19 Comments

• Chris Keating 17th May '11 - 12:37pm

  Quite. Double ouch.

  I think it’s very helpful that Andy has been so frank. It was evident from the outside that the campaign was a bit of a disaster area; lessons need to be learned.

  I think there will be another serious look at the voting system within the next 10 years. The fundamental problem is that FPTP is only suitable for a two-party state and the 2011 election results show more than ever that the UK isn’t a two-party state, so the issue isn’t going away.

  But if the forces in favour of reform are as disorganised as they were in the referendum we’ve just had, we’re never going to get anywhere.

• Adam Bell 17th May '11 - 1:45pm

  I’d like to praise Andy’s frankness, too. I wonder, would LDV be able to invite John Sharkey to give a response?

• Duncan 17th May '11 - 1:59pm

  Chris Keating – ‘The fundamental problem is that FPTP is only suitable for a two-party state and the 2011 election results show more than ever that the UK isn’t a two-party state, so the issue isn’t going away.’

  How would you explain that to someone with a 2/3/4 way hung Council elected by FPTP?

• Rob 17th May '11 - 2:06pm

  A Lib Dem organisers view of the AV campaign – http://robspoliticsblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/av-campaign-shambles.html

• George W. Potter 17th May '11 - 2:06pm

  Duncan, the problem with council elections is that they are very different. I don’t think that we should ever underestimate the effect of multi-member wards. They alone allow people from different parties to represent the same group of people according to the support they have – as opposed to parliamentary elections where the winner takes all and everyone else is ignored.

• Chris Jenkinson 17th May '11 - 2:26pm

  None of these post-mortems of the Yes campaign have led me to believe that it was not possible to win this referendum.

• Duncan (Another) 17th May '11 - 2:41pm

  Other Duncan, what I can tell you is that the people served by that council get shafted in Westminster elections. Sure, it might happen to be the case that each council district by some miracle has in it people whose political views split perfectly along binary lines such that an electoral system which requires binary opposition doesn’t disenfranchise anyone (though it seems unlikely) but such a council as you describe, if people vote for the party’s representative who matches their councillor would see an MP elected by 4/9ths of the constituents and possibly loathed by the remaining 5/9ths.

  @Mark – wouldn’t it be possible to publish these things in a medium which didn’t want to spy on me via Facebook?

• Chris Keating 17th May '11 - 3:25pm

  Duncan – well currently we have a 3-way hung parliament elected by FPTP so I’m not sure there is much to explain.

  It is not that FPTP never produces anything apart from a majority government, it’s that the further you move away from 2 parties the more bizarre the results it produces.

  For instance under FPTP the Eurovision Song Contest was won by Bosnia-Herzegovina with 5 of the 43 votes cast 😉

• Steve Way 17th May '11 - 3:55pm

  Sorry I think this must be incorrect. Previous threads on this site have decided it was all Milliband and Labour’s fault. !!!!!

• Tony Dawson 17th May '11 - 5:15pm

  Steve, it is all Ed Milliband and Labour’s fault that the ‘YES’ campaign had anything to do which required the operation of brain cells. if Ed&co had ‘played their full part’ early enough rather than coming in at the fag-end then the theory was that the combined ‘go with the flow’ of Labour and Lib Dem official support would have had these measures ‘nodded through’ by the voters. That was why there was deemed to be no need to bother with trying to explain what was wrong with the present system or how this new system was better.

• Tony Dawson 17th May '11 - 5:17pm

  “under FPTP the Eurovision Song Contest was won by Bosnia-Herzegovina with 5 of the 43 votes cast ”

  Perhaps the YES campaign can be drafted in to explain to the world how and when Israel and Azerbaijan came into Europe’?

• Fiona 17th May '11 - 6:06pm

  I think it is unwise to think that voters didn’t understand the issue. I think they certainly did understand, and that the yes campaign was on a hiding to nothing the minute the Lib Dems signed up with the Tories.

  They understood that AV wasn’t a small change that made a big difference, but a big change that in reality made a small difference. That’s because many of them voted Lib Dem at the last general election to keep the Tories out, but they’ve ended up with a Tory government, and won’t be making that mistake again.

  So they knew that AV was more appropriate if you have three parties, but realised that in fact there are only two – Tories, Labour, plus a collection of outsiders, calling themselves Lib Dems, willing to fall in with whatever party will throw them scraps from the cabinet table.

  If people were impressed with the Lib Dems, and intended to vote for them again, they might have had a reason to vote yes.

  Sad but true.

