Inside that is a smaller yellow square to scale with the rectangle labelled "Annual government spending: £644,000 million"
Inside the yellow square, barely visible, is a tiny purple rectangle (again, to scale). An arrow points to it indicating that this is the £250 million alleged cost of AV.
Below the diagram, the text: "Real cost of AV: £20 million (too small to show)", and then in larger type "Good democracy is worth paying for. We can afford it: Vote YES to AV."
Over at REFUSING THE DEFAULT, an excellent POST explaining why AV is 'worth it' and why the YES campaign need to get their act together and slam down the mendacious claims of NO2AV that AV will cost £250m and is unaffordable.
As RFD puts it;
"...apparently lacking good arguments in favour of FPTP, the No2AV campaign were instead campaigning on cost - and had significantly exaggerated the cost through a mix of accounting fraud and the political technique commonly known as "making stuff up".
"It should be a major mistake - if you start complaining about the cost of democracy, what other "cost saving" measures are you willing to entertain? Less frequent elections? Increased restrictions on suffrage? Dictatorship? We don't have democracy because it's cheap but because it's worth it.
Rather than pointing this out - and indeed, pointing out that even the massively inflated £250 million price tag is insignificant - the Yes To Fairer Votes campaign have instead chosen to ... complain to the Advertising Standards Authority"
Good to see Mark Thompson back blogging at Mark Reckons, he also has a good poster parody of NO2AV's mendacious adverts.
Yes of course the cost of the referendum is tiny and worth it anyway (hopefully we'll get a 'Yes') but UK GDP by most measures is something like £1,400 bn, not £2,250 bn.
ReplyDeleteMark, you are indeed correct, didn't notice that. Not so good at doing graphics, pinched this on off refusing the default blog. Will have a go at putting this right. Won't change the point though.
ReplyDelete