The Right argues that high executive pay is the result of a newly globalised market for executives pushing up prices. This appears to be based on the assumption that a global market will be competing for a fixed pool of executives, and the expansion of that pool will therefore increase wages paid. It would also imply that executive pay should be proportional to exposure to foreign markets. Let’s test this. As a proxy for exposure to foreign markets, I will use both inflows and outflows of foreign direct investment, and stats for the US as they’re the easiest to come by:

Sources: Forbes/OECD

That looks like a pretty strong correlation to me. Having a cap on wages would only mean that Britain wouldn’t have access to the international executive market. If there is a limited supply of executive talent globally – and the stats appear to indicate that is the case – it’s worth considering why this should be the case. The strength of the market should incentivise more people to try to enter it. An explanation may be that overseas expansion by multinationals pushes out competition, and this combined with overseas merger & acquisition activity would serve to reduce the pool of individuals with global CEO experience. However, having fewer firms in competition for CEOs should also lower CEO compensation.

It may be that barriers to entry are unnaturally high as a result of corporate directors picking people like themselves, in which case Cable’s reforms should have concentrated less on shareholder representation over executive salaries themselves and more on ensuring that shareholders are represented during the shortlisting process. However, it’s clear that while his reforms are welcome, they don’t get at the root of the problem. High executive pay is a global phenomenon, and has little to do with the UK’s corporate governance.

Of course, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this – politics is part of the competition for limited resources, and condemning Wikipedia for using the levers at their disposal is comparable to condemning the film industry for buying access to lawmakers via their trade association, the MPAA. Attempting to define your opponents’ actions in the political sphere as immoral is often a way of attempting to limit their success. The condemnation of campaigning undertaken by tech companies and web services is in many respects a recognition of the failure of the likes of the MPAA to properly engage the public over the changing definition of intellectual property. This failure is hardly surprising, given that the MPAA’s position is unsustainable.

In order to understand why, it’s important to consider why intellectual property rights are valuable in the first place. In enabling people to profit from their inventions, they directly encourage innovation and are arguably a prime driver of economic development. While they are a constraint upon freedom inasmuch as they prevent people from making whatever they want, they are a reward for something so valuable that they are worthwhile constraint.

However, in the digital age, the cost of production of content can be so low that a financial reward is unnecessary to facilitate innovation. The serried ranks of Wikipedia’s editors carry out their work on an unpaid basis for little greater reward than internet glory. Running costs can be covered by donations from those who want to see that service continued, in much the same way as charities function. This model can even apply to more labour-intensive digital products – consider this paean by the New York Times to the video game Dwarf Fortress, whose developer is funded entirely by donations. You cannot recoup costs from donations if you are not the original distributor of a product. No-one is going to donate money to someone who simply copies Wikipedia onto their own website. This new business model makes profiting from IP theft incredibly unlikely. Only the innovator will see a return. It is those innovators who went out on strike yesterday, in response to an attempt to make this new model impossible.

The MPAA’s preferred business model, if enshrined in statute, would put a halt to a wholly new model of rewarding innovation. The net cost to society for doing so may be significant. If the MPAA’s members believe their products are strong enough that people would seek to support their continued production, then I would urge them to let the market decide, and not hide behind regulation.

I have previously written about how the parties of the Coalition are expressly aiming to use Government to overhaul the way in which the public perceives the private sector, by putting the burden of demonstrating the ethical worth of private enterprise squarely on its shoulders. A drive for greater employee ownership must be seen in this context – co-operatives and mutuals have always been perceived as more ethically sound than models of ownership which concentrate more shares in fewer hands. It puts the cost of an ethical stance on the company, rather than enforcing ethics through legislation. In doing so, it reduces the scope for dissatisfaction with capitalism, limiting the political space open to the likes of the Occupy protestors. It overcomes a very specific challenge: if wages represent a falling share of GDP compared to returns on capital, then the way to overcome this is not simply through higher wages, but the redistribution of capital itself. The share of GDP accorded to wages becomes an insignificant issue.

British liberalism has always recognised that the condition for a free society is the consent of all its members. By moving towards a model which places the burden of securing that consent upon business, Clegg is diminishing the space available for a Labour Party that would seek to secure that consent via the State. Labour’s complicity in this may yet be their undoing.

