by Guest

contribution by Andy May

The first ever national UK referendum on our voting system was always going to be a difficult affair. But the size of the loss cannot just be attributed to the political environment we were in. Those who ran the Yes campaign must take a long hard look at themselves.

From the very start the self interest of the major funders and the senior management’s lack of creativity, lack of experience and inability to listen to staff and activists’ concerns had a very negative impact on the chances of success. These are just some of the contributing factors.



Staffing: We lacked staff with experience in basic political campaigning. Although some certainly stepped up to the plate and did some outstanding work – this cost us.

The most experienced people in the campaign were often the regional organisers – who had up to 20-30 years experience from Labour or the Lib Dems in some cases. At HQ there were just a couple of people who had any deeper experience than running a constituency campaign – yet had hugely important roles with national influence.

Phone Banks: The phone bank strategy yielded somewhere in the region of 500,000 contacts when 3 million had been originally projected. I do not have the overall complete cost of this but know it was somewhere over £600,000 or £1.20 a contact.

This turned out much worse than quotes from a commercial company. The reasons for this were partially technology failure, partially a lack of willingness of activists to do high volumes of calling and also a very unrealistic target being set right at the start in terms of the numbers of calls that could physically be made.

Public awareness levels about AV and the referendum were very low so many of the early contacts made were not Yes or Nos but ‘Don’t Knows’ which were of little use to follow up ‘Get out the Vote’ calls.

Campaign literature: Until sometime in March 2011 the central campaign never had a coherent literature plan for political parties. Not one single piece of literature, bar the polling day leaflet, was produced on time. The first A4 leaflet took five weeks to produce (unheard of in political circles) after escalating complaints from activists and regional and central staff.

Most of the time regional staff did not get an opportunity to even look at the material they were supposed to be trying to sell in to local political parties to delivery before it was already printed. This massively reduced the goodwill of local constituency parties.

Media and communications: At a national level we had a very experienced head of communications who had extensive links into the lobby and some very useful relationships with newspapers in England and Scotland. However our media was too reactive.

Every proactive idea came too late, allowing the no campaign to tar us as the dodgy donor campaign, or the campaign that would allow BNP supporters more votes. Either we should have got down and dirty with them or totally ignored them and played the moral high ground. Yet we fell between both positions and went into reactive mode, which simply played into their hands.

At a regional level our regional staff never received even the most basic of media support. For instance they would often receive second hand the national press releases hours after the useful period had passed.

For nearly the whole campaign they never received template press releases, any sort of communications grid, and only really received proper support on regional media work in the final two weeks.

Advertising: Not one of the creative concepts designed ever saw the light of day despite costing the campaign tens of thousands of pounds. There has already been a report in the Guardian about the giant pin striped bottom, but there were half a dozen more where that came from.

Fundraising: A number of consultancy arrangements were made on the campaign at considerable cost to the war chest. This meant things like the Freepost and above the line advertising suffered badly from lack of funds.

The Freepost was only sent to about 11 million households due to lack of money – yet we never had a professional fundraiser from the start working to raise more money.

Polling: A six figure sum was spent on polling and the original message testing back in August to conduct a series of polls and focus groups. This was a huge spend and no further focus grouping was conducted until well into the short campaign when last minute focus groups were pulled together.

This found that one of the key messages that the campaign had run with for months ‘a small change that makes a big difference’ didn’t even resonate particularly well with the public.

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Mistakes are always made, strategies are always changed and referendum campaigns are rare so things are likely to go wrong. It’s not the things going wrong that we activists who worked so hard should be angry about. It’s that a chorus of voices in the campaign at various levels were saying that things were not working but were repeatedly ignored.

And yet, the ground campaign we managed to build up the closest equivalent ever seen to a political party machine, created by a non-party campaign. And we did this in less than nine months. This was only possible through a superb network of regional staff, from all parties and non-aligned backgrounds who bonded and worked together across party lines.

All those organisations fighting for constitutional reform – though some of the problems and the wider environment were out of your hands, telling people we would have lost anyway is not good enough. Reform yourselves first – then reform the voting system.

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Andy May was National Manager of the Regional Staff for the Yes Campaign and formerly National Organiser of Take Back Parliament.

This is an edited-down version of a longer report he has written.