May 7th 2011, 6:22 by J.G. | LONDON
BRITAIN is to continue electing its Parliament with the first-past-the-post voting system. A change to the alternative vote (AV) was offered in a national referendum, only the second in British history, on May 5th, but was rejected by a landslide. The counting is yet to finish but the No campaign is on course to secure over two-thirds of the votes cast. Cambridge and some London boroughs were among the very few electoral districts which voted in favour of AV. Turnout is estimated to be 41%, higher than many expected.
The political implications of the result are different for each of the main three parties. It is a crushing setback for the Liberal Democrats, and their leader Nick Clegg. Electoral reform is their animating cause; the current system gives them fewer seats in Parliament than their share of the popular vote would seem to deserve. Today’s result has killed off not only AV, but perhaps the prospect of any electoral reform for a generation. Some in the party may now also begin to openly question what the Lib Dems are getting out of the coalition with the Conservatives, though their reluctance to provoke a general election while they are so low in the polls would seem to make an outright rupture unlikely.
For the Tories, and David Cameron in particular, the result is a triumph. The party feared that it would never again be able to govern alone if the reform passed (though the electoral implications of AV for the Tories were never that clear) and many resented their leader for offering the referendum to the Lib Dems in the first place. Only when he joined the No campaign tenaciously in February did it begin to pull away from the Yes camp. Mr Cameron has managed to avoid a serious schism with his party, and perhaps even a crisis concerning his own leadership, by defeating AV. He is also the only one of the three main party leaders to end up on the victorious side. The only problem is that he may have won too well, as Bagehot notes.
For Labour generally, the result means little. The party has long been divided on electoral reform, and even its pro-AV camp were not so enthusiastic as to be crestfallen tonight. For Ed Miliband, their leader, the implications are slightly more serious. He featured prominently in the Yes campaign, perhaps more prominently than was wise. On its own, the result is not enough to taint him as an electoral under-achiever but, in combination with Labour’s humiliation in the elections in Scotland (where he also campaigned visibly) and its modestly successful showing in the English council elections, it might.