I’ve been reading through An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, and I’ve been pulling out quotes that appear to me to conflict with what could be called a procedural justice version of libertarianism; a version which may not be held by every contributor to the ASI, but nonetheless appears to inform some of their work.  This post, the first in an occasional series, will examine some of the ASI’s work in the context of the actual words of the Master.

I am using the OUP World’s Classics version of WoN. The following is from Book 1, Chapter VIII:

“What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little, as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower, the wages of labour.
“It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily: and the law, besides, authorises, or at least does not prohibit, their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work, but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes, the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, or merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks, which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year, without employment. In the long run, the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate.”

Smith is here observing that the freedom of contract between capitalist and worker is, in reality, no such thing. The relative levels of capital each holds distort the negotiation: the capitalist can always afford to hold out for longer. However, within procedural justice libertarianism, freedom of contract is interpreted as absolute: any Government intervention, whether it be through regulation of rights or wages, is an immoral intrusion into a private negotiation.

The above quote appears to indicate that Smith understands that the freedom to make contracts varies between capitalist and worker, in a manner dependent on their relative wealth. This particular freedom appears to be determined less by Government intervention and much more so by possession of capital. Being a strong believer in the power of freedom, I would advocate that some way be found to bring a greater equality of freedom to negotiations between a capitalist and a worker, as an end in itself. I am agnostic as to how this can be achieved, whether it be through the State or through a non-state body, such as a trade union.

However, the Adam Smith Institute has recently put forward a proposal that runs counter to this aim of securing greater freedom of negotiation, which they have dubbed the ‘Self Employment Option’. This calls for greater use of the self-employed status amongst workers, which “sidesteps the burdens not only of PAYE and NI, but also of unfair dismissal, discrimination suits, maternity and paternity leave, statutory sick pay and holiday pay“. The self-employed, being freed from the ‘burden’ of rights, will have less freedom in negotiation than the employed. It is difficult to interpret this in any other way than the ASI having a very different understanding of freedom of contract to Adam Smith.

Eight:  ”Realization of human potentiality.”

It’s pretty broad, but I would similarly broadly agree. Freedom means the freedom to reach your potential, however you define it; to not be constrained by circumstances of birth, by lack of access to knowledge or by things over which you have no control, such as your health. This freedom does not yet exist for everyone, but I’d argue its achievement is a clear liberal* goal.

However, some of the definitions ask for freedom from reality:

Two:  ”Revolution means freedom from necessity.”

Six:  ”Freedom means freedom from necessity, freedom to do what you want without having to sell yourself in order to survive.  Freedom to express who you are through whatever you want to do without any forces stopping you.”

Ten:  “I think that freedom is your ability to carry out what you want to do.  It’s not just about your social freedom, it is also about economic freedom.  If you are always working for a boss, you don’t have freedom either.  Freedom is always that you’re emancipated from your physical necessities and your mental baggage.”

What these definitions miss is that someone, somewhere, always has to be thinking about physical necessities. We can’t all be artists, because we’d starve to death. Someone needs to farm. Someone needs to deliver healthcare. Someone needs to get rid of the shit.

A society in which we are free from necessity is an impossible society; someone somewhere needs to take account of the necessities. If the people taking part in the Wall Street occupation genuinely believe such a thing to be possible, then they are calling for the slavery of others in order to remove the need for themselves to consider necessity, because that is what is required for such a thing to be the case.

The only fair way of distributing necessity within a society is for everyone to experience it. It is only through confrontation with the demands of necessity that we can identify effective ways of living in the world. Necessity breeds judgement, breeds character, and – above all – breeds virtue.

If the only call of the occupiers was for the rich to experience necessity themselves in the form of taxes, I could understand it. As it is, anyone calling for freedom from necessity is themselves an enemy of freedom.

*not in the American sense, in the actual sense.

Kwarteng’s book is an overview of the British Empire, told through a series of pen portraits of the nations, characters, intrigue and wars that comprise the Empire’s history. It is a story told with one eye on the present: the book covers Iraq, Kashmir, Burma, the Sudan, and a range of other notorious flashpoints, all of which, the book successfully argues, came about as a result of the capricious nature of the Imperial system itself. This capriciousness was not wrought of incoherent and vicious individuals; rather, the very individualism inherent in the Empire produced often contradictory and conflicting policies depending on who happened to be in charge at the time.

