Retrospection is wisdom indeed. What would any campaign manager give to be able to make decisions knowing what the future was? Nonetheless, it is possible to draw some early lessons from the failure of the Yes to AV campaign.
That there was an overconcentration of resources on the grassroots ‘ground war’ as opposed to the media-led ‘air war’ is probably true. We committed too many of our resources to building a grassroots campaign that could never be big enough. Despite the impressive efforts of our workers and volunteers, and the fact that we raised half again of what we spent on the field operations through small donations, a national vote can never be won from the grassroots up.
The Yes campaign tried to frame the debate as ‘people versus politicians’. The research confirmed that, in the wake of the expenses crisis, the public viewed politicians as self-interested. The accuracy of that belief, or even the morality of seeking to exploit it, can be questioned, but no one ever challenged the premise. It was also the accepted wisdom that politicians of any party leading the call for change (or indeed opposing it) would also be seen as self-serving. Nobody said this was the wrong frame or suggested another.
It is clear to everyone now that the frame did not hold for a variety of reasons. One is that Nick Clegg’s role as ‘father of the referendum’ was impossible to avoid. Another was that those who write or comment about politics have no interest whatsoever in what ordinary people have to say on an issue such as the referendum. So if non-politicians were our messengers, no one was going to hear our message. A reliance on celebrities may bring slightly more media attention, but slightly less credibility. In the end it turned into a familiar political bun fight, crushed into the wrong frame.
Labour Yes began to deploy the message of ‘Kick Cameron, Vote Yes’ in the last two weeks of the campaign and it may be that this should have been the main thrust from the beginning. A Yes win needed Labour voters in a proportion of 2:1. There were several problems with this challenge. First, David Cameron had promised the Liberal Democrats that he would not campaign, and he probably meant it at the time. A reluctance to go negative, combined with Cameron’s lack of a clear association with the No campaign until the closing stages, meant that it would have been difficult to pursue such a strategy until the last two weeks anyway. The other problem was the fact that some Labour ‘big beasts’were so anxious to give an overwhelmingly Conservative campaign a hint of cross-party credibility, dissipating any potential blows that might land on Cameron.
The Yes campaign probably should have put more resources into the Labour element of the campaign. However, until the last two weeks of the campaign trying to get other than a few Labour figures to hold a Yes speech bubble was like playing pass the parcel in a Belfast pub in the 1970s. Difficult as it was, we probably should have tried harder.
I am disappointed by the lack of strategic vision from those in Labour’s ranks who so wholeheartedly defended the status quo. Now Cameron is in an ascendant position, Labour’s position in Scotland is precarious, and boundaries will be redrawn in the Tories’ favour without AV to mitigate. If they have sacrificed their own party interest for principle then they are martyrs to their hearts. If it is for anything else they are not even useful fools.
Cameron,ascendant position ? no ; not rocket but rocket launcher which has to be on more terra firma than wot he is ,this is like way true you get me bruv.
OMG Such utter utter nonsense. You seem to forget that if ‘the press’ had thought it a good thing they would have jumped on it. NO mention of the stupidity of branding your own MP’s as not caring about jobs , not working hard enough or stupidly branding anyone not foolish enough to believe the campaign as Tories? The failure to prove the myth that AV would help some minority parties while at the same time destroy the more objectionable? That the miserable little compromise was just that and something that you would be campaigning against to get what you want at the next referendum you would need? Head in the sand Political Elitism at its worse and such mind numbing ignorance of your failures shows a real contempt for those who didn’t just say no but showed you how thoroughly wrong you were, to make such a judgement.
