“So let me get this straight,” I interrupted. “AV makes for better MPs, because they can make fewer people pissed off?”
“Sort of,” explained the weary local activist. “There are so many safe seats under the current system that MPs can stroll through a career without really having to care about constituents’ concerns. If you need to get 50% of the vote, you have to listen more.” His patience was clearly wearing thin. When you have to spell out the cause to fellow canvassers as well as constituents, you know you’ve got a hard sell on your hands.
Dragged along by a friend of superior civic virtue, I joined up with the ‘Yes! To Fairer Votes’ campaign at Essex Road station on a glorious early-summer evening. We were greeted by a small company of enthusiastic political junkies loaded up with purple bumf, who immediately tested our best lines on AV reform. My friend responded to this grilling with all the enthusiasm of a recent convert, but my own lack of qualifications for the job at hand were soon exposed. “I haven’t really made up my mind on it yet,” I sheepishly confessed. We all agreed it was best if I took a step back for the first few houses.
A seasoned canvasser took me under his wing as we veered onto the side streets of Islington. The trick, he told me, was to steer clear of the wonkish stuff. “The thing with this referendum is that it gets a bit technical; you have to simplify things.” I soon found out what he meant. “DO YOU WANT POLITICIANS TO WORK HARDER?!" he bellowed down the first responsive intercom. Maybe this is the kind of politics that everyone can understand and care about after all.
Or maybe not. Since AV is not the first thing on everyone’s minds this spring, knocking on strangers’ doors armed with purple stickers and a confusing concept feels at once terrifying and intrusive. As my fellow freshman campaigners discovered, both emotions were fully justified. One was invited into a toothless gentleman’s front room, pungent with the fumes of crack cocaine, only to be lectured on the potential merits of a totalitarian Christian government. Another was forced to wrap up his discussion with a semi-robed ‘No’ voter, just out of the shower, with the classic last-ditch phrase: “Are you sure there’s nothing I can do to change your mind?”
Personally, I decided to stick to a rehearsed, unadventurous spiel. My first target neighboured a house with a ‘Yes to AV!’ sticker emblazoned on its front door. Low hanging fruit, I thought. But having mumbled my way through some semi-formed arguments about 50 per cent, pluralism and Papua New Guinea (they have AV in the big PNG, you know), I found my quarry annoyingly unmoved. Instead of jumping on the AV bandwagon, he jabbed his finger towards his reformist neighbours: “I don’t care how many votes I get,” he screamed, “as long as those idiots don’t get in power!”
If only the rest of his street were as passionate. My timid opening gambit of “Have you heard about the referendum on 5th May?” was most often met with variations of disappointment, suspicion and contempt. Where the answer was yes, a refreshingly open-minded and reasonable exchange ensued. But the mention of “referendum” rarely garnered recognition, and so the majority of the evening was spent attempting to explain the ins and outs of “First Past the Post”—a system so difficult to deal with in everyday language that I might as well have been selling subprime mortgages.
The overriding lesson of my foray into local politics was of a yawning disconnect between the feverish rhetoric of the political class and the everyday concerns of estranged voters. These activists—young, male and, coincidentally, card-carrying members of the Liberal Democrats—were admirable in their energy and engagement. My evening with them even transformed me, in the language of the canvas-clipboard, from a ‘soft yes’ to a ‘hard yes’ on AV. In a society so clearly adrift from the concerns of party politics, surely an electoral system that reflects a wider plurality of beliefs is preferable.
Really, though, who cares? Certainly not many citizens of the little corner of Islington that I visited. And, unfortunately, the burden of proof lies with the ‘Yes!’ campaign, as David Cameron callously alluded to when he urged voters to obey their “gut instinct” and reject reform. (Who, after all, has a “gut instinct” for the Alternative Vote?) People just switch off when confronted with unsolicited jargon about politics; and who can blame them?
As one resident explained: “I’m just a bit flummoxed by it all, and why should I trust you? I might just wait for ‘the majority’ to make a decision while I stick my head under the pillow.” And so, one suspects, will the rest of the nation.
