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.
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71 Responses to “A progressive majority has surrendered Britain to the conservative minority”
13eastie
“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.”
Come again?
Wasn’t this supposed to be about “fairer votes”?
Didn’t the YES campaign drone on and on about making people feel their votes would count?
No mention of any of this in your article.
The only regret you express appears to be that those of a different political persuasion to you might continue to be represented.
If AV was designed to serve the purpose to which you seem to have assigned it, it should be a cause of celebration to ALL voters that it is now dead in the water.
Congratulations: you’ve exposed yourself as the charlatan you are.
Anon
Or Emily, you might find that certainly in the cases of London and Glasgow, the yes vote has more to do with inner city deprivation. No one will know until the voters are assessed. Whether the progressive side is a majority or minority, sticking with the antiquated FPTP system is stagnant, if not regressive. Change is hard to swallow but as society changes its systems have to change with it.
Dave Citizen
Emily – Individuals vote not places. More individuals voted yes in some cosmopolitan areas where, in my experience, the melting pot of ideas and debate is often at its most challenging. I voted Yes in my sleepy rural market town for what it was worth.
If Britain is to find its way in the 21st century – a way that favours the majority population that is – more people are going to have to move out of the small c conservative comfort zone that is increasingly eroding our chances and step up to the plate of genuine change. Outdated political, economic and aristocrat friendly institutions make sense for a smaller and smaller minority every year. Their defence in narrow vested interests is literally destroying prospects for a prosperous majority future.
Anon
Also, I agree with 13eastie, this has never been for me about party politics, the reform was simply a means to have a fairer representation of ALL political views and social interests in parliament, whatever your beliefs & leanings, now or in the future. I despise that this referendum has become a political football and absorbed in self interest- on the left as well as right. There must be a equally weighted space for EVERYONE. PR all the way.
emily
Dave, there are plenty of other “cosmopolitan” places outside London, you know. Why did they not vote the same way? People vote & not places? Yes, they do, but people in places often vote in similar ways, which is why there are few Tories in northern cities and few Labour voters in, say, Northumberland or the South West. Are you really saying the blatant pattern in ‘yes’ voting areas is mere coincidence?
Equally, Anon, I live in a “deprived” inner city district. There are plenty of those outside London & none of those have voted yes either. Unless you count the oh so deprived city of Cambridge, that is. Is it really convincing to suggest that the 20% of the electorate in Islington or the 18% in Lambeth who actually voted for AV were the most impoverished residents of those boroughs clamouring for electoral reform? Probably not.