Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 19 March 2011

‘You can be young, optimistic and oppose AV’, says the magazine spiked.

issue 19 March 2011

‘You can be young, optimistic and oppose AV’, says the magazine spiked.

‘You can be young, optimistic and oppose AV’, says the magazine spiked. I am sorry to hear it, because we anti-AV people were hoping not to be pestered by any young, optimistic people, but to oppose change in an elderly, unthinking and sullen manner. ‘Non tali auxilio!’, we cry, confident that young, optimistic people will not know what we mean.

But one might feel more optimistic if one could have referendums on subjects for which there is real popular demand. The AV vote is so obviously and solely the result of a treaty between politicians that it just isn’t reasonable to ask the rest of us to interest ourselves in the details of the matter. Yet the fact is that referendums have now become quite a large part of our democratic system.

Charles Moore
Written by
Charles Moore

Charles Moore is The Spectator’s chairman.

He is a former editor of the magazine, as well as the Sunday Telegraph and the Daily Telegraph. He became a non-affiliated peer in July 2020.

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