In less than four weeks, Britain will decide on whether to change the voting system. But do people understand AV? And how many will turn out to vote?
Thursday lunchtime, and two Sheffield University students are standing behind a table outside the union handing out free doughnuts. At an adjacent table, beneath a couple of straggly purple balloons, another group gathers around piles of leaflets, asking passersby if they have heard about the 5 May referendum.
This is a big day for the Yorkshire and Humber Yes to Fairer Votes campaign. In less than four weeks, Britain decides whether to switch from first past the post to the alternative vote in only the second national referendum ever to be held in the UK. Activists have come from York, Hull and Leeds for this evening's mega phonebank, when about 20 volunteers will make 1,000 calls.
"My great-grandad campaigned for electoral reform," says 22-year-old politics graduate Emily Wilkie. "He went on a march in London when he was 94. I studied mass movements in Manchester and I was really inspired by how people campaigned for democracy in the past. That's why I'm doing this now."
Wilkie organised a flash mob at the station last week and is planning more. Fellow activist Arnie Craven used to be a Conservative. "Issues are easy to get behind because they don't have the flaws people do," he says. None of the young activists gathered here is currently involved in party politics.
Local organiser Arran Cottam reckons he has spoken to 3,000 people, and only 10 have mentioned Nick Clegg. But local Labour MP and Yes supporter Paul Blomfeld believes anti-Liberal Democrat feeling could influence the result. "Nick Clegg is hated in Sheffield," he says. "There's a strong feeling here that this government is pursuing policies that are against Sheffield and against the north of England. More than anything at the moment in this city people want to give Clegg a kicking."
Back at their sparsely furnished first-floor office, lent by the solicitors downstairs, the group sits down for a briefing with field operations director Willie Sullivan. Unlike the Westminster-based No campaign, he says, which has no regional offices, and has yet to reveal its funding arrangements, Yes is a genuine grassroots movement under a broad umbrella: cross-party; bottom-up; decentralised; transparent; with £180,000 so far in small donations, and £1m each from the Rowntree Foundation and the Electoral Reform Society (ERS).
For the Yes team, persuading people that their campaign, put together by assorted pressure groups led by the ERS, is different from the old politics is part of the point – particularly because compared with other voting systems AV is not that big a change, and hence something of an anticlimax.
Under AV, voters rank candidates in order of preference and votes are reallocated, starting from the bottom, until somebody reaches the threshold of 50%. How much difference this would actually make in elections is moot. Some argue it would exacerbate swings, producing even bigger and less proportional majorities. Others protest that it can only benefit the Liberal Democrats, as many voters' natural second choice.
The No camp takes every opportunity to remind the public that Clegg once described AV as a "miserable little compromise", while supporters of full PR have been urged by Lord Owen and Labour MP Austin Mitchell, among others, to vote no and hold out for the real thing. Mitchell, who has a £5 bet on the result with environment secretary Chris Huhne, takes the view that the bill is a coalition fix – with the Liberals set to benefit from AV and the Tories from the reduction in the number of seats due to associated boundary changes – "but I'm regarded as an old bore on the issue; you're beginning to fall asleep."
On the Yes side, there are those who would prefer STV (the single transferable vote with multimember constituencies, long regarded as the most proportional system) or something else. Others including Cottam in Sheffield and pollster Peter Kellner see AV as an end in itself. For Anthony Barnett, former director of pressure group Charter88, AV is the tip of the iceberg, a glimpse of a much more radical future that would see a complete overhaul of our constitution.
Where the Yes side is united is in its view of first past the post, summed up by Liberal Democrat party chair Tim Farron as "rubbish". At the campaign's politician-free launch in London last weekend, activists stood up one after the other to complain about so-called safe seats – places where opposition parties barely function, council seats are uncontested and nobody puts leaflets through the door.
Electoral reform as an issue in British politics goes back a long way, but the previous high watermark for campaigners outside parliament was Charter88. The campaign, which followed Thatcher's third election victory in 1987, and coincided with the merger of the SDP and David Steel's Liberals, was the product of deep anger at the transformation of British society being enacted by a government supported by less than 45% of the electorate. The charter called for proportional representation, devolution, a democratic upper chamber, bill of rights and written constitution, and its founders deliberately reached beyond Westminster to collect supporters including Ian McEwan, Billy Bragg, Emma Thompson and Harold Pinter.
"I think there is a deep cultural divide," says Neal Lawson, director of pressure group Compass. "There is, on the one hand, a very machine-like view of politics – you control your party, the party controls the state and the state controls the country. That worked in 1945 when you had a control and command structure, but that's all now broken down.
