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”
LondonStatto
Your conclusion is that a campaign which wrote off 40%+ of the electorate as “against” would have done even better if it had focussed on the 60%-minus better?
Ridiculous. No wonder you lost, and deservedly so. You can’t win a referendum by ignoring the right.
Eddie Clarke
“Progressive” is such a pointless, distracting tag that it is no wonder that it seems immediately to sound the death knell for any political project – though it keeps the bloggers happy. I do hope Mr Milliband will divorce himself absolutely from this ridiculous concept and try to build a sellable story based on some real constituency. How about “ordinary people” = people with no privileged access to the levers of political or economic power? But dump – dump! – the progressives (which, incidentally, used to be the banner under which Tories fought local elections in Scotland. Where are they now?)
David Herdson
This analysis is so flawed on so many levels.
– There is no ‘progressive majority’. It is a delusion brought about by adding the votes of all the parties who are not those you really dislike. But those parties’ leaderships are not representative of all their voters. Check out C2/D/E attitudes towards the death penalty, for example.
– Winning a referendum means winning 50% of the vote (appropriately enough for AV). How was this ever going to be achieved when anyone to the right of Vince Cable was excluded from the party? Compare and contrast with Cameron working with Reid, Beckett etc.
– Large parts of Labour is perfectly happy with FPTP because it delivers them majorities from time to time. Even to the extent that there is a ‘progressive alliance’, it is not the same as pro-AV.
– The Lib Dems are not a centre-left party. They are a centre party spanning centre-left and centre-right. That is why they are able to be in coalition with the Conservatives – there is a broad agreement on large sections of policy, especially around freedoms.
– The Yes campaign too often sounded like it didn’t believe in its case; that it would rather have been campaigning for PR. In so doing, it reinforced the ‘miserable little compromise’ message from No.
– AV, even if implemented, would not prevent a future Conservative government. The 1983 and 1987 elections would have produced even larger Tory wins under AV, and a Con-led government would have still been the most practicable result in 2010.
Mr Creek
RT @leftfootfwd: A progressive majority has surrendered Britain to the conservative minority: http://bit.ly/ktYxqY writes @MattWootton
Hughes.
I think you need to study your own “cognitive policy”. The result shatters the delusion that every vote that isn’t cast for a tory is a de-facto “anti-tory” vote.
If there were a majority interest in replacing the Government with “progressive” politics then Yes may still have lost but not by the huge scale that it did. The ever-present sub-text of the desire for 50% approval was entrenching of narrow 2-party partisanship AV deceitfully claimed to eliminate. A condescending ignorance of the genuine plurality of feeling that our pluralistic political system allows, born of tribal anti-tory sentiment.
Electoral reform has been damaged by the Lib-Dems accepting this 3rd rate system that benefits 2nd rate candidates, when this country already has regional election systems that are vastly more proportional, and much fairer than the abomination we were offered.
The worst damage is from the “once in a generation chance” narrative; a defeatists, and self-defeating strategy that sounded half-way between a sideshow Huckster and a suicidal ex-girlfriend’s emotional blackmail.
This harmful narrative was entirely generated by the Yes side, peddling what they know is a poor system with cheap and artificial ultimatums that have predictably become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
At least I live in Wales, where the Additional Member System delivers the best of both worlds: a local representative, and a nationally proportional Government. The chances of achieving that for the UK as a whole suffered not because people rejected replacing a bad system with another bad system, but because they weren’t offered anything worth having.