Brexit: Inspiring New Polling Analysis Shows Majority of Constituencies Now Support Remaining in the EU

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There was some rare good news in the Observer on Sunday, when, two years and two months since 37.47% of the eligible electorate voted to leave the EU (17.4m people, compared to the 16.1m who voted to remain), the impossibility of this proposal, and the realisation that the government tasked with implementing it is spectacularly, almost inconceivably incompetent, has finally led to a situation in which support has swung back significantly for staying in the EU. 

Just to be clear before I proceed with explaining why this is good news, I’m no enthusiast for the EU’s neo-liberal tendencies, or for the way the Euro project was used to strangle Greece, but pragmatically we are tied to the EU through 43 years of laws and treaties, and our economic health depends on our involvement in the single market and the customs union, which allow the frictionless trade with the EU that makes up by far and away our biggest trading market. In addition, the free movement of people across the EU is, in general, a positive development, and not the righteous target of the misplaced fears of those with a tendency to insularity, racism and xenophobia. We are all nations of immigrants, and immigrants have an overwhelming tendency to assimilate.  

The Observer’s headline that encouraged a surge of optimism on my part, and on the part of so many other Remain voters, was “More than 100 seats that backed Brexit now want to remain in EU”, and its tagline explained, “Major new analysis shows most constituencies now have majority who want to Remain.” Further spelling out the change, the text of the article confirmed the study’s conclusion that “most seats in Britain now contain a majority of voters who want to stay in the EU.”

The research was undertaken by the Focaldata, a consumer analytics company, which “compiled the breakdown by modelling two YouGov polls of more than 15,000 people in total, conducted before and after Theresa May published her proposed Brexit deal on 6 July”, itself an unworkable “soft Brexit” proposal, which nevertheless enraged the evangelical Brexiteers on the right of the Tory Party, whose arrogance and capacity for self-delusion apparently knows no bounds.

As the Observer explained, the research “combined the polling with detailed census information and data from the Office for National Statistics”, and “was jointly commissioned by Best for Britain, which is campaigning against Brexit, and the anti-racist Hope Not Hate group.”

The Observer proceeded to explain that the analysis, which was “one of the most comprehensive assessments of Brexit sentiment since the referendum”, indicates a shift driven mainly “by doubts among Labour voters who backed Leave”, and that, as a result, “the trend is starkest in the north of England and Wales – Labour heartlands in which Brexit sentiment appears to be changing.” 

Pointedly, the article added that the analysis “will heap further pressure on Jeremy Corbyn to soften the party’s opposition to reconsidering Britain’s EU departure.” By any measure, Corbyn, an old left Labourite who shares the old left’s suspicions regarding the corporate aims of the EU project, has been a disappointment on the EU referendum, although by respecting the Labour Party’s democratic structure, and handing over leadership on Brexit to the very capable Keir Starmer, barrister and Remainer, who has set six tests that must be passed before we leave the EU, tests that require no damage to the economy and therefore seem to be unworkable, he appears to have ceded control over Brexit. 

In addition, on a pragmatic basis, the Labour Party has spent two years sitting on the fence, content to watch the Tories implode, without confronting the difficulty of challenging their own Leave voters, who made up about a third of their voters. 

As the results from Focaldata show, however, it now appears to be time for Labour to stop sitting on the fence and actively encourage its voters to oppose Brexit and either to support a second referendum, or to endorse the right of Parliament to refuse to support our departure from the EU. 

The former is better, in that it gives the people a right to change their mind, but I fear that the disgusting pro-Leave right-wing media would do all they can to encourage some of the estimated 12.9 million people who didn’t vote in the EU referendum, and have probably never voted, to repeat the 2016 result by voting for the first time ever, and voting Leave. In addition, as the EU referendum was a vote to return sovereignty to the UK, and sovereignty resides in Parliament, and not with the Prime Minister or the Queen, it would be fitting for MPs, who generally supported remaining in the EU by a 2:1 majority, to be responsible themselves for the final refusal to leave the EU.

The polling also provided details of some of the MPs at risk because of shifts in their constituencies, with the Observer noting that, “Among the constituencies to switch from Leave to Remain is that of Boris Johnson, the former foreign secretary and face of the Leave campaign. Support for Remain in his Uxbridge and South Ruislip constituency has risen from 43.6% to 51.4%, according to the new model.” 

