MEDIA: Premiärminister Gordon Brown och Labour ser ut att gå mot en valförlust.
Det måste vara extra surt för Brown att även The Guardian – som läses av många av Labours väljare – nu ger Liberal Democrats och dess partiledare Nick Clegg sitt stöd på ledarplats.
Utgångspunkten för beslutet är att Liberaldemokraterna är det enda partiet som tydligt står bakom en reformering av valsystemet.
Medan Conservative är klart emot och Labour under lång tid har velat i frågan har liberalerna under många år drivit på i frågan. The Guardian har under många år förespråkat en reformering.
I en helsida på ledarplats i lördagens tidning förklarar man beslutet;
Citizens have votes. Newspapers do not. However, if the Guardian had a vote in the 2010 general election it would be cast enthusiastically for the Liberal Democrats. It would be cast in the knowledge that not all the consequences are predictable, and that some in particular should be avoided. The vote would be cast with some important reservations and frustrations. Yet it would be cast for one great reason of principle above all.
After the campaign that the Liberal Democrats have waged over this past month, for which considerable personal credit goes to Nick Clegg, the election presents the British people with a huge opportunity: the reform of the electoral system itself. Though Labour has enjoyed a deathbed conversion to aspects of the cause of reform, it is the Liberal Democrats who have most consistently argued that cause in the round and who, after the exhaustion of the old politics, reflect and lead an overwhelming national mood for real change.
Proportional representation – while not a panacea – would at last give this country what it has lacked for so long: a parliament that is a true mirror of this pluralist nation, not an increasingly unrepresentative two-party distortion of it. The Guardian has supported proportional representation for more than a century. In all that time there has never been a better opportunity than now to put this subject firmly among the nation’s priorities. Only the Liberal Democrats grasp this fully, and only they can be trusted to keep up the pressure to deliver, though others in all parties, large and small, do and should support the cause. That has been true in past elections too, of course. But this time is different. The conjuncture in 2010 of a Labour party that has lost so much public confidence and a Conservative party that has not yet won it has enabled Mr Clegg to take his party close to the threshold of real influence for the first time in nearly 90 years.
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