If you want a scintillating, furious polemic on why the Yes to AV campaign lost so heavily, go no further than Liberal Vision:

The YES campaign was eminently winnable. But it ended up being run by readers of the Guardian for readers of the Guardian. Readers of this newspaper are about 1% of the voting electorate – and are also a statistically extreme group.

Their views do not chime remotely with mainstream British opinion. There is no purist Guardian editorial proposition that could ever come close to winning a referendum in the UK…

The lessons of all of this should be pretty clear. Never again allow a bunch of well-meaning, self-important Guardian readers to run a national campaign in which they talk to themselves and then blame their embarrassing naivety on external forces beyond their control.

Read that magnificent sentence again:

There is no purist Guardian editorial proposition that could ever come close to winning a referendum in the UK…

Yet as we know it is the Guardian which most BBC opinion-formers turn to for their deepest spiritual inspiration.

Indeed, Liberal Vision feared the worst lfor the AV campaign ast August – this piece reads well now.

Conclusion?

That any referendum across the UK risks unleashing forces of defiant populism which are unpredictable and unmanageable.

No doubt one reason why the worst nightmare for all three mainstream political parties would be a referendum on the UK’s EU membership – who would dare campaign for saying Yes to continued membership after this debacle?

Which in turn is why a sense of popular disgruntlement and disillusionment gnaws away at public life:

"They know we’ll say No to lots of things – but they’re too cowardly to ask us…"

One reason for the Scottish Nationalists to proceed carefully if they want to win a referendum on Scottish independence – what if for no obvious reason the local populist instinct turns against them?

Meanwhile in Republika Srpska of all places the use of a referendum as a factor in democratic life is under challenge – from the ‘international community’, as represented in good part by the European Union.

Hmm.

Is it such a good idea to try to block any consultative democratic process, even it the result will be unhelpful and the whole exercise is designed in part to prompt you to look undemocratic by blocking it?

The formidably clever International Crisis Group forlornly tries to find a reasonable way forward:

The 9 May UN Security Council discussion on Bosnia and the 13 May European Foreign Affairs Council should be used to launch a strategic rethink of international policy. This should culminate before the planned mid-June RS referendum.

Specifically: the international community should convene a high-level conference to set its goals in Bosnia, reconfirm its commitment to the Dayton Peace Agreement, remove the High Representative from local politics, develop plans to relocate his office outside Bosnia and give the EU the capacities to become a leading actor…

But here again, is not the basic problem that the supposed solution starts with what clever elite members of the ‘international community’ want, not what the people of Bosnia themselves might want?