Britain's voting referendum cleaves governing coalition

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The sick baby stares out at voters from a West London intersection, its nose stuffed with tubes and its hand reaching out in a desperate gesture.

"She needs a new cardiac facility," the stark black type reads, "NOT an alternative voting system." A similar ad shows a soldier and suggests that he will be deprived of a bulletproof vest if Britons vote in favour of an Alternative Vote scheme in Thursday's referendum. Another hints that a Yes vote could put fascists into Parliament.

Those ads exploded this week into an angry cabinet feud that threatened to undermine the liberal-conservative coalition that has governed Britain for almost a year. There are signs the Alternative Vote referendum, despite being widely ignored by most British voters, could be the death knell of one of Britain's more successful political unions.

At a weekly cabinet meeting Tuesday, Energy Minister Chris Huhne, an influential member of Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats and a leader of the Yes campaign, raised his voice and lashed out angrily at Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne, whose Conservatives are pushing for a No despite having supported the referendum itself.

"There was a bit of a bust-up," one minister told the BBC. Mr. Huhne had earlier likened the Tory-led No campaign to Nazi propaganda, and on Tuesday threatened to sue the Tories for their No campaign ads. Conservatives took him aside and warned him to calm down, but later Mr. Cameron distanced himself from the most extreme No ads, telling reporters that his party supports the campaign but is not responsible for the more "robust" ads.

It was an explosion that had been waiting to happen. For two parties whose leaders have otherwise been desperately eager to appear joined at the hip amid mounting tensions over tuition fees, budget cuts and immigration, the referendum was the issue that everyone suspected might rip them apart.

But it has proven even worse than anyone expected, as the voting-scheme debate has turned Mr. Clegg and Mr. Cameron, who sit side-by-side on the government benches in Parliament, into political opponents denouncing one another on the hustings, and has turned some of Mr. Clegg's key ministers and part of his party rank-and-file against him.

One of the Tory-backed No billboards suggests ominously that an AV system would produce a "President Clegg," presumably by opening the gates to a republic and giving him a victory. On the other hand, Labour grandee Peter Mandelson set the tone of the Yes campaign by coining the slogan "Vote Yes to damage Cameron."

On Wednesday, Labour Leader Ed Miliband gleefully mocked the way in which a seemingly irrelevant matter of voting structures has turned the two men against each other: "Two parties working together in the public interest - that's what we were told," he said in the House of Commons. "Now what do we have? Two parties trying to sue each other in their own interest."

The Liberal Democrats made a new voting system central to their 2010 campaign - a matter of long-standing principle but also practicality, as their party attracted a third of the vote but won fewer than a tenth of the seats in that election.

In coalition negotiations with the Tories last summer, the centrist Lib Dems gave up most of their key campaign promises in order to extract a Conservative pledge to hold a referendum on a different voting system - but not necessarily to support a Yes outcome.

The proposed voting system, similar to Ireland's, would be roughly similar to the British and Canadian systems except that instead of marking an X beside a candidate, voters would rank each of their riding's candidates by preference, with a "1" for their favourite, a "2" for their second and so on.

If no candidate's "1" votes add up to more than 50 per cent, the "2" votes are added, and so on until a candidate has a majority. The strength, advocates say, is that all MPs will be elected to Parliament by a majority of constituents (if you're willing to accept second-choice votes as contributing to a majority). The system would give the Lib Dems considerably more seats, the Tories somewhat fewer and Labour an ambiguous result.

As a result, the leaders of the opposition Labour Party have been campaigning for a Yes vote - not on democratic principle, but in order to humiliate Mr. Cameron. Another Labour faction, representing about a third of its members, is campaigning for a No vote in order to damage Mr. Clegg's credibility, destroy the unity within the coalition and trigger an election that Labour might win.

Polls suggest that this strategy might work, as Mr. Clegg appears headed for a humiliating defeat Thursday night. A poll conducted by the Guardian Wednesday found a 68 per cent No vote against 32 per cent for Yes, and even a quarter of Liberal Democrats planning on voting No. After such a devastating and personal rebuke from the man sitting next to him, it will be hard for Mr. Clegg or his party to return to business as usual.