I voted yes. But I did so feeling that it was not in the interest of my party, the Labour Party, to do so. From the very beginning, all the arguments on a progressive majority were based on polling from before May 2010. Since the inception of the coalition, on the evidence of many council by elections, as well as a lot of polling data, Tory and (remaining) Lib Dem voters have chosen each others’ parties as second preference. Not once did I see any counter to the argument from my No-voting friends that left leaning voters would now vote Labour and that AV therefore had very little to offer the Labour Party at this time. Perhaps AV would have built the mythical progressive majority in the future. You don’t know that. Nobody knows how voting patterns would have changed under AV. So don’t tell me that my friends who voted no did so because they are fools. They did so because no evidence existed that Labour would have benefited from the change. In the meantime, they had to listen week on week to Liberal Democrats blaming Labour for everything, including their own political failures. Why should they vote for a new system that would demonstrably reward these hostile, manipulative liars? I voted for AV because I thought it would be a fairer system, not because it was in my party interest. Since the vote, half the Yes campaigners have blamed the voters for being stupid, and particularly Labour voters for being so stupid they couldn’t see how inherently superior the system was. It wasn’t. I voted yes, but after reading this and other articles in a similar vein I’m bloody pleased that everyone else voted no.
I criticised the framing and the narrative. I tried to email the people who I was getting ‘yes’ campaign messages from (with no reply) and I tried talking directly to some ERS people. There was no positive vision. Parliament should look like a mirror held up to Britain. It doesn’t. Only 20% of MPs are women. There are only a couple of nurses in parliament, but over 50 former bankers and financial sector professionals. Ethnic minorities are under-represented. Here was the basis for a positive narrative that would switch on peoples identities and give them a personal link into the yes campaign. It a narrative that allows lots of of scope for imaginative ideas for campaign advertising, films and literature – much better than the atrocious ideas of the advertising company on which tens of thousands were squandered. On top of this, the narrative needed its villain, which as Willie now understands is Cameron. The people heading this campaign clearly did not have the first idea about narrative and messaging.
Andy Farrell is so right ‘a miserable little compromise’ and those of us on the left who voted ‘NO’ did so because we were not prepared to be insulted by it. As for the Labour Party support –ridiculous! Commission an report which says that AV by itself is the worst option and then support it!! What it did show was the weakness of the LibDems in the coalition that they had had to be satified with this miserable little compromise.
I distributed YES leaflets and spoke to people. I found that most I spoike to found the YES message unclear and confusing, ie the ‘make MPs work harder’ message. It would have been better to focus on a message which explained why voting using AV would have been fairer and would have meant MPs had to elected by more than 50% of the electorate. A simpler message based on the voting system would have helped.
The Conservative Party are the political party supreme. They are often portrayed as dimwitted toffs.They are not, indeed when the chips are down, they prove themselves to be the most advanced political thinkers; based on their class interests. Once it was shown that there was any danger of a YES victory, their strongest card was played: Cameron. To see Labour Lords and MPs, lining up with Tories and under-mining their party leader, was galling. Their lack of understanding that the ‘two-party system’ is finished and that the trend for the past sixty years has been in the opposite direction, politically, is sad. To hear David Blunkett MP say that the cost of AV would be £250 million was “made up” by the NO campaign, just goes to show the roots of pragmatism and opportunism at the heart of right-wing Labour.Still there are over 6 million very dissatisfied people out here who want to see a better electoral system. We won’t be going away.
I was pleased that the Labour Yes campaign had supporters from across our broad church, but disappointed that the main cross-party Yes campaign did not point out a fact of AV – it would have been, as David Davis put it “an anti-Tory voting system”. On election day, I was helping to get out the vote in a marginal ward when I found a leaflet the Tories were putting out. It had a big picture of Cameron and the instruction to vote no to av. The instruction to vote for the candidates on the other side wasn’t much help, as Labour turned the ward red – but the prominence given to the No vote is telling.
oh dear JP the country is not looking for a ‘political party supreme’ that knows how to play its ‘chips’ . People’s lives ,all the peoples lives ,are not simply to be used for the Tory get rich quick dream. It is humanity that is to be advanced , evil-wits not dim-wits say otherwise. No such thing as evil ?well it is the lack of goodness. This Tory government is a blip that’s all ,most people can see that now,its desperation to consolidate power for all time is not as well concealed as they hope and to imagine ‘advanced political thinking can forecast world events as they stand today is frankly childish.
While there is a need for electoral reform, both Yes and No campaigns become to personalised to be objectively comfortable. If any reform is to succeed it needs to give the voters a proper democratic choice. These particular reform proposals were to politically motivated. Both campaigns in order to put their point across failed to listen to the voters concerns. While the concept of reform was right the timing for referendum was not.