According to an article written for the Guardian by Andrew Rawnsley, nearly all the politicians who are leading the   No2AV campaign are fading names from the past, the majority of whom have never liked change. 

Interestingly the Labour Party have supported electoral reform in the past in their manifesto, committed themselves to a referendum, implemented it for the Scottish and Welsh Assemblies and they use it to select their own leader but now many within their party want to protect their own interest.

Andrew Rawnsley wrote:

Just when things were beginning to look a little bleak for electoral reformers, what with opinion polls indicating a loss of enthusiasm for changing the voting system, relief is at hand. It comes from those who want to cling to the status quo. The NO2AV outfit has unveiled the “big names” who will spearhead the campaign to retain first past the post. Prominent among them is Margaret Beckett. That ex-minister’s most memorable recent contribution to British politics was to incite a near riot by the Question Time audience to whom she tried to explain away the parliamentary expenses scandal.

Standing out among the no men is John Prescott, the former deputy prime minister whose offences against good taste and decency are too numerous to list. Over the last decade or so, it has been a reasonable rule of thumb that any cause he champions is a lost cause. Regional assemblies, Gordon Brown, the maintenance of dignity in high public office: none has survived close association with John Prescott.

I make it sound personal because this referendum campaign is going to be intensely so…

Most of the faces of the NO2AV campaign have next to nothing in common except their constitutional conservatism. And their age. John Prescott is 72. His fellow “big beasts” are also long in the sabre tooth: Ken Clarke (70), Margaret Beckett (67), David Blunkett (63) and John Reid (also 63). Only in this company could Charlie Falconer (just turned 59) feel young. William Hague (49) is the only heavy hitter associated with the no lobby who has not reached his half century. I draw this to your attention not to be ageist, but because it tells us that they are coming from another age. Most of the politicians fronting the no campaign grew up in the 1940s and 1950s when Britain had a two-party system for which first past the post was defensible. The relatively youthful William Hague is the exception who proves the rule. The foreign secretary has often said that he’d have been much happier as a politician had he been born a century earlier. The world to which they yearn to return is one in which politics was a two-tribe affair. The voters knew their place. That place was to make a simple binary choice between the blues and the reds.

Hostility to reform among some Labour tribalists has certainly been swollen by their bitterness that the Lib Dems entered the coalition with the Tories. But among many of those Labour cave-dwellers, antipathy towards Liberals long predates the formation of the coalition. Indeed, they are partly to blame for it. Labour club-draggers thwarted Tony Blair when he attempted to do a deal with the Lib Dems from a position of Labour strength. John Prescott has always had a visceral loathing for the third party. He threatened resignation when Mr Blair toyed with bringing Paddy Ashdown into the cabinet during New Labour’s first term.