The squeeze is on. The YEStoAV campaign has Labour supporters, but they aren’t quite so august. Iain Martin reckons that the YES team are faced with a cross-party opposition that can get these diverse big beasts working together. Iain calls it a pincer movement on the Lib Dems.
The strategy is to characterise electoral reform as aan exclusively sectional interest: Clegg’s fixation. With his singular brand of native wit, John Prescott spilled the beans:
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‘This is the system that nobody wants. It’s a shoddy little deal that the Lib Dems made with the Tories as their price for power. They could have made a deal to protect health, education, jobs, but no – they chose a voting system to help themselves.’
The Tories can’t be so brazen; but their sentiments will be similar. After all, the Lib Dems were unequivocal: a referendum was the price of any coalition deal.