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”
Anon
er……. obviously what I meant was “a No2AV vote does not equal yes2FPTP, for many a NO2AV was a yes2PR…..” Either way, the shocking defeat of yes cannot be explained away by this, but I would think that the amount of money that funded each campaign, the fact it coincided with local elections, the bitterness towards Libdems DOES count for something. Lets not forget that if this vote had happened 3 weeks ago, the outcome could well have been a yes vote. People are incredibly fickle and CAN be swayed easily by grandiose claims/lies and increased visibility, advertising, etc. I don;t think the result proves much other than one campaign was better than the other – even if some of that campaign was based on fabrication.
emily
Um… Matt Wooton – I hope you aren’t referring to me there?
If you are, why? Because I disagree? If so, I think that’s a good indication of why the “yes” campaign lost. Too many voters were simply dismissed instead of engaged with.
Anon 8/15: Agree with a lot of that, though still not the London point: I don’t think we can get away with saying that people outside certain London boroughs “understood” AV any less; that’s what I mean about being careful we don’t patronise people. But I absolutely agree that a vote against AV wasn’t necessarily a vote for FPTP: mine certainly wasn’t.
The problem with the yes campaign (for me) was that it didn’t really make its case: it relied on appealing to a notional “progressive” political majority instead of promoting AV as the best (impossible since it isn’t?) or at least a better system in a reasonably objective manner. It should have approached all voters left, right and centre. It should have tried to persuade its opponents instead of dismissing them as “conservative,”tribal” or “Tories”. It should have avoided the “all the cool kids” approach, trotting out Stephen Fry & Eddie Izzard or whoever. It should have disowned that nonsensical coffee/beer diagram. & most of all, its left supporters should have not tried to link it to opposition to the cuts, when the Lib Dems who were the referendum’s instigators were enabling the Tory government to make them.
But even then AV still wouldn’t be a very good system.
Christopher Queen
God, once again we get what we didn’t vote for.
I’ll leave you to dwell on the irony of that.
As a Scot, I’m worried about the collapse of Labour in a traditionally socialst country – are we just not trying hard enough?
jt
A progressive majority has surrendered Britain to the conservative minority: The awful feeling of Conservative h… http://bit.ly/iKHOPm
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Hey @mattwootton – they're tearing you a new one for your hypocrisy and sour grapes at @leftfootfwd http://bit.ly/ktYxqY #No2AV #Yes2AV