Take a look at the official website for the Yes to AV Campaign: http://www.yestofairervotes.org/ it has some negative and fairly strident (but ultimately unprovable) comment about how awful MPs are. Then asks us to care about how they are elected. This website absolutely takes for granted that every and any person who lands on the website is ready to man the barricades for AV. There is absolutely nothing there for anyone interested but undecided on the issue. no arguments, no persuasion, no gradual drawing in. There is in the bottom left a very small “about” link. This takes you to a page of only 105 words. These words again are all about the campaign (who they are, who they do and don’t represent),  not the issue.

In order to get any further with the website, you have to sign up to get involved. For you, dear reader, I submitted my details in order to see what lay beyond that. First there was a page where – once you had signed up – you are asked to submit details of at least one friend. You cannot get to the next part of the website without giving another email address to them. Luckily I have two email addresses and enough curiosity to want to see it through to the bitter end. However I suspect that the Venn diagram for people interested in electoral reform and people interested in data privacy has a pretty big cross-over. So not being able (as far as I can tell) to access any information without both signing up yourself and giving the details of another is insanity.

The final page is about what you are willing to do for the campaign. It’s only after agreeing to take some form of action that you can access a screen that looks like it might be helpful and have the kind of information that someone interested in the issue might find useful. This page has the landing text “Thank you for growing our movement.  We will be in touch soon to let you know how you can get involved in the campaign. But in the meantime can you use the buttons below to spread the word via Facebook and Twitter.” It also has links to a blog and to “why vote yes”. The blog has two posts in Lorem Ipsum and the why vote yes page cannot be found. So in other words – nowhere on that site – to my untrained eye – was a simply list of arguments as to why I should vote yes to AV. It just feels like a website written by people who feel the argument has already been won, and who didn’t bother to consult with anyone who was unsure on what might be needed to convince them. I am sure the answer to this will be that the campaign website is still being constructed. But the problem is, the campaign was launched on September 11th and it’s now October 21st. The Campaign shouldn’t have been launched without fully functioning website and for the website to remain so inaccessible and uninformative over a month on is inexcusable.

This matches closely my experience of talking to campaigners – particularly those who are Lib Dems – about this. They have cared about  this issue for so long now that they simply don’t realise that most of the country doesn’t know very much about it and even fewer care. A campaigner said to me yesterday that he thought there was “simply no moral case” for voting any other way.

Now there is nothing wrong in believing that passionately in change. But to deny that the other side has a case is to deny yourself the ability to answer that case. To further deny that you might have a party political problem in spending most of your time slagging off Labour members while expecting them to then join you in fighting for a measure even the Lib Dem’s own leader described as “a miserable little compromise” is naive.

The people running the pro-AV campaign need to do some focus grouping very, very quickly. it may already be too late. This interesting article on Labour List says that to succeed a referendum should start with a 2:1 lead in the polls. A YouGov/Sun poll in early October already has the vote at 40% FPTP, 35% AV and 18% undecided.

Now have a look at the current (temporary) website for the other side: http://no2av.org/ It has easily accessible information and arguments. The stories are updated every few days. There is even a section on what AV is. It’s not patronising, but it does present the arguments clearly and openly accepts that they won’t be familiar to everyone. The website has many, many times the information that the pro-AV website has -  and it’s just temporary.

I understand that the different sides probably have very, very different funding levels. But if half the energy and passion I have seen from pro-AV campaigners had been put into devising their principle portal into actually informing the populous (as a pro-democracy campaign really ought to do) they would at least have some blog posts up and a decent basic FAQs on the positive argument for AV.

As it stands, I don’t see the commitment to democratic discussion and argument making from the pro-AV lobby that will be essential if this referendum is to have any legs at all. And that in itself is the biggest insult to democracy I can think of. It may be that the campaign is not being run as passionately as it could be because the proponents themselves believe it’s a compromise measure. But if we in the UK are going to spend £90 million on a referendum, it ill behoves us all to do so halfheartedly.

As things stand, if the yes campaign doesn’t step up, I simply cannot see how a yes vote is going to be won.

Tags: av, first past the post, referendum

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 21st, 2010 at 17:32 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.