In 2010, incoming Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron announced a referendum on electoral reform in return for the support of the Liberal Democrats in a governing coalition. The referendum, which offered instant-runoff voting (branded as "Alternative Vote", or AV) as an alternative to FPTP, was held in May 2011. AV is not a proportional voting system, and as such many electoral reformers considered it no great improvement on FPTP: Liberal Democrat leader and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg called it a "miserable little compromise", and some leading proponents of electoral reform considered AV to be such a poor system that they voted for the status quo. LCER did support AV in the 2011 referendum, via the Yes2AV umbrella group, but following the heavy and widely predicted defeat of the "Yes" campaign, LCER's activities fell into abeyance for several years, with activists exhausted and the organisation having spent almost all its money.