For example, in Sudan, right up until independence the British pursued a very specific Southern Policy intended to ensure that the largely African south of the country remained free from Arab and Islamic influence. This policy entailed restricting Islamic missionary work and promoting Christianity in its place, as well as constraining trade with the north. The two halves of Sudan were never homogeneous, but this policy served to drive home cultural and ethnic distinctions between both halves of the country. At independence the policy was ignored, welding together extremely different cultures into a single state.

Kwarteng attributes this policy incoherence to the individualism of the Empire; to the power of governors to reverse previous policies and to London’s reliance on the ‘man-on-the-spot’. He claims that the Empire had no overriding ideology, the absence of which engendered this incoherence.

I do not think Kwarteng’s analysis necessarily bears out this last point. The individualism of the Empire is clear; the classism inherent in it is also clear – the ruling class was drawn from a small pool of public schools and Oxbridge graduates, mainly of History or the Classics. However, I would like to argue that this very approach can be considered an ideology, that rampant individualism connected with an emphasis on character building does, in itself, constitute an ideological approach to Empire.

In order to understand why this is the case, we must ask why history and the classics were preferred subjects. The science of Government is not necessarily read from history, nor is it always found in the work of the poets of antiquity. Kwarteng seems to think that an understanding of an alien culture (inasmuch as ancient Greece and Rome are alien) was the reason behind the clear preference for these subjects in the ranks of the Imperial Civil Service. That may be the case, but there is an additional factor worthy of consideration, one which Kwarteng makes reference when he jokingly describes the Imperial Civil Service as viewing itself rather like Plato’s philosopher-kings. Kwarteng is looking in slightly the wrong direction in this reference. Rather, he should be considering the role of Aristotle in the education of the men who ran the Empire.

Aristotle’s ethics are very much about the development of character. They describe the virtues that should be cultivated as an aid to both happiness and effective judgement. It is this ‘cultivation’ which is key: this is not a morality that prescribes particular actions in particular situations; instead it is an ethics by which one is intended to govern one’s own development as a person, so one becomes more likely to act with virtue. Cultivation entails avoiding both excess and deficiency of virtue in a sphere of action, but does not say, “Thou shalt do so-and-so when such a thing happens;” rather, a particular action is a combination of one’s cultivation of the self and the circumstances surrounding it. You are not a moral agent at the moment of action – your moral agency occurs in reflection in between actions, when you determine how best to organise your future judgements under the heading of virtue.

A moral individual in this view, therefore, is one who has cultivated virtues and excellences to the point where they can be relied upon to act in a virtuous way. It is from this viewpoint that the insistence on ‘character-building’ within the British educational institutions that supplied the officers of the Empire can be understood: they are intended to provide individuals who can be relied on to act effectively and morally. The paragons of the Victorian age, as Kwarteng points out, were individuals who had cultivated their own character to a high degree of proficiency in martial and moral arts. They could be relied upon precisely because they had gone through an educational system designed to develop individuals virtuous in an Aristotelian sense, to develop the propensity of those individuals to make effective judgements to a high standard. This fostering of judgement covers every sphere of action – it is no coincidence that the word Aristotle uses for virtue, arete, can also be translated as ‘excellence’.

Those who studied Classics – who would as a matter of course hence reflect on their own virtue, and moreover on the effectiveness of their judgement – would be the highest products of this system, a system designed to encourage the development of a cultivated character. This all sounds rather lofty and intellectual, but the development of effective moral judgement must be considered in the context of what actually works, what is effective in achieving the goals of the complex web of virtues and principles of the individual in question. How virtuous can you be when a housemaster has tossed you into an icy lake to ‘build character’? It’s not the act itself that builds virtue, rather reflection upon it afterwards; virtues and excellences designed to work in real-world situations, rather than particular moral tropes.

Kwarteng makes reference to the resentment by the British of intellectuals and ‘effendis’ in the colonies, people described as of ‘weak character’. This must be understood in the context of the Aristotelian pragmatic school of virtue and excellence: there is a range of actions open to you in a situation and your decision upon which to take is decided by the virtues and excellences you have cultivated. Talking about morality without this personal context is, from this point of view, a waste of time. Morality can only be understood with reference to the man-on-the-spot. If he is of bad character, he can be condemned for it.

