AV will not help the BNP and everyone's vote counts the same.

The Alternative Vote isn’t a great voting system but neither is First Past the Post. I suspect inertia and boredom and a lack of outrage will help swing the day for the status quo in the end. Neither side has impressed during the campaign thus far. Claims that AV is some kind of elixir that will “clean-up” British politics are absurd. But at least the Yes campaign is, on the whole, only peddling pie-in-the-sky. They’re not, again on the whole, trying to frighten voters. Their exagerrations seem a little less desperate than those made by the No campaign.

Take Baroness Warsi’s nonsensical claim that AV will somehow help* the BNP. As it happens, FPTP doesn’t help them much either and you’d need to switch to an Israeli-style system to give the BNP a real boost. Nevertheless, were AV adopted for council elections the BNP would find it much harder to win any seats at all since, if nothing else, AV raises the bar of minimal acceptability to a level the BNP cannot realistically hope to clear.