Cheap slogans and funding scandals

This week, Bagehot has devoted his column in the Economist to a popular theme: the ‘shockingly low quality of the national campaigns’ in the AV referendum, typified perhaps by the Yes campaign’s latest funding scandal and the No poster pictured above. Bagehot writes:

‘I came away from a whistle-stop tour of the country pretty impressed by the diligence of local activists, as they try to explain the intricacies of the alternative vote (AV) to members of the public. The national Yes and No campaigns are a different matter, I argue: they have blown a chance to have a proper debate about the nature of British democracy.

Judging by my anecdotal crop of evidence from the ground in Dorset, Cambridgeshire and the suburbs of Manchester, the country is in a pretty sober, rather political mood. Voters did not brush off canvassers or treat the whole question of the referendum with flippancy. Yet instead of engaging with the public, national political leaders have chosen to bombard them with cheap slogans.’

There is a sense that this referendum, which was supposed to reinvigorate public life, is having the opposite effect. Still, everything has a wider context.