The Observer added, “Surrey Heath, the constituency of the other Leave figurehead, Michael Gove, also emerged as having a pro-Remain majority. Support for Remain increased from 48% in 2016 to 50.2%.” The paper also noted, “The seats of three pro-Leave Labour MPs switched to Remain. Birkenhead, Frank Field’s constituency, now has a 58.4% majority in favour of Remain. Graham Stringer’s Blackley and Broughton constituency now has a 59% in favour of Remain. Kelvin Hopkins’s Luton North seat now has 53.1% backing Remain.”

From Leave to Remain in Swansea

In an accompanying article, the Observer travelled to Swansea to see how the shift assessed by Focaldata played out on the ground. Tom Wall interviewed John, a cleaner in Swansea’s celebrated indoor market, who “ponder[ed] his momentous decision to vote Leave in the EU referendum.” 

“If I had the chance, I’d change my vote,” he said. “There has been talk of a lot of job losses and I’m not happy with that. It’s just a mess. I don’t think they know what they are doing.”

Geraint Davies, the pro-EU Labour MP for Swansea West, told the Observer that the dramatic swing was because of “voters’ frustrations with the tortuous negotiations, and a growing realisation that the tempting promises about inward investment and jobs will come to little in the end.” As he said, “People voted to leave the EU on the promise of more money for the NHS from the membership fee, access to markets and more trading opportunities, and taking back control of our borders. People are now realising that a lot of those promises won’t be delivered.”

He also pointed to “a growing feeling that Swansea is losing out rather than benefiting from Brexit”, explaining, as the paper described it, that “[r]ecent plans for a £1.3bn tidal lagoon in Swansea Bay to generate renewable power and proposals to electrify the rail line between Cardiff and Swansea have both been dropped by the government.” As he said, “The overall amount of capital expenditure is being constrained because we have to pay a €40bn divorce bill for leaving the EU. People are beginning to see that some of the big promises about investment are evaporating, and that is feeding into this feeling that we are being left out in the cold again.”

Also in the market, Tom Wall spoke to Rachel Jones, a sweet-seller working at a family stall. She said, “I think it was a wasted vote, 110%. If I knew that it was going to be like this, I probably wouldn’t have turned up to vote. You understand it is going to take time, but it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.” She added that she “wanted to register a protest vote by putting her cross in the Leave box”, explaining, “Swansea is having a really hard time at the moment. If you walk around you just see boarded-up businesses and charity shops.” But now, she said, “uncertainty around Brexit risks the very future of the market.” As she put it, “People are frightened to spend money. Things have gone up in price but wages haven’t gone up. None of us knows what is going to happen.”

At a food bank on Swansea’s post-industrial eastern fringe, Chris Lewis, a Swansea-born and bred Baptist minister who runs the food bank, told the Observer that Swansea had “never fully recovered from the decline of heavy industry in the 20th century.” As he put it, “It is a significantly deprived area. Regeneration hasn’t really replaced the industrial base that employed people in this area.” He added that “many Leave voters were angry about the state of their community, which had been further impoverished by benefit cuts and austerity.” As he stated, “Some of it was a protest vote. They felt alienated by sort of every elitist, privileged government. There was a degree of racism too – some people felt threatened by immigration.” However, “he believes Leavers are now switching sides as the reality of a Tory Brexit dawns on them”, in the Observer’s words. As he put it, “Some of the people who voted as a protest have flipped. They think these posh idiots are leading us to disaster in a charge of the light brigade.”

While this is all — finally — very positive, it remains to be seen how this polling can be turned into a strategic advantage, rather than just a morale booster, however welcome that may be after 26 months of existential torment. On a brighter note, it has been somehow apt — a sense of poetic justice comes to mind — to see the Tories destroying themselves over Brexit, led by the most incompetent leader ever, with chief Brexit cheerleader David Davis finally acknowledging the impossibility of his task, and with every pro-Brexit enthusiast revealing the extent of their mental deficiency every time they try to make out that Brexit will be anything other than a disaster for our economy, our standing in the world, and our necessary place as a country that relies on and welcomes immigrants in a world that only works because, across borders, immigrants are welcomed for the contributions they make to all our economies.

It may be that, come next March, when we are supposed to leave the EU, there will be some sort of fudge that prolongs the agony, perhaps for many years, but it may also be that it will signal the definitive implosion of, and self-willed destruction of the Tory Party. However, while very little in life would please me more, it remains even more important that, whatever it takes, the deranged business of leaving the EU is stopped, definitively.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London.

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