We can, if we wish to push this further, also understand the Empire’s classism from this perspective. Aristotelian virtues are designed for the Greek aristocracy, and contain virtues which may seem surprising today. A particular example is magnificence – spending one’s wealth temperately, but not miserly and without being gaudy or showy. Rappers and footballers would certainly fall under the ‘excess’ heading for this particular virtue. However, it is clearly a virtue only open to the rich: there is a presumption in Aristotle that only aristocrats are capable of virtue. In this context, the justification for classism becomes clear: surely the virtuous should reign over the non-virtuous? In addition, the ‘natural leaders’ identified amongst colonised populations as surrogates for British rule appear to have been regarded in this context, as having developed the character necessary for governing.

Kwarteng’s book is well-written and fascinating, and for anyone even remotely interested in the British Empire, I urge you to go and buy it. It is especially noteworthy for highlighting the Empire’s individualism, an individualism which, in prizing individual character, laid the seeds of its own downfall. Aristotle’s virtues belong to a different age, and the cultivation of one’s character and judgement is something that should be open to all. Certainly, it is something at which our educational system should aim. I am not confident that it currently does so, given that celebrity can apparently be achieved without cultivation of judgement at all. Kwarteng’s book is in many ways the story of how a clutch of public schools took over a quarter of the world. Imagine the possibilities for Britain if every one of our citizens was free to cultivate their own set of virtues.

I read Tim’s blog on a regular basis, for its amusing deconstruction of left-wing economic tropes, and I am disappointed that Tim hasn’t applied his usual economic rigour here. Shale gas appears to have become something of a magic bullet for certain sections of the Right, but as Tim would normally be the first to say, if your magic bullet is made of platinum and a thousand regular bullets do the same job, it’s probably not worth bothering with.

Tim appears to be putting himself in a box with some rather mad fellow travellers, like James Delingpole and Christopher Booker, perhaps to get a similar Telegraph gig. Let me try to summarise this shared position:

• Renewables are bad, because they require space in a countryside that must be locked into a sepia-tinted version of the 1950s for the rest of time, are very clearly associated with hippies and filthy left-wingers, and above all are expensive. Tim is currently only espousing the last of these points.
• A far better way of securing our energy sources is to rely on unsubsidised fossil fuels, which human ingenuity will guarantee cheap and plentiful supplies of for the foreseeable future.

It’s this question of cost that’s at the heart of the current debate, and rightly so – we need to decarbonise our economy, but we need to do it in the most cost-effective way possible. The key question, therefore, is how much shale gas actually costs, rather than how much Tim, James and Christopher think it costs.

To do so we’ll look at some research carried out by the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. The OIES is partly funded by those well-known opponents of the oil and gas industry, the oil and gas industry. The paper we’ll look at is called ‘Can Unconventional Gas be a Game Changer in European Gas Markets?’ by Florence Gény.

The paper can be summarised as ‘No, Europe is different, and it’s not clear that shale gas is as profitable and productive in the US as its advocates claim’. The section relevant to our question here is from Chapter 4:

“Although gas production has continued to increase in 2009 and 2010 despite lower prices than in the previous years, there is a big question mark about current well economics. Many public sources estimate that the average price required for shale gas wells to be economic is around $6/mcf. Averages are a very poor measure to use in the case of shale plays, as every play is different, and within plays, core areas and non-core areas yield very different results, but the fact that by late 2010, gas prices had not reached $6/mcf for two years suggests that the commercial viability of many wells drilled, and so the financial solidity of many independents, could be very weak. We believe it is only a question of time before costs drive up prices, or drilling slows downs significantly and production falls. However many independents get financial protection against low gas prices through hedging strategies, so the cash impact of non commercial drilling is mitigated.”

The reduction in the price of gas in the US appears to have been caused by a broader range of drivers, not least the economic downturn and a significant increase in the number of gas processing plants, which convert unprocessed gas into dry natural gas suitable for injection into the gas grid. It’s not clear that shale is the primary cause of lower gas prices – or indeed whether shale gas suppliers can make money out of it when gas prices are low. Certainly, one of the strongest advocates of shale gas production in the US, Chesapeake Energy, made a significant loss in 2009, although they appear to have since climbed out of the hole, primarily by selling off shale gas assets. Cuadrilla doesn’t appear to have ever made a profit, although as a start-up that’s not really a consideration.

