Saturday, May 03, 2008

Letting The Perfect Be The Enemy Of The Good

Might I start by advising any readers who “couldn’t be bothered to vote”, "voted for Boris as a protest/joke" or "voted for Boris because they genuinely thought that was a good idea" that they would do well to avoid me for the next few days… But what makes me the angriest (I think, it’s so hard to chose) is that if all the Lib Dem and Green Party voters had put Ken Livingstone second choice - we wouldn’t have a sexist, racist, homophobic idiot running our nation’s capital. Brian Paddick has apparently said that he put Linsdey German as his second choice candidate.

Now Lindsey German is a great candidate with some great policies. However if voters didn’t want THIS to happen then whether they voted Paddick, Berry or German, they had to put Livingstone as second choice. German was never going to make the head-to-head so a second choice vote for her was a total waste. That’s really the point of a first and second choice system: you can vote idealistically first and tactically second. Not idealistically, twice. THIS did not have to happen.

No comments: