A really insightful article by Henry Cooke on why the yes vote failed to win the cannabis referendum. The TLDR version is:
- The PM refused to spend a cent of political capital on it. Only 55% of Labour voters voted for it. She could have easily got that over 60%.
- They should have gone for decriminalisation, not legalisation
- They should have done what euthanasia did and passed the law in advance, conditional on a referendum endorsement, so people knew exactly what a yes vote would entail
- The yes campaign was terrible, and failed to focus on human stories, as the euthanasia campaign did
- The yes campaign was designed more to make yes voters feel good, than persuade more conservative voters to vote yes