What does this mean for ‘damn windmills’? We can plug the $6/mcf figure into the costings report produced by Mott Macdonald for DECC last year. It models a range of gas prices. $6/mcf translates to about 37p per therm. The lower boundary of prices in the Mott Macdonald report is 34p per therm. Looks good for shale, right?

Well, no. The prices in the Mott Macdonald report are ‘burner tip’ prices – i.e. the cost to generators per therm at combustion. The $6/mcf price is the wellhead price, which is typically around $1-2 below the wholesale price. Factoring in the need for shale gas suppliers to make a profit, the burner-tip price of shale gas is going to look a lot more like DECC’s medium case. Under this case, onshore wind turbines will be the cheapest source of electricity by the end of this decade, when the carbon cost of gas is factored in. The latter won’t be a consideration for those who find the very concept of science an affront to their all-knowing egos like Delingpole and Booker, but for Tim, who acknowledges science as a worthwhile field, it will be.

If Tim had written ‘damn tidal mills’ he would’ve been correct. Different types of renewable energy generators will become economically viable at different times. A combination of onshore wind and combined-cycle gas turbines will be the cheapest way of replacing the quarter of our electricity generators that are being shut down over the course of this decade. I don’t mind admitting that, as a fervent supporter of capitalism, I’ve put my money into this solution. I too believe in the power of human ingenuity to provide solutions to our energy problems; I just don’t think it only applies to fossil fuels.

I would also point out that because of the long lead-time on making new sources of energy economically viable, subsidies can be a sensible policy option. For example, in 1980, the US Government brought in ‘The Alternative Fuel Production Credit’ to provide incentives to invest in non-traditional sources of energy. One of those was shale gas.

Let me summarise what’s been going on. An anthropologist named David Graeber has had the temerity to point out that one of economics’ just-so stories, namely that currency arose from bartering economies in which people got frustrated with not always being able to swap their pigs for their favourite type of lifestock, never actually happened. Primitive systems of exchange don’t seem to be based on bartering at all. Rather, exchange takes place in the form of a kind of social ritual, in which the exchange itself is largely incidental to the fun. For example:

‘In the 1940s, an anthropologist, Ronald Berndt, described one dzamalag ritual, where one group in possession of imported cloth swapped their wares with another, noted for the manufacture of serrated spears. Here too it begins as strangers, after initial negotiations, are invited to the hosts’ camp, and the men begin singing and dancing, in this case accompanied by a didjeridu. Women from the hosts’ side then come, pick out one of the men, give him a piece of cloth, and then start punching him and pulling off his clothes, finally dragging him off to the surrounding bush to have sex, while he feigns reluctance, whereon the man gives her a small gift of beads or tobacco. Gradually, all the women select partners, their husbands urging them on, whereupon the women from the other side start the process in reverse, re-obtaining many of the beads and tobacco obtained by their own husbands. The entire ceremony culminates as the visitors’ men-folk perform a coordinated dance, pretending to threaten their hosts with the spears, but finally, instead, handing the spears over to the hosts’ womenfolk, declaring: “We do not need to spear you, since we already have!”’

The crucial point here is that the actual value of the goods being exchanged is incidental to the exchange itself, within rather fuzzy limits. This primitive exchange serves a quite separate social function to the sort of value-agreement exercise that bartering is typically understood to involve.

However, that’s not to say that bartering cannot arise in more developed societies, so Graeber looks at how the first currencies actually arose in Mesopotamia. Silver, as a common trade good, was stockpiled in the non-state communities known as temples. It was traded with external partners in a system of fixed equivalences for other goods, without any bartering being involved. Temples, as early bureaucracies, needed a method of keeping accounts of the rewards to be granted to members of their communities for their work in various fields – fishing, hunting, pottery and so on. Given the status of silver as a trade good, it was indexed to the value of a given number of bushels of grain, and used as currency in this context.

Graeber makes the very strong claim that currencies have never arisen from bartering societies of the type described by the likes of Adam Smith; indeed, on the examples he provides, it is hard to see how they could.

