In Off the reservation I wrote I would “make some far out predictions based only on the most tenuous of currently observable facts.” At the risk of confirmation bias I will hereunder examine what evidence to support that thesis is gradually becoming available. I will rely heavily on Wikipedia compilations of all available polls as any one poll has to come with so many health warnings.
Even compilations of polls have to come with a health warning that they represent, at best, a snap shot in time, and are subject to becoming out of date very quickly in a rapidly evolving environment. For that reason I will rely as much as possible on polls whose field work was conducted after 29th. March 2019, the date Brexit was supposed to happen. I do so as I believe that date could come to mark a watershed in UK history.
I also believe that not a lot of significance may happen between now and 23rd. May, the starting date for the European Parliament elections. Westminster is in recess, and Theresa May has survived (again). The May Corbyn talks are being kept on life support so that both sides can claim they are doing something positive to resolve the mess, but it is in neither leader’s interest to actually come to an agreement.
Any agreement they could strike would probably split both the Labour and Conservative parties and might not pass in the House of Commons even with both leaderships applying the whip. Corbyn has absolutely no incentive to bail out Theresa May, and May has now achieved her immediate objective for the talks of providing a pretext for securing another A.50 extension.
It has come at the price of having to take part in the EP elections, but she can always claim that they are irrelevant in the context of delivering Brexit. Until she can’t.
What happens if the turn-out is much higher than previous EP elections and results in a large surge of support for Remain or second referendum supporting parties? Strangely for a departing member UK European Parliament elections turnout has actually increased slightly over the years, while it has declined almost everywhere else.
A poll for the Open Europe think-tank by Hanbury Strategy indicates the Tories would suffer a crushing defeat if the elections took place now.
Basically a 60:40 split in favour of Remain or second referendum supporting parties… This compares to the results of the 2014 UK EP elections as follows: Labour 25%, Conservatives 24%, UKIP 28%, Lib Dems 7%, Others 18%: Almost identical to the 52:48 referendum result. Basically, since then, Labour has gained over 10% support at the expense of hard Leave parties, UKIP and Farage’s new Brexit party.
These results are corroborated in General Election polling for the main parties:
The trend line is based on the average of the previous 15 polls. Basically the Tories have been in free fall since Theresa May failed to “deliver Brexit” at the end of March and the Labour decline has halted. Recent polls all show Labour ahead.
Strangely, there has been no Remain/Leave polling since March, but March polls all show Remain well ahead, often by double digit margins. Interestingly, some February polls show Remain ahead of leave by c. 50% among Labour 2017 voters living in Northern England and the Midlands – supposedly the heartland of Labour Leave supporters. Another February poll shows Remain ahead of Leave by 62% among respondents of voting age only since the 2016 referendum, and by 26% among non-voters in the 2016 referendum. If Corbyn is worried about splitting the Labour party, it seems he has less and less to worry about.
Most polls show undecideds in the 10-30% range, so there is still plenty to play for. However it is hard to see those voters plumping for the Conservative party, given the humiliations it has wrecked upon the country since February.
This has resulted in a lot of voters saying they would boycott the European Elections:
Some 26% of Britons say they would sit out elections in protest, while 47% say they would vote in them, and 17% admit they would not vote in them anyway.
A higher proportion say they would vote than turned out in the 2014 EU elections in the UK – 36% of potential voters turned out five years ago, though usually more claim they will get to the ballot box than actually do so.
Four in ten (43%) say they will be angry if European Parliament elections go ahead (30% saying they would be ‘very angry’), while 28% would be pleased and 23% would not mind either way – 5% were unsure.
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Forced to choose between no deal, Theresa May’s deal or a long delay with EU elections, 41% prefer no deal, 35% a long delay with EU elections, with just 16% favouring the prime minister’s plan – nine percent answered ‘don’t know’.
The vast majority of the boycotters seem to be Tory activists and voters: Rank and file Tories to BOYCOTT EU ELECTIONS – `Brexit shambles SHAMES BRITAIN’
GRASSROOTS Conservatives are set to “go on strike” and boycott the European elections after Theresa May extended Article 50, it emerged today.
Theresa May was forced to plead with the EU to extend Article 50 until June 30 to prevent the UK crashing out of the bloc without a deal. In her letter to the President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, the Prime Minister said the UK would be participating in the European elections on May 23. But according to local party chiefs, “a lot of Tory activists are going to be on strike” because of the extension.
The Chairman of the Conservative London East Area said the Tories were struggling to find people to campaign for the party in the European elections.
Dinah Glover said: “They just don’t have that commitment – they’re just not going to put weeks of their lives on hold to campaign for something they don’t believe in.
“Going out to campaign would be giving a very literal example of the fact that we are still in the EU.
The mood among Tory activists is hardly going to be improved now that May has actually agreed a Brexit delay until October 31st. Basically I see no reason to alter my prediction in Off the reservation that the Tories will win only 15% of the vote and that the turnout will be high compared to previous EP elections. The Hanbury poll cited above also found that “The survey also suggests that Remain supporters would be more likely to vote – 47% compared to 38% of Leave voters” which should increase the Remain parties margin of victory.
