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Interview: Why Did Yes2AV Fail So Badly?

In autopsy on the failed Alternative Vote referendum Ben Austwick interviews Yes2AV regional co-ordinator Arnie Craven.

By Ben Austwick

9 Jul 2011, 20:01

In May 2011 the United Kingdom held a referendum on whether to adopt the Alternative Vote method of electing MPs at future general elections. The result was a resounding ‘no’. Here I push the Leeds Yes2AV Regional Co-Ordinator, Arnie Craven to reveal why he thinks it failed and who was responsible.

BA: Without sounding too blunt, at what point did you realise the Yes2AV campaign was doomed to failure?

AC: Well I’m an eternal optimist so I remember about two weeks before the referendum a poll came out which showed we had cut the gap from 20 points behind to 8 or 9 and this really clouded my vision right up until polling day. So I can’t pretend to have been a prophet who was saying in Jan/Feb that this was going to shit. But what I can tell you is that in Jan/Feb onwards I was getting very frustrated with the central campaign’s inability to foresee we were appealing only to the Liberal left. The people I worked with in Yorkshire were tremendous and I had volunteers giving 40 hour weeks with no recompense other than a few slices of pizza and for that I am eternally grateful.

The whole campaign was very frustrating because, in my opinion, we needed to win over the political spectrum as a whole – what I mean by this is the authoritarian left and the right, not just the liberal left. The best way to illustrate this is that in Barnsley we lost around 25-75, in what is a very safe Labour seat. In the by-election this was a Lab/UKIP seat and both of those parties were behind AV, but we lost terribly. We needed the authoritarian left and the right on board but we were unable to secure that. Another thing that annoyed me was the total ignorance to anyone to right left of...Tim Farron? It was beyond belief – you’d say ‘we’re a cross-party campaign’ and try to explain to someone that this is not a Lib Dem/Labour thing and I’d see Caroline Lucas and Ed Miliband on TV talking about a ‘progressive majority shutting the right out of power forever’.

There is nothing ‘progressive’ about the majority of people in this country.

Are you sad that Nigel Farage wasn’t more involved in the campaign?

Yes I was sad about this - everyone in Yorkshire was very upset and recognised that to have any chance of winning you needed to appeal to the right. I know some Conservatives will disagree with me here but Nigel Farage is a damn sight more appealing to Conservative voters than some members of the Tory government, and he could have delivered some of the right, if we had given him a chance to.

Like?

I bet that a lot of Tory members would prefer Nigel Farage to say Theresa May and we missed an opportunity there. Some UKIP leaning voters will always vote Tory as they think UKIP’s a wasted vote and will let Labour in but this was a free hit for them, and we didn’t exploit it. This was a widely held opinion in the campaign, but some people at central HQ in London were sitting around saying ‘well here voters go for the Lib Dems or even the Green Party so why don’t we appeal to them?’ The Green Party are on 2% in the polls and in 2009 UKIP got nearly 3 million votes. There’s a world of difference between the two.

Was the campaign let down by its grassroots strategy?

There were a few things. It’s my opinion, and I’m sure that many reading this will disagree, but phone canvassing only works in very limited circumstances. A few of the Yes people had been involved in Ed Miliband’s leadership campaign and they made a big use of phone canvassing - I can fully get that. They were phoning up Lab members and saying “you’re a Labour member; you’re voting in the leadership election, will you vote for Ed Miliband?” And that was fine. With this, however, we were phoning random people up who had no interest at all in politics and asking them “What are your views on political reform, in particular preferential voting systems?” You’d get “eh, what, are you trying to sell me Sky?” and we encountered this a lot. If you could get people to listen to you then they would support you but there were two things; Firstly, it’s difficult to get someone to listen to you and secondly if you convince them in January that AV is a good thing, when May arrives they’ve totally forgotten about a 5 minute phone call they had four months ago. P

I’ve heard there were problems with the canvassing software?

Yes2AV used some software from an American company. In November 2010 we had a training conference call to learn how to use this software. We followed the instructions given & logged in but no phone numbers came up. We were told that the software was down and would be back up in a couple of days. A couple of days passed and it still wasn’t working. Another phone call - definitely working by the start of January we were told. By Christmas we’d made about 3000 calls but it was all off an Excel sheet. Not the best way to work! January came and things appeared to be working. However the software failed to save any of the hundreds of calls we made. Hundreds of call records were wasted. Weeks came and went and by February they still couldn’t provide a bit of software that produced a phone number, script and let you update a database. It’s not difficult, it should have been a pretty simple ask for a software firm.

Finally in February we were told to scrap the whole software – a decision made far too late in my opinion. We were then told we’d be undertaking some doorstep canvassing - but guess which software we were going to use? After months of it failing, someone, and I’d love to know who, decided to use the same software company for doorstep canvassing. To the best of my knowledge that never did work.

I got a parcel in March and do you know what was in it? Ten of those rubber rings you throw for dogs to retrieve and a piece of string. A little bit of paper with it said ‘this is your high visibility pack and with this you’ll get loads of press attention!’ Do you know what they wanted us to do? Someone, and once again I’d love to know who, thought the best way to gain press attention was to use the slogan ‘make your votes count’ and to articulate this they wanted us to use the rubber rings and string to create a giant abacus, go and stand outside Leeds University and say “look – make your vote COUNT!” A high school paper wouldn’t give that coverage. The stuff we were sent was unbelievable.

What else did you receive?

Two days before the election I received a box with 50 sky lanterns that said ‘Yes2AV’ on them. Why would we need those? What did they want us to do, let them off in the dense urban area that we were campaigning in & firebomb a house? Although at least that would have resulted in a bit of media attention!

Finally, what would you have done differently if you had led the Yes2AV campaign?

On the first day of the campaign I would have gone to see Ed Miliband. I believe that one reason we lost was his leadership failure. He, as a newly elected leader, couldn’t even bring his party on board to campaign for a policy that was in their own manifesto.

Secondly, for every left-winger we had representing AV, I would have had a right-winger.

Thirdly, I’d have carried a big stick around and if I ever heard the world “progressive majority” I would have picked the stick up and beaten them with it.

Fourthly, I’d recognise that the Green Party are a fringe party that not many people like or vote for and stop giving Caroline “I’m not a communist, honestly!” Lucas any airtime

Finally, you can’t treat people like idiots and tell them that voting yes is what’s good for them, that it’s shiny and new, and throw around innuendo about how MPs don’t like it so it must be good.  We needed actually explain to them what it’s about.