Naturally, this claim has caused a significant amount of debate amongst economists – not least those of the Austrian School, an approach to economics which, if one were being unkind, could describe as exclusively involving  these kinds of just-so stories.

They have retaliated, and their argument boils down claiming that Graeber’s evidence really supports their theories. The argument runs as follows. All that’s required for Austrian assumptions to hold true is that there is a period of bartering in which one good which is more easily tradeable (‘marketable’) than others emerges as the dominant medium of exchange. This bartering happens during the period when the fixed equivalences for long-distance trade are being set – a very brief period of initial haggling, seemingly, is enough for the Austrian theory to hold true.

However, Graeber’s examples of primitive tribes seem to demonstrate that it’s not necessarily the case that this attempt to determine the relative market values of goods occurs at all. Indeed, the only evidence they cite in favour of this occurring is ‘economic logic’, which is rather circular: if economic logic requires a particular foundational event, then citing it as a reason why that foundation took place is quite pointless. Certainly, Graeber provides evidence and reasoning to suggest reasons why it would not – not least that the hazards inherent in long-distance travel in ancient times would’ve made merchants much less likely to even consider negotiating. It’s not clear that those long distance-traders were utility maximisers in manner in which certain types of economic theory would require. Without that certainty, it’s impossible to make the claim that bartering must have taken place, and so impossible to rely on premises based upon it.

There is a broader lesson here: you can’t get intellectual premises for free. With this in mind, I’m going to do some reading around the Austrian School’s concept of praxeology, which this debate has drawn my attention to.

1. Did you do any telephone canvassing? Did you enjoy it? If not why not? If so, how would you improve the process?

I undertook many telephone canvassing sessions. Generally, they were positive, however when the campaign decided to abandon persuasive canvassing on legal grounds, they became less so. Focusing on telephone canvassing was a strategic mistake; we should’ve been out on the doorsteps from September onwards. ‘Grassroots’ means ‘where people actually live’, which means ‘doorsteps’.

2. How would you have improved the literature?

The design was generally to a high standard, however many elements of the messaging were poor. I would in particular focus on ‘Make your MP work harder’ message, which was rather opaque. The focus groups that gave rise to this message were flawed: those groups were educated in advance about how AV works, which allowed a complex message to resonate more strongly than would otherwise have been the case. The connection wasn’t clear to someone without a fairly in-depth grasp of how electoral politics works in practice, which unfortunately is not the case for the majority of the population.

We got some fantastic leaflets towards the end, which lumped the supporters of the Yes vote against the No-supporting parties, and asked the public to decide whose side they were on. Given that the BNP was urging a ‘no’ vote, these should’ve been widely distributed in BME areas. That they weren’t was seemingly a result of what I can only describe as ‘wets’ being nervous about reverse dog-whistle politics.

3. How was your relationship with activists from other political parties?

Mixed. The local Labour Party was fiercely opposed to a Yes vote, and we only received support from individual activists – even though the head of Labour Yes was a councillor in the borough. Anecdotally she was forbidden from campaigning in Islington by her fellow councillors.

The Greens were very supportive, and we worked well with them. I abetted this relationship by taking an ostensibly apolitical stance for the entirety of the campaign; I judged this campaign to be too important to allow any party loyalties to interfere with its delivery. Besides, following the tuition fees debacle it was reasonably easy to not feel like being a Lib Dem.

We had no idea who the local UKIP branch was at all, despite efforts to find out. This is a broader criticism of the campaign – we should’ve reached out to the only right-wing party backing a Yes vote. That we did not I lay at the feet of the trendy lefties in the centre, who did not understand how to build a political consensus.

4. Did the Yes campaign marshal activists in your area effectively? If not how could it have been improved?

I was the local organiser for the campaign, and have been relentlessly self-critical about the number of people we got out onto the streets, even though we won and had plenty of people out on the day and the weeks before. I failed to:

- Make enough phone calls to get people out for campaigning events

- Give up on street stalls and phone banking early enough in favour of door-knocking, when it became clear that the former wasn’t attracting enough support and the latter was a pointless waste of time in the absence of a proper GOTV operation.

- Bully the centre sufficiently into providing us with enough high-quality ‘out’ leaflets for doorknocking. We ran out on several occasions, which disheartened some of our activists who felt that knocking on empty houses without them was a waste of time.