So we have the perfect storm for Theresa May. Unable to get rid of her until December, her party has effectively gone on strike. Her supporters are much less likely to go out and vote, and Remainers – disappointed by the response to their 1 Million march and 6 Million petition signatures – are likely to turn the EP elections into an effective second referendum vote. If Remain and second referendum supporting parties can rack up in excess of the 17.4 Million who voted Leave, the argument could well be all but over.
Theresa May has promised to get the UK out of the EU. Corbyn is a half-hearted supporter of EU membership at best. Neither supports a second referendum. May knows she is going to be out as PM as soon as her party can manage that feat. Corbyn cares only about having a general election and moving into Number 10. If he pulls that off, then what? It’ll be he with the hopelessly split Party that cannot pass a Brexit bill. The only outcome I can envisage at this point is a hard Brexit when the EU refuses another extension to Article 50. It would be another matter entirely if Corbyn actually endorsed EU membership and said that as PM he would revoke Article 50, of course.
The EU will not want to be seen to be forcing or precipitating a hard no deal Brexit. Official Labour party policy is to support a second referendum, although only if they can’t force a general election. My hope is that Labour will see the winds of change blowing, and will seek to get out ahead of public opinion in order to claim credit for it.
The 2014 election only got 16 million votes, so it would be difficult for Remain parties to surpass the referendum result in total votes. They would have to about double their 2014 votes. That said, a resounding win for pro-Remain parties will still weaken the support for Brexit. It can and will be cited as evidence the populace has “changed its mind”.
Are the petition signers public? That would make a great knock list.
Yes it is a tall order. The turnout would have to be much more like that of the referendum (72%) rather than that of a European Parliament election (38% in 2014).
No doubt the Russians have the knock list…
NewGov have just released a new poll: Compared to the results of the 2014 EP elections: [Labour 25%, Conservatives 24%, UKIP 28%, Lib Dems 7%, Others 18%] this shows Labour, the Lib Dems, and the combined Brexit/UKIP parties roughly unchanged and the Conservatives down 8%.
Compared to the Hanbury poll published in the Diary above and conducted just a few days earlier this new YouGov poll shows Labour are down 14, Conservatives -7, Brexit Party +5, UKIP +6.5, Lib Dems (no change), Greens +4, and ChangeUK +3.
The official Launch of the Brexit party (and unveiling of Rees-Mogg’s sister as a candidate) may give the Brexit party a further bounce, but it is harder to explain the boost to UKIP and the fact that Labour have lost more than the Conservatives. However the Conservatives, at 16% are probably close to their irreducible core vote (and in line with my prediction!) and probably can’t fall much further.
Based on these figures, Leave supporting parties are at 45% but I don’t know to what extent the poll take account of differential Remain/Leave turnout.
YouGov’s standard general election polling has Labour on 32 and Conservatives on 28%. For the EP elections Tory supporters are defecting mainly to UKIP and the Brexit party while Labour supporters are defecting to the Greens, Lib Dems and Change UK.
Buried in the small print of the detailed results is the fact that over 40% of respondents would not vote (18%), didn’t know how they would vote (21%) or refused to answer (2%). 19% of those who voted Leave in 2016 said they would not vote while only 7% of 2016 Remain voters said they would not vote.
Although voters typically overstate they intentions to vote, a high poll (by EP elections standards) still seems likely and there are still a lot of don’t knows to be swayed either way. Voting patterns seem much more fluid than in a general election, and even if there were a general election, only 60% would vote Labour or Tory.
In that respect the UK is increasingly resembling the European norm, with the traditional mainstream centre left and centre right parties losing more and more support to fringe parties, chiefly on the right.
You’d expect voting intentions to be more fluid in a PR elections than in a FPTP election. If you vote Green it will have no benefit in terms of getting an MP but it will influence the number of MEPs.
I note that new voters who declare an intention are overwhelmingly Remain. That’s a good thing, and I suspect most of those who are “don’t know” are deciding between Labour and Remain.
I see here yet another reason Tories don’t want the EP elections. Voters are sticky, and those who defect to a Brexit party will be more prone to stay there for the next Parliamentary elections. The same is true for Labour, of course, but Labour support looks more stable. That general polling already looks catastrophic for the Tories (yay!) with Labour outpolling them and Remain parties getting almost twice the vote of Brexit parties.
On a separate note, I don’t understand why centrist hard-core Remain Change UK is remaining separate from the centrist hard-core Remain Lib Dems. They don’t have the local party base of the Lib Dems and I’d expect them to get wiped out if they contest on their own in Parliamentary elections (although that won’t make much difference for the Euro elections). Merged, they might well beat the Tories in the EP elections.
The Lib Dems were complicit in the Tory/Lib Dem coalition government replacing student grants with a student loans system – and so they have lost the youth vote and carry a lot of baggage. However some kind of electoral pact with ChangeUK, whereby they don’t compete against each other in the same constituency in FPTP elections would make sense. They just need a public system of primaries to nominate joint candidates in areas where neither have a compelling presence.
Replacing student grants with student loans is simply unforgivable. Really, anyone with a pulse should be able to look at the US and view what we did to higher ed as a cautionary tale.