President Clegg?
This image has been attacked as the “politics of the gutter“.
Lord Ashdown might be right to say that making a personal attack on Nick Clegg would be gutter politics. But is this a personal attack on Nick Clegg? I’m not so sure. It doesn’t actually say anything bad about him — it simply says that AV would give him the power to choose the government. Yes, this bald claim is open to misinterpretation, but that’s not to say it’s false.
The underlying message of the poster is this: by increasing the representation of smaller parties relative to the larger ones, a proportional system is less likely to deliver an absolute majority in Parliament. But since an absolute majority in Parliament is what’s needed to choose a government in this country, the parties are going to have to decide how to arrange themselves after the election is concluded, with the result that a small party (a potential junior coalition partner) has a lot of power to choose which large party gets to form the government. If the Lib Dems were the third party, Nick Clegg would be kingmaker, as he was in the general election last year.
The poster might be tendentious and a bit underhand. But I’d say it’s no worse than the equally annoying approach taken by the Yes campaign.
