Following defeat in the Alternative Vote AV referendum, Green Party activist Matt Wootton conducts an autopsy into the failures of the Yes! To Fairer Votes campaign.
The noes have it, the noes have it; Matt Wootton, who studies Cognitive Policy with his colleague Rupert Read at the Green Words Workshop, looks at the reasons for defeat
So. We lost. However much we feared this was looming, we were working and hoping up until the last minute that it wouldn’t be so. What is there to say at this point? The awful feeling of Conservative hegemony maintained is depressing enough, without the feeling that progressives, Labour, Liberals, Greens did not do enough to help ourselves.
We didn’t realise soon enough the importance of the referendum on the Alternative Vote, and if we’re going to beat ourselves up about it, as we should do at least for a little while, let’s do it with some analysis.
There are 62 million people in Britain. If just one 30th of those had given one pound the Yes campaign would have had an extra £2 million to spend, right up to their spending limit. How many people in Britain describe themselves as left, Labour, Liberal, Green, or radical? Where were they all?
Say the Labour Party has 200,000 members, and the Liberal Democrats have 60,000 members. If each of those members had given £10 each, that’s more than 2½ million pounds right there. Yet this didn’t happen, even remotely – Labour splits aside. All of the internal party efforts seem to have been lacklustre, barely-funded and voluntary.
By contrast the Tories – who bankrolled to No campaign – lent their phone bank to the NO to AV campaign. And they were raising money even before the bill obtained royal assent, in order to circumvent spending limits.
The Tories aren’t stupid. They had a clear vision from the start how a No vote would benefit them. And they acted like it. It’s almost as if the other parties, most obviously Labour, just didn’t really take seriously that AV was something they had to make happen, not least for their own benefit.
One wonders what proportion of effort was split between the AV campaign and the electoral campaigning that parties had to undertake as usual. One also wonders whether the LibDems, Greens and Labour, having spent most of May 5th splitting each other’s votes, will now have ample time to consider whether they should have taken more time out from politics-as-usual in order to forge a greater joint effort against Conservative minority control, and how they could have communicated that to the public.
The referendum on the Alternative Vote was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to change politics for the better, and to mainstream red, green and liberal politics, and sideline Conservative. But the parties, their hierarchy, their supporters and the British public didn’t treat it like that. The radical left and Labour bickered amongst themselves, to the benefit of only the Tories. And if the communications, advertising and political skills of the official ‘Yes! To Fairer Votes’ campaign represent the pinnacle of those skills in the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties, then it shows how much those parties rely on tribal voting.
I’ve blogged extensively and critically about the Yes campaign at www.greenwordsworkshop.org; I’ve blogged about emotions, values and ‘cognitive policy’ and how the Yes campaign didn’t seem to know how to use any of them. But now is not the day to criticise them further. They’re feeling hurt too, as well they should be, and despite their shortcomings they did their best.
And the last people who should receive any criticism are all of those hard-working, street-pounding, keyboard-thumping individual people who sweated day after day, to make a Yes vote happen. I’ve worked with you. I’ve respected you. I’m grateful to you.
But somehow, if not individually but collectively, we have failed – even though we know that we are in the majority, and the Conservatives and Conservative voters are in the minority. We have failed. And with the tide now having turned against political reform in this country, we’re going to have several years to work out what happened, and what to do about it.
71 Responses to “A progressive majority has surrendered Britain to the conservative minority”
Ed's Talking Balls
Mike,
Wasn’t it more than 2:1 against AV?
The ‘progressives’ took one hell of a hiding. No-one was buying AV because the product was so awful and I’m far from convinced that simply trying harder will successfully sell similar terrible ‘progressive’ ideas to the public.
masterth
“But somehow, if not individually but collectively, we have failed – even though we know that we are in the majority, and the Conservatives and Conservative voters are in the minority.”
I you can’t see what is wrong with this sentence the it is no wonder you lost
Daniel Pitt
A progressive majority has surrendered Britain to the conservative minority: http://bit.ly/ktYxqY #ConDemNation
Red Ryan
What seems to be the problem with FPTP? It’s equal and fair in that everyone gets the same number of votes, 1, and each vote is weighted with an equal value. The fact that the person who wins the election doesn’t have an OVERALL majority shouldn’t be a problem – more people voted for him than any other candidate. AV is ‘a miserable little compromise’ after all, and I can understand why progressives and Left-Wingers who are in favour of electoral reform and generally some form of PR voted against it – the idea of Nick Clegg in future governments. I am personally in favour of FPTP, even over a genuinely proportionately representative system – not because i like ‘stability’ or tradition but because even small parties, with real policies and supporters can win seats under it but lunatic, extremist parties who could never realistically expand their base of support cant, but could under PR.
We must keep the fascists out at all costs
Duncan
On the basis of what canvassing I did, and it was close down our way, the no vote was considerably boosted by ‘don’t knows’; people who started out the referendum saying they would probably vote ‘yes’ but switched to ‘no’ when the NO2AV campaign stepped up with various falsehoods – ‘it violates one man one vote’ (it doesn’t violate voter parity, which is the important norm) ‘it strengthens the BNP’ (no) ‘it hurts minority parties’ (no relative to the greens) ‘it would be expensive’ (nah, you can handcount it easy enough) ‘it’s complicated’ (if the Irish can understand it) – the volume of negativity meant that those voting anyway – it was a LibDem seat which went SNP, both YES2AV parties – opted for a No vote because they thought there was no smoke without fire and the status quo wasn’t that bad. Epic fail on the YES campaigns part, but I think it’s pretty clear to most of us that Will Straw is wrong; at least here, if the Yes campaign has been more active (and we less focused on our own elections) the ‘don’t know’ vote wouldn’t have been as strong.
Anyone who voted NO2AV to get YES2PR, you’re crazy; it’ll now never happen (not for years, anyway) whereas it could have been part of the next coalition deal one or two general elections from now if we’d adopted AV. The alternative vote is half of the PR-STV system (the STV half); I find it difficult to be unsympathetic towards the general public for their ‘ignorance’ if the so-called advocates of electoral reform are this stupid.
P.S. – Surely if ‘cognitive policy’ was a thing, there would be ‘non-cognitive policy’. Have to say the article reads as being a bit ‘non-cognitive’. Having gone into the referendum assuming it was in the bag you seem to be inclined to blame everyone else for it failing, including to the ludicrous point of asserting there was nothing wrong with the YES campaign, whereas the rest of us are happy enough with the idea that we all failed by not gutting the campaign leadership the second it looked to be going off the rails. Two obvious failings; the ‘this is the progressive vote’ message when a lot of right wingers would prefer AV as well (I remember thinking on election night, having seen him give a clear common sense defense of it, that Nigel Farage would have been a better choice to head the YES2AV campaign) and the ‘make your MP work harder message’ which isn’t a great, practical idea when the largest deliver networks in most constituencies are that of the party of the incumbent and most incumbents think they work pretty hard. Better would have been to stress the clear scope for a corruption in a system where you can guarantee re-election so long as a sizable enough minority will vote for you time and again (see Labour in Glasgow).