Tony Blair. Remember him? He was a pretty good prime minister on the whole, did wonders for the NHS and education, but made a few blunders on the international front. He'll always be remembered for the Iraq War - probably his biggest blunder by quite a long way. Perhaps the reason Iraq stands out so much in our minds when we think of Blair's tenure is that a mistake of that magnitude was in stark contrast to what Blair's government were doing in other areas. It wasn't all good, but it was infinitely better than what the Tories had offered in the previous government under John Major. And when you hear Blair talking about Iraq, he still thinks it was the right thing to do; perhaps that's naive of him, perhaps it's incompetent, but the important thing is that it's genuine. Blair was trying to do what was right, he believed his advisors when they told him that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and he acted on that advice. He did not set out to deliberately mislead people.
Sadly that cannot be said for David Cameron. He hasn't been in office long, and he has already made some pretty stupid mistakes; today, for example, Oxford University responded to his daft assertion that they had only admitted one black student in 2009, saying he had been "incorrect and highly misleading". Apparently the actual number is 26, which is still appallingly low, so Cameron's argument should still hold some weight - but because he got his facts wrong, Oxford University have pretty much dismissed his argument. It's a bit like the light bulb thing all over again.
In that case, though, perhaps Cameron made an honest mistake. It makes him look stupid for a few moments, but it's forgiveable; it doesn't really undermine any trust we happen to have in him. Were he, though, to attempt to deliberately mislead people, that would be a different matter - and sadly, today, he's been doing exactly that.
"It's a system," he said of the Alternative Vote, "so undemocratic that you can vote for a mainstream party just once, whereas someone can vote for a fringe party like the BNP and it's counted three times..."
Wrong.
The circumstances he's alluding to are where a party, in this case the BNP, receive the smallest share of the vote. Under AV in those circumstances, the BNP are wiped out of the competition and those votes are transferred to the second choice candidates. The key word there being transferred. Votes for the BNP would not be counted three times - in fact they would stop counting at all. David Cameron knows this, and in making statements like the one above he is deliberately trying to mislead voters, attempting to scaremonger them into submission.
A true democrat would lay the facts on the table in an honest way, argue his corner without fabricating rubbish like that, and let the electorate decide. A worthy Prime Minister would not deliberately attempt to mislead the electorate in such a despicable way. Today David Cameron showed his true colours: he's anti democracy, and he's not sufficiently trustworthy to be our Prime Minister.
