Another of those 'where did it all go wrong' blogposts

Across the country, bleary eyed progressives have sat down in front of their computers over the last 24 hours to share their analysis of what went so very wrong with the referendum on moving to a fairer voting system. It's possible, I suppose, that some good may come of the collected outpourings, informing future campaigns on other issues. But for many of us, I suspect it's just cathartic.

When disappointed - and that's a mild word for knowing that I will now never cast a vote in a fair UK election - it's easy to lash out at others. And, my God, isn't there a queue of others to lash out at. The No campaign, of course, for its daily torrent of what Nick Clegg memorably and accurately described as 'ludicrous bilge'. Cameron, for fronting such a duplicitous campaign. Labour, for failing to back something which was in its own manifesto only twelve months ago. Ed Miliband, for appearing to support the Yes campaignwhile sticking the boot into its main supporters and allowing more than half his MPs to run riot on the issue.

But there were fatal flaws in the Yes campaign, and it would be only a partial tale simply to blame the enemies of reform.

The AV referendum asked voters not merely to accept change, but positively to choose it. Yet the Yes campaign appeared to have little interest in explaining why change was needed, what the proposed change was, or what it would achieve. It left all the actual explanation to the Electoral Commission, whose output it could not control, and whose booklet on the referendum was so appallingly badly presented it might as well have been written by the No campaign.

The message the Yes campaign put forward managed to be both simplistic and unclear: that somehow changing the voting system would mean MPs working harder, when there was no obvious connection. The early television advertisements, showing caricatures of troughing MPs being doorstepped by newly empowered voters, were both ghastly and irrelevant. The war the Yes campaign was fighting was last year's battle on MPs' expenses, and there appeared to be no effort to explain why this was affected by writing 1, 2, 3 on your ballot paper instead of putting a cross.

The bevy of middle-class white luvvies lined up to front the campaign didn't help either. I enjoy Richard Wilson in One Foot in the Grave as much as the next man, and Eddie Izzard's stand-up comedy is always fun, but I'm not sure what qualifies them to advise on electoral systems. They embodied all that was wrong with the Yes campaign - the assumption that the rightness of their cause was so self-evident that it didn't need explaining, and that everyone would automatically share their view. There seemed no attempt to understand what was needed to reach out to people who didn't live in Hampstead or follow Stephen Fry on Twitter, or that it was important to do so.

When I was a councillor, I attended a brilliant presentation by Richard Olivier, son of the great Laurence Olivier. It was intended for council chief executives, but I begged, blagged and wriggled my way in to the overcrowded event because I knew it would be worth it (and it was). Olivier uses Shakespeare's plays to train managers, and on this occasion he was using The Tempest to talk about managing change. He said something very memorable to begin with: that when you want people to accept change you need to start with three things - discontent with the present, a vision of the future, and an acceptable first step. The Yes campaign offered none of these things - indeed, it didn't even seem to understand why it should.

The general level of information about what was at stake was woeful. A polling clerk was telling me about how she'd been at a polling station on the day of the referendum, and a couple had come in to vote. She'd handed them their ballot papers, and the wife had looked at the referendum ballot paper and said "What's this?" It was explained that it was about changing the voting system. She asked what this change was to be, and her husband said he wasn't sure, but he thought it was about being allowed to vote on the internet. "Oh," said the wife, "but I like coming to the polling station. Oh, no." Such is the basis on which millions of people have been denied a meaningful say in our democracy for a generation.

I honestly don't know how we move forward from here. A hundred years ago, the suffragettes didn't give up on votes for women; two hundred years ago, Wilberforce didn't give up on abolition of the slave trade. There have always been No campaigns, blocking progress in the interests of those who benefit from the status quo. I suspect it will take a long, long time now. But we can't go on like this, with governments elected by smaller and smaller percentages of the population, with less and less of a mandate, and a political system that alienates more and more people. One day. One day.