"Now you need a politics of morals – where you have to go out and win the moral case for what you're saying. The fundamental, the core point of all of this is the fact that you have to trust the people."
Under New Labour, argue the reformers, the fragmentation only accelerated. While 97% of voters in the 1951 general election backed one of the two main parties, by 2010 that had fallen to 65%. While first past the post is a system designed for a two-horse race, where whoever gets more votes wins, they claim it is not suited to a scenario in which multiple parties compete.
The result is cynicism and disengagement, with falling turnout and large numbers of voters believing their votes don't count. Resources are increasingly concentrated in a handful of swing seats during elections. Whole campaigns can be summarised as: get Basingstoke!
"We can make a very strong case that the people who benefit from this are voters on the doorstep," says shadow business secretary John Denham, a longstanding supporter of change. "Everyone has had an election leaflet at some point saying 'only x can win', 'only x can beat y', and nobody likes that. Our strongest argument is undoubtedly the fact that MPs will not be able to afford to ignore a large number of people that they ignore at the moment."
Even if the House of Commons under AV looks rather similar to what it is at the moment, the contention is that the culture will be different. Because they will need to appeal beyond their base, politicians will be forced to look for consensus, to be more open-minded, less tribal, not so slavishly loyal to the party whips.
Does anybody care? Turnout is not expected to top 40% nationally, with far lower figures in London and elsewhere where there are no local elections. An editorial in Thursday's Evening Standard seemed surprised that a debate hosted by the paper the previous evening was such a hit, with people queueing to get in. But Farron says he is feeling "very chipper". He points to the crucial role of Labour figures such as Livingstone and Ed Miliband. But their party is divided. While 92 MPs, including most of the shadow cabinet, have signed up to the Yes campaign, almost two-thirds of MPs haven't, and many former ministers are on the other side.
"A lot of Labour people irritated by being attacked from the left by the Liberal Democrats for the past 13 years are enjoying being Trots for a bit," Farron says. "Lib Dem bashing is their favourite sport, but if they cost Britain the chance for the most important democratic reform since universal suffrage then they will be blamed at least as much as Cameron is."
"Nothing is inevitable, especially in this country, which can change very fast or not at all," says Barnett. "The thing about PR now is that it's a victim of the Blair catastrophe – he could have delivered a referendum on the [Roy] Jenkins report and he personally stopped it."
Crucially, it is not yet clear whether the Yes campaign can successfully harness the wave of popular disgust with Britain's political class that followed the expenses scandal. For the young activists in Sheffield, the news that MPs had been stealing from taxpayers was a tipping point.
Some suggest the campaign has been slow off the mark, and may simply be overwhelmed by the No's bigger budget and powerful negative messages. The strategy of using celebrities to front the campaign has also been attacked.
Yes director Sullivan believes the media coverage has so far been "lazy and confused", and casts doubt on polls that have not even attempted to factor in the differential turnout, which will be the result of local and assembly elections on the same day. If the vote is lost, grim forecasts predict no change for a generation.
But Sheffield battles on. "We've built this machine from nothing," Sullivan says. "It's never been done before." Jack Ashton talks of setting up a campaigning consultancy, making a career out of it. His boss, Jane Thomas, worked on the failed campaign for a Yorkshire regional assembly, and last year lost a Labour seat in the general election. Neither experience put her off, and she took a pay cut to work for Yes. "I love campaigning!" she says happily as she waves me off.
Do people know what AV is?
Niall Archer, 18, football coach: NO
I didn't know about AV or the referendum, but now I think I will probably vote. A change might be good for most people. I don't agree with what's been going on with university fees. I think I would vote yes to a new system. It's time for a change.
Angyl Roper, 29, self-employed office worker: YES
I'm vaguely aware of AV. I know it's basically changing the way the voting system works, so rather than voting for one candidate you list the candidates in order of preference – that's about as much as I know. I'm voting against it. I think it's a daft system. I want to vote for the person that I think is most suitable for the job. I don't want to give anybody else a vote. I don't think there's much point in voting for the other candidates.
Michael Quinn, 67, retired printer: YES
AV is the alternative vote. I don't know if it would be better or worse – I don't think anybody does. I don't know what to do, really. I'll probably decide on the day. I probably will vote for it to see what happens, because we've had the other system for a long time and it might be wise to try a new system. But whether it will work or not, no one knows.
Peggy Flint, 74, retired teacher: YES
I will vote yes because my husband I are not happy with the present government and we're not happy with the coalition, so we want the chance to vote for what we want to vote for.
Rachel Hughes, 38, mature student: NO
I hadn't heard of AV, but it definitely appeals to me now you've explained it, because of that second chance, I think. It's like when you choose one thing and that loses – at least something else that you would find OK has a chance of getting in.