Like millions of others, I voted for the party which is now the largest single party from any country in the EU Parliament and which won the British Euro elections by a country Mile – Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. The reaction of the Westminster and media classes has been predictable: “Didn’t the Lib Dems do well! This is a vote against Brexit.” You could not make it up. But they did.
The BBC coverage of the results was a disgrace. Mad Al Campbell who created the dodgy dossier which justified the illegal war in Iraq was allowed to claim that the Brexit Party was funded by Roubles ( Russian Money). The Electoral Commission says this is not the case, there is no evidence that it is the case. It was just a lie and a smear but there was no attempt by the BBC’s Huw Edwards or Laura Kuenssberg to challenge that lie. The Green Party harridan Sian Berry made up numbers to back her claims but though they were patently false she also went unchallenged.
As Nigel Farage appeared Ms Kuenssberg noted that he appealed to a “certain kind of voter”. What kind Laura? Racist? Stupid? White? Working Class? Provincial? Northern? Xenophobic? Poorly educated? Certainly Laura did not mean the well paid middle class metropolitan elites she mingles with. Laura let the mask of impartiality slip badly. So how would the establishment spin what was clearly another triumph for we dirty plebs against the establishment? Simple: Remain won.
To arrive at this conclusion you add up the votes of explicitly remain parties ( Libs, Greens, Nationalists in Wales & Scotland and Change UK) and then those of the hardline leave parties (Brexit & UKIP) and say it is 40% plays 35%, the country now wants to Remain. The Times newspaper (fake news central on this matter) went one further arguing that while Labour was fence sitting the Tory’s were a remain party (as Brexiteers had all voted Farage) and so made the scores 49% to 35%.
Al Campbell argued that while he had voted Lib Dem, not Labour as he had done in all other elections, and that while many others had done so too and that Labour had to change its policy to Remain, for the purposes of this contest it was already a Remain party so that makes it 63 plays 35.
As it happens both the Tory party (campaign headline pledge “vote Conservative for Brexit” causing many Remain Tories like the treacherous old bastard Heseltine to vote Lib Dem) and Labour are, as things stand, committed to leave. But I shall not argue that this makes the result 58 plays 40 for Leave although, actually, it does.
While I am sure that all of us who voted Brexit Party or UKIP want to leave the EU, there are surely some Greens who always vote to “save the planet” but who want to leave the EU. Some folk vote Plaid Cymru because they are just tribal cottage burners but they hate the EU too. Therev are tribal Liberals who oppose EU membership – not many but some. It goes on. So the party alignment in the Euro poll is a guide but not a totally accurate one.
So instead I look at the most detailed analysis of actual voters which is provided by Tory peer Lord Ashcroft. There is a flaw in his polling in that some voters in the Euros won’t be able to vote in a referendum. I refer to the several million EU but non British citizens on the roll and one assumes they are largely remainers. Ashcroft polled 10,000 folk who had actually voted so this is a large enough survey to have only a 1-2% margin of error. It is amazingly detailed and makes grim long term reading for the Tories and Labour and rather good long term reading for the Brexit Party and the Lib Dems.
The full results are HERE but the key paragraph is this one:
Overall, 89 per cent of Euro-election voters who voted Leave still want Brexit to happen – 55 per cent of them with no deal – and seven per cent now say they want to remain. Meanwhile, 81 per cent of Remainers who voted last week say they still want to remain, with 15 per cent now saying the best outcome would be to leave. Among all those voting in the European elections, 50 per cent said they had voted to Remain in the referendum and 45 per cent to Leave; now, 50 per cent said they wanted to leave, 46 per cent said they wanted to remain, and 4 per cent didn’t know.
Ends.
Even allowing for demographics (old leavers dying, snowflake remainders starting to vote) that suggests that those voting in the Euro poll were a bit more remainerish than the population as a whole. Maybe there are perhaps a few folks who hate all parties but felt strongly about Brexit, the so called left behind folks, so voted only in the referendum. Or maybe it was the ability of Germans or Froggies to vote in this poll. Who knows?
But the Ashcroft data shows clearly that whatever the media classes or the political elites might say there has been no seismic shift away from Brexit. If there was a second people’s vote tomorrow it would again be close but despite three years of being told that we were stupid, did not understand the issues, were racist and xenophobic it appears that just over half of us still want to leave. That is what the actual hard data tells you. Not that I’d expect Laura Kuenssberg, Huw Edwards or anyone at the rotten , taxpayer funded BBC to admit it soon.