Ed West: Nigel Farage could have saved the Yes campaign

Via Daniel Hannan, I discovered this article by Ed West:

For the past few weeks the Yes campaign have run a campaign aimed almost entirely at the soft Left, metro Labour supporters and the chippy SDP wing of the Liberal Democrats. Their campaign leaflets have asked us to vote yes because Tony Robinson, Eddie Izzard, Colin Firth, Stephen Fry and Benjamin Zephaniah will. I’ve got great respect for all these people in their chosen field, but why should I particularly care about their political views, especially as I happen to know they’re all almost identical? The No campaign has played rough, using soldiers and babies, and making some bizarre claims. But the Yes campaign have only themselves to blame for trying to appeal to such a narrow segment of society.

Lots of small-c conservatives support, or are sympathetic to, a change in the system, but the leaflets were almost perfectly designed to repulse them. This is a crazy strategy; the metro left are far from being a majority of the population, and the older, more tribal Labour voters are already in the bag for the No campaign.

I have to agree. Though I've been bombarded with Yes2AV messages, both in the post, and through Power 2010, I wasn't aware that UKIP were supporting the Yes side until I looked up their position on their website.

The last leaflet I received mentioned UKIP, but almost as an afterthought:

Ed Miliband, Alan Johnson and many Labour leaders, the Lib Dems, the Greens and UKIP all say YES!

Not great company.

West concludes

It’s the perennial mental disorder of the metro-Left – a failure to understand that decent, intelligent people might have different opinions to them.

Quite.