More on AV:
James Purnell and James Forder debate the pros and cons of AV
Anne McElvoy on why not to vote for AV
Peter Kellner on why electoral reform won’t just change the way we choose MPs, but the way we do politics
“Sort of,” explained the weary local activist. “There are so many safe seats under the current system that MPs can stroll through a career without really having to care about constituents’ concerns. If you need to get 50% of the vote, you have to listen more.” His patience was clearly wearing thin. When you have to spell out the cause to fellow canvassers as well as constituents, you know you’ve got a hard sell on your hands.
Dragged along by a friend of superior civic virtue, I joined up with the ‘Yes! To Fairer Votes’ campaign at Essex Road station on a glorious early-summer evening. We were greeted by a small company of enthusiastic political junkies loaded up with purple bumf, who immediately tested our best lines on AV reform. My friend responded to this grilling with all the enthusiasm of a recent convert, but my own lack of qualifications for the job at hand were soon exposed. “I haven’t really made up my mind on it yet,” I sheepishly confessed. We all agreed it was best if I took a step back for the first few houses.
A seasoned canvasser took me under his wing as we veered onto the side streets of Islington. The trick, he told me, was to steer clear of the wonkish stuff. “The thing with this referendum is that it gets a bit technical; you have to simplify things.” I soon found out what he meant. “DO YOU WANT POLITICIANS TO WORK HARDER?!" he bellowed down the first responsive intercom. Maybe this is the kind of politics that everyone can understand and care about after all.
Or maybe not. Since AV is not the first thing on everyone’s minds this spring, knocking on strangers’ doors armed with purple stickers and a confusing concept feels at once terrifying and intrusive. As my fellow freshman campaigners discovered, both emotions were fully justified. One was invited into a toothless gentleman’s front room, pungent with the fumes of crack cocaine, only to be lectured on the potential merits of a totalitarian Christian government. Another was forced to wrap up his discussion with a semi-robed ‘No’ voter, just out of the shower, with the classic last-ditch phrase: “Are you sure there’s nothing I can do to change your mind?”
Personally, I decided to stick to a rehearsed, unadventurous spiel. My first target neighboured a house with a ‘Yes to AV!’ sticker emblazoned on its front door. Low hanging fruit, I thought. But having mumbled my way through some semi-formed arguments about 50 per cent, pluralism and Papua New Guinea (they have AV in the big PNG, you know), I found my quarry annoyingly unmoved. Instead of jumping on the AV bandwagon, he jabbed his finger towards his reformist neighbours: “I don’t care how many votes I get,” he screamed, “as long as those idiots don’t get in power!”
If only the rest of his street were as passionate. My timid opening gambit of “Have you heard about the referendum on 5th May?” was most often met with variations of disappointment, suspicion and contempt. Where the answer was yes, a refreshingly open-minded and reasonable exchange ensued. But the mention of “referendum” rarely garnered recognition, and so the majority of the evening was spent attempting to explain the ins and outs of “First Past the Post”—a system so difficult to deal with in everyday language that I might as well have been selling subprime mortgages.
The overriding lesson of my foray into local politics was of a yawning disconnect between the feverish rhetoric of the political class and the everyday concerns of estranged voters. These activists—young, male and, coincidentally, card-carrying members of the Liberal Democrats—were admirable in their energy and engagement. My evening with them even transformed me, in the language of the canvas-clipboard, from a ‘soft yes’ to a ‘hard yes’ on AV. In a society so clearly adrift from the concerns of party politics, surely an electoral system that reflects a wider plurality of beliefs is preferable.
Really, though, who cares? Certainly not many citizens of the little corner of Islington that I visited. And, unfortunately, the burden of proof lies with the ‘Yes!’ campaign, as David Cameron callously alluded to when he urged voters to obey their “gut instinct” and reject reform. (Who, after all, has a “gut instinct” for the Alternative Vote?) People just switch off when confronted with unsolicited jargon about politics; and who can blame them?
As one resident explained: “I’m just a bit flummoxed by it all, and why should I trust you? I might just wait for ‘the majority’ to make a decision while I stick my head under the pillow.” And so, one suspects, will the rest of the nation.
More on AV:
James Purnell and James Forder debate the pros and cons of AV
Anne McElvoy on why not to vote for AV
Peter Kellner on why electoral reform won’t just change the way we choose MPs, but the way we do politics