• edmaxfield 17th May '11 - 7:52pm

  Chris (Keating), mate, I’m willing to stake a tenner that electoral reform wont get looked at again in the next ten years. I suspect even people talking about it being ‘over for a generation’ are being optimistic. Parliament is, of course, a nine-way split (not a 3 way split) at the moment and has been increasingly fractured since the mid 70s. And (bizarre tho it may seem) people are willing to consider using different voting systems for Eurovision and for choosing their government… 😉

  Thanks for sharing this – it confirms many of the weaknesses that were apparent from outside.

• Mark Pack 17th May '11 - 8:13pm

  Duncan (Another): I don’t quite follow what you mean by your question? Scribd offers users the options to integrate with Facebook, e.g. by sharing what they are reading with their friends on Facebook, but it’s all based on opt-in and in line with good privacy standards as far as I can see (and in my experience), so what is it specifically that you’re referring to?

• madmacs 18th May '11 - 1:42am

  It was obvious from the outside that both yes and no campaigns were s**t but in different ways. No was effective nasty and s**t, Yes was ineffective and s**t in the other way. If I had been involved the key messgae would have been vote positively for who you are for, not for who you are against. In my area the Tories delivered three leaflets slagging off Nick Clegg for VAT increases etc. We only had ten thousand fairly poor leaflets to deliver for Yes and put articles in our leaflets which went to some wards. I agree the telephone canvassing was a waste of effort. We needed to explain to people what it was about.

  The scourge of tactical voting will now continue long into the future.

  I believe we can forget about electoral reform for way more than ten years. Sadly this rotten system will last for mnay more years.

• Matthew Huntbach 18th May '11 - 10:45am

  Fiona, people may have voted LibDem to keep the Tories out, but the reality is that not enough of them did so. The Tories still won the election “first past the post” by having the most MPs elected. There were not even enough Labour MPs to give a Labour-LibDem coalition a majority.

  So your argument is silly because it fails to recognise democracy – we who hate the Tories did not get what we wanted because a lot of people like the Tories and voted for them. Those places where the line could legitimately be used “Vote LibDem to keep the Tories out” are those places which otherwise would have returned Tory MPs. If there had been no LibDem standing in those places, the Tory would have won anyway. In many of those places the Tory did still win. Had AV been in place, more of them would have elected LibDem MPs, so we would have had more LibDem MPs and fewer Tory MPs. However, the people have just voted to reject AV. Therefore, the people have voted for the system which so distorted representation in favour of the Tories last year and so led to the current government.

  Your line is therefore ridiculous. You are saying people voted for a system whose stated benefit was that it distorts representation to strengthen the biggest party and weaken the third party because they were unhappy with a government where the biggest party was over-strong in it and the third-party too weak. Does that makes sense? Fiona, can you tell me how it makes sense? Because it certainly makes no sense to me. You seem to be saying people voted for the very thing they were against because they were against it.

• Sean Blake 18th May '11 - 11:25am

  Adam Bell asks whether LDV would be able to ask John Sharkey to give a response to Andy May’s article.
  I hope we shall be informed if Lord Sharkey (yes, he was being ennobled at the very time his enthronement as chairman of the Yes to Fairer Votes campaign was being announced to such acclaim here on the LDV site!) is asked and also informed should he decline the offer.
  The defensive response of one of the ‘Yes’ team to calls for an independent enquiry by Anthony Barnett into just about everything including the use/misuse of funds shines a light on the mindset on some of those involved in this truly dreadful campaign. http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/anthony-barnett/av-debacle-waste-of-nearly-%C2%A32m-and-rowntree-reform-trust

• Matthew Harris 18th May '11 - 4:22pm

  Thing is, most of the public know little and care less about groups like Unlock Democracy and Take Back Parliament. They are not mass movements and they have little to do with the mainstream of public opinion in this country. That was part of the problem with the Yes Campaign. All those Independent readers and celebrities prancing around in purple T-shirts as if running a campaign for election to the executive committee of a student union…It was awful.

• Sean Blake 18th May '11 - 5:45pm

  @Matthew Harris
  How right you are about the colour purple….and the student whom Andy May originally appointed to head our group last summer, the one who ceased to appear after four meetings – during which she remained studiedly detached from those who didn’t know the supposed significance of the colour chosen by the suffragette movement to the campaign for electoral reform. And then there was a kind of purple poster boy with a loudhailer who seemed to be acting as Take Back Parliament’s online spokesman before we suddenly morphed into Yes to Fairer Votes. A 20% poll lead. Ah, happy days…..but now fast forward to April in Trafalgar Square, with 60-70 purple ‘Yes’ campaigners, calling themselves a ‘”flash mob”, playing straight into the hands of the tabloids who duly oblige. As Anthony Barnett – in a reply to a member of Unlock Democracy – says of Andy May’s report:: “there isn’t a sense in his reflection of the need to make a radical shift, or rather he argues for one but in the manner of the past.” Now what colour are those spectacles we should be taking off?