Voters in Oxford, “the home of liberal intellectualism”, demonstrated their overwhelming
support for electoral reform by voting Yes in last week’s AV referendum, in contrast to the majority of the rest of the country.
The majority of voters in Cambridge also voted in support of AV. Nearly four thousand more votes were cast for Yes than for No.
North London constituencies including Islington, Haringey and Camden equally followed this trend.
However, only 10 out of 440 national constituencies had a majority vote favouring AV.
Andrew Mell, Oxfordshire Press Officer for the YES campaign and an Economics student at Nuffield, said more people in Oxford voted in favour of AV because of an effective campaign which “engaged with all parts of the community”.
Oxford City’s result did not match the national consensus. 6.1 million people voted in favour of electoral reform across the country, as opposed to the 13 million who rejected it.
Mell said that it was time for those behind the Yes campaign to hold a “post-mortem” to “work out what went wrong”.
Sam Robberts, an OUCA member from Christ Church, said that both campaigns had centred on “demonisation” of the opposition.
“I was concerned that the increased consensual politics the Yes campaign required would in fact lead to greater voter apathy”, he said.
Robberts admitted that Oxford’s liberal stance hardly came as a shock.
“I am not surprised that Oxford and Cambridge, and North London voted yes”, he said.
“They are traditionally seen as the home of liberal intellectualism in this country, and it is good to see that those people at least stuck to their principles and delivered the result they wanted.”