- Carry out more ‘one-to-one’ briefing sessions with key activists, which I found to be a very effective way of engaging people in the campaign.

Having said that, I have one very major criticism of local activist ‘marshalling’ that had nothing to do with me. I was not allowed access to the mailing list of local people who signed up by the national website, which remained with the regional staff. This meant I was frequently unable to get emails, like event reminders, sent out to supporters because they were going out on the same day as national emails, and the centre was worried about spamming. There is no other way to describe this decision than stupid.

5. Did you find channels of communication with the Yes Campaign hierarchy open or closed?

While the regional organisers deserve to be commended for the amount of time they spent sending my complaints back to the centre, what actually happened at the centre was almost entirely opaque. Decision-making seemed largely capricious, and the final decision to focus on doorknocking I could only interpret as the centre finally catching on to their error in focusing on telecanvassing.

6. With the benefit of hindsight, how would you have liked to have seen the Yes campaignin your area run?

My ideal campaign begins in September 2010 with a relentless focus on grassroots organising, via a series of large group meetings of everyone on the various databases that became the Yes supporters database, followed up by one-to-ones with as many key activists as possible. Explanatory leaflets on AV start going out in November, with one per month till February. Doorknocking starts once-weekly in September, and moves to twice-weekly in the New Year. We develop a proper relationship with the local press in the New Year, selling in a package about why activists are devoting so much of their time to voting reform. Our leaflets contain simple messages that do not rely on an understanding of AV to be effective. We target particular groups, including BME people and students assiduously. We have a small local budget we use for our events and for particular leaflets focused on local issues. We have a proper cross-party forum for discussion of campaigning tactics.

This is all mostly textbook stuff, with the exception of the community organising elements. This is what I thought a grassroots campaign would look like. The Yes campaign did not run a grassroots campaign; they ran what people who’ve worked in NGOs their entire lives think a grassroots campaign looks like.

7. And nationally, how could the Yes campaign have been improved?

The list is too long to go into, but Andy May’s now famous document is a good start. I’d like to pick up on a few points from it:

- Actually sending out a Freepost mailing to every house in the country. The person who made the decision to not do this should never work in politics, campaigns or communications ever again. This is unforgiveable.

- Not hiring quite so many expensive consultants and managing the ones that you do hire properly.

- Reach out to all your supporters, including the ones you personally find distasteful. It’s a measure of your commitment to an issue that you’re willing to work with people you ostensibly despise in order to achieve it; the issue is more important than the fact you don’t like UKIP.

- In fact, this extends beyond UKIP. Labour Yes barely talked to the central campaign at all. All the party Yes groups should’ve been round the same table at least once a fortnight.

- Not being afraid to engage in reverse dog-whistle politics. I would’ve put up billboards with two pictures on them: Nick Clegg and Nick Griffin, and asked the public which Nick they preferred. That the Yes campaign did not do this meant the No campaign was free to use Clegg against them.

- Perhaps most importantly, celebrities are not people, they’re artificial media contrivances. Eddie Izzard was never going to change the mind of a granny who lives on an estate. Someone knocking on her door might have done. A ‘peoples’ campaign should involve as many people as possible making their own decisions about how to effectively campaign.

8. Could the Liberal Democrats have fed into the Yes campaign better?

Yes. We could’ve not put John Sharkey in charge of it. I’ve yet to see a response by him to Andy May’s allegations. Not making that response is a tacit acceptance of their truth.

9. What did the Yes campaign do well?

The elements of community organising they brought in at the start – I’d like to particularly cite George Gabriel here – were excellent and a breath of fresh air. It’s a pity they then decided to ignore them entirely in favour of the mixed bag of centralised control and cock-ups they tried next.

10. How would you fight a future referendum campaign on electoral reform differently?

I’ve covered much of this already above, but there’s one important principle I’d like to raise here. I’m in favour of electoral reform because I believe a government over which people have more real influence is a better government. Similarly, I believe a campaign for electoral reform over which all of its participants have real influence is a better campaign.

A grassroots campaign involves ceding as much power and decision-making as possible to the grassroots. Some of them might cock up. Some of them might perform brilliantly. However, they’ll demonstrate that the freedom to have influence, when distributed as widely as possible, can achieve great things.