‘Yes’ camp is succumbing to a mean-spirited referendum campaign

It's a sad truth that, in politics as elsewhere, a positive and a negative only equal one thing.

It's not looking good for those seeking change. Last week two polls gave the 'no' camp an enormous 16-point lead in the campaign to change Britain's voting system. The yes camp could still win, but pollsters say this needs two-thirds of Labour supporters to vote 'yes'. But coalition ministers' rhetoric is preparing the ground for the public rejecting the alternative vote. Nick Clegg may end up paying the price for the 'yes' campaign's failures.

The idea that the "politics of the gutter" at the heart of the problem is a recent development in this campaign is far from accurate. It's been like this from the start.

There seemed something wrong with those early press releases from the 'yes' and 'no' camps. Something spiteful, petty, inward-looking. "The Yes campaign in May's referendum has confronted the Nos over their failure to engage in an honest debate with the British public," one 'yes' camp press release stated. Was that from last week? No - from January 15th, actually. Three weeks later, the No To AV press office were telling us: "Yes To AV campaign challenged once again to 'come clean' over Lib Dem links."

It was as if all the old stereotypes about the Westminster village looking in on itself were coming horribly true.

Matthew Elliot, the No to AV campaign director, explained to me back in the depths of winter that this was simply because the campaign hadn't got the "cut-through" to the national media yet. "There has been a lot of to-ing and fro-ing on twitter and the blogs, which has been magnified slightly and taken perhaps a disproportionate influence on how people see the campaigns," he explained. Despite the distraction of the royal wedding, he expected that when things really got going this would change.

I asked both campaign directors whether they were planning on holding a positive campaign. There is only one answer to this question, of course, and Elliott - leading the 'no' effort - duly gave it.

"I'm confident we're sending out a very positive message in the sense that we want to keep accountable government, while also encouraging those people who believe in PR to join us," he explained.

Three months on, with the referendum now fast approaching, that positive message seems to have disappeared.

We now know, of course, that the tone of the campaign has worsened, not improved. Both sides have attacked each other's funding in a bid to win by default. Frustrated senior figures in the desperate Liberal Democrat party, goaded into speaking out, have made the conduct of the campaign even more of an issue. The end result is a public debate ruined by acrimony and mudslinging. This wasn't what the public deserved, but it's what they're getting.

The argument over the BNP sums up the way in which the 'yes' camp has been slowly drawn into the 'no' camp's web of negativity.

Katie Ghose, chief executive of Yes To Fairer Votes, and her team were obliged to respond to the 'no' claims that the BNP would benefit from the alternative vote system. Their voters - and those of other fringe parties - are more likely to have their second preferences counted, that's true. But, as experts have pointed out, extremist parties only tend to do well because they come first with a tiny minority of the vote. That didn't stop the 'yes' camp talking about the 'no' campaign's "desperate smears".

"What really stinks is that the Nos just won't run an honest campaign," anti-fascism campaigner Billy Bragg was quoted as saying. "We've heard a lot of nonsense from them on the BNP, so we're setting the record straight."

There was no need for this sort of aggressive, punchy quote to be included. But sneering and contempt are an essential for any referendum campaigner's armoury. The public tone had been well and truly set.

The tragedy of this referendum is that both sides decided, very early on, that reaching out beyond the Westminster bubble meant trivialising and dumbing-down to the lowest common denominator. The 'no' camp revelled in overly lengthy explanations of the complex AV system - and cleverly presented the alternative as being a simple race-for-the-finish, even if few MPs ever actually make it over the 50% of vote share that most people would call the finish line.

The 'yes' camp played up the unpopularity of our lazy, good-for-nothing politicians, as they sought to capitalise on the 'let's make them work harder' argument. This approach was as fundamentally negative, in its own way, as the 'no' alternative. So we shouldn't be surprised when the public either don't care, or become even more alienated than they were before.

That can only lead to one result. Did it have to be this way? Not if both sides were prepared to have a high-minded discussion about the relative merits of each system.

You can't blame the 'no' camp for deciding to go negative in response. Doing so is playing into their hands very well indeed. The 'yes' camp do have cause for regret, however. It's a shame they didn't hesitate before lowering themselves to this depressing, knee-jerk level.