isn’t the solution to the problems it has. It’s not doing a perfect job but the problems are essentially managerial, not structural.

Putting the Scot Rail franchise into public ownership is completely realistic, it was SNP policy in 2003: http://s.coop/14le until 2008: http://www.rmt.org.uk/Templates/Internal.asp?NodeID=104030&int1stParentNodeID=89732

I’m confused by your comments on knife and alcohol policy where I explicitly disagree with current Labour policy.

Apologies for the typo – I’m dyslexic and was in a rush, didn’t spot it. Glad you’re keeping it positive. ;)

Leaving Scottish Enterpise the hell alone and letting it get on with its job – Labour previously did and it wasn’t

Speaking of which, we’re going to look at public ownership for Scotrail when it comes up for renewal – Scottish Parliament only has power to let the franchise and is specifically forbidden to operate it in the public sector – unions not interested in making a bid

Big focus on … literacy – start with your own material (see above for a start)

Knives – offending dropped 30% under SNP and sentences doubled

Alcohol – Labour oppose dealing with the problem

A party leader that says “we’re off” when faced by a small group of protestors ain’t going to bite the Tories

In order: 1) Constituency democracy is important, but so is national democracy. It is not the case that people people only care about their local MP – they also care about their government. The reason we’re talking about FPTP vs AV is not because of any strong preference for those two above all others from the electorate, it’s because that’s all that David Cameron would give the Liberal Democrats in the coalition negotiations. My point isn’t that First Past The Post is more or less legitimate than AV it’s that AV will tend to exaggerate landslides.

2) I’m not making any predictions about particular contests, I’m making a general point about what happens in specific electoral situations – specifically landslides.

3) It doesn’t matter how fragile or not a particular majority is in psephological terms, elections are infrequent and governments aren’t brought down by mid-term polling. Further, my point is about the frequency of landslides, I suspect they’ll happen on roughly the same frequency as under FPTP all other things considered. My point is that when it does happen, those majorities will be larger.

4) The Australian experience with AV would argue against a proliferation of smaller parties, they thrive in the STV elected senate but do exceedingly badly in the AV elected lower house. It’s also irrelevant to my examples since the analysis applies equally to straight 3 party systems as to the final elimination round in AV.

My point is that it’s much easier for those freak occurances to happen under AV than under FPTP – I’ve been unable to find any FPTP elections which resulted in the winner gaining 75+% seats. I’m not sure what the “confines of our single member constituency” means, that isn’t up for discussion in the vote.

Second, you’re ignoring three key areas here.

1) Constituency democracy is important to voters, it’s one of the reasons why we’re talking solely about AV or FPTP here. There is nothing democratically wrong with each constituency being represented properly, with the majorities or not that it leads to, for every factor you see it as unfair for an MP to legitimately hold their seat, I see it as unfair that someone is represented by an MP that doesn’t actually work for them.

2) Local effects. One of the main reasons I say you can’t predict how AV will change things is because of the reasons people vote from area to area. It’s all well and good looking at national polls and seeing how people would vote in general, it’s quite another when you go down in to individual constituencies with the local politics that goes on. Those of us that thought we could look at national and regional opinion to predict the last election got burned very badly because of extremely variable local effects, and that is with a simpler system to predict!

3) Fragility of your freak occurrence. We’ll see how the parliament looks after we change the boundaries, which is unfortunately going to happen regardless (as I said above), but as it stands I can’t see any danger of “disastrous” majorities. I can’t rule them out, but then I can’t rule it out under FPTP either, the chances are so similar between both as far as I’m concerned…BUT…

Under AV a majority that was devastating or disastrous would be extremely fragile. Hung basically on second preferences that are so aligned with “national mood”, bad policies and politics would quickly create a backlash that would reverse that huge majority in to a hung parliament. There is no incentive, unlike under FPTP, for large majority governments to act recklessly and without care, their vote simply won’t be solid enough.

There’s also a potential point 4, which isn’t possible under FPTP

4) Realities of future under AV. You talk about parties as if they would certainly remain the same. I’m not convinced that’ll be the case in the long term. Co-op Labour members may not want to remain bedded in with the rest of Labour, Orange Bookers not so much with the more social liberals, Cameron’s Tories with those like Thatcherites of old. AV will let them split out from one another, to run multiple candidates from the same party with different ideals in the same constituency at least. I don’t think it’s as simple as to focus on our 3 party situation.

Basically…every poll I’ve seen shows that Tories would generally vote for LDs, Labour for LDs, and LDs would split 50/50 between the two, while at least a quarter wouldn’t put a further preference down. Local effects we don’t know, but nationally the trend would be to give people a voice, but with the effect of minimal actual seat changes. But then we also don’t know how constituencies will look, nor how parties will operate with the greater freedom to segregate internally as well as externally.

You’re making an anti-democratic argument, from the confines of our single member constituency model, and choosing the most freak of occurrences to stand against AV, oblivious (it seems) to the fact just the same can (but doesn’t) happen under FPTP, and the hypocrisy that means.

Though that burnt clump can be fairly tasty.