People’s Vote UK have tweeted:
People’s Vote UK
@peoplesvote_ukThis year by the numbers:
✊✊Two People’s Vote Marches
👩👩👧👦Over a million people at each march
💷Record fundraising year
📃5 Million leaflets distributed
🎤3,000 events all over the country
✉️Hundreds of thousands of letters sent to MPs
LOL. Yes indeed, a perfect example why LTOV is utter bunk, but one many will nevertheless not ‘get’ 😀
I think ‘The People’s Vote’ also understand how marxists use statistics.
From a capitalist perspective, that’s a lot of cost for little-to-no return on investment. Glad it’s not my money that’s being spaffed up the wall in such a fashion.
Happy New Year to one and all. My apologies if this is slightly off-topic, but it seemed quite interesting – a YouGov survey of 496 GB adults who claim to have voted for Labour in 2017 but not in 2019:
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/12/23/their-own-words-why-voters-abandoned-labour
Main reason those people changed their minds:
35% – Jeremy Corbyn/Leadership
20% – Other unspecified reason
19% – Brexit (both because Labour was too Remain and too Leave)
16% – Policy/Economic competence
10% – Tactical voting
9% – Don’t know (sic)
5% – Did not get around to voting
3% – Extremism
And, yes, that adds up to 117% of those surveyed. Well, it is a poll.
If the sample is representative (a very big IF), then the implication is that Brexit was only a small part of why Labour lost 2.6 million voters between the two elections. Which may help explain why the People’s Vote expenditures had so little impact.
Gavin Longmuir (30th December 2019 at 5:15 pm), that the total adds to 117% suggests that most respondents felt they had to give just a single top reason. ‘Getting Brexit Done’ versus ‘not having Corbyn as PM’ – one could care about the first yet choose the second for top spot.
The report also notes that Brexit mattered in the rejection of Corbyn.
Niall, it is a fair point that perceptions on Brexit may have influenced perceptions on Corbyn. But the statement “making him look weak and indecisive” suggests that being pro- or con-Brexit was not of itself that significant; it was the lack of character demonstrated by his failure to take a stand one way or another.
I am very dubious about any poll that relies on self-reporting of votes — even more so about a poll in which nearly one out of ten of the self-reporters does not know why he changed his mind. And the 117% mistake suggests there are other problems, at least in the reporting. But if we put doubts aside and take the poll at face value, only about 1 in 5 of the 2.6 million voters who abandoned Labour did so directly because of Brexit — maybe 0.5 million people.
The implication is that Brexit is very important to a small minority of the population. Most people have an opinion on it, but it is not something about which they would be prepared to go to the barricades. That view of Brexit as a minority concern is bolstered by the mere 6 million people who got off the couch to vote for the Brexit Party in the Euro-elections.
This could be good news for Boris. He can strut around making grand statements about Brexit, and then slide through an EU-pleasing BRINO. The push-back from the great majority of the UK citizenry would probably be negligible.
I’m not sure that he actually was being “Evasive or Indecisive”, I think he was being “deliberately evasive”, which is both understandable and worse. Corbyn knew full well that whichever side of the BRExit debate he chose he would have lost either BRExiteers or Remoaners and tried to deliberately steer a course between both with his (apparently) settled position being closer to extreme BRINO than anything else.
There was no win in BRExit for the Labour leader whichever position he had taken he would have been criticised for alienating one side or the other.
There was no way that Labour could “Out EU” the Lib Dems and the Lib Dems showed that there was nothing substantial to be gained from being ultra Pro EU either.
The losers position at the 2014 European Elections (Big UKIP win) also lost at the UK 2015 GE, the UK referendum on EU membership in 2016, the UK GE in 2017 (80% of MPS elected stood on a Leave manifesto with labour and the Tories being very close in vote share), the 2019 European Elections (Brexit party big win from nowhere)and the UK GE in 2019 (Best Tory result since 1987 and Labour vote collapses).
How much more losing can the losers do before everyone accepts that UK Independence is a decisive (not necessarily only or of interest to the biggest percentage) vote winner?
It restrained or flipped Labour voters in a way not seen since 1979. If we count the indifferent in elections and referendums, the winner would mostly be none of the above.
This is clearly not the sign of permanent allegiance but could be a starting point to it if, Bojo concentrates on making normally Labour voters feel both richer and good about themselves, Trump style without out tripping up the Tory base too much, i.e. grow the economy of the North rather than redistribution of wealth from the South.
Independence clearly has made people who would otherwise vote Labour feel good about themselves enough to abandon their Labour voter identity and vote Tory, where previously they would only stretch to voting UKIP or BREXIT. Yes he lost a few Tories to the Lib Dems, but not too many to win. So now he all needs to do make his voters feel richer.
It helps that Jez was offering ludicrous unfunded policies, with a background of courting people his voters see as enemies, but ultimately that was largely true against Theresa the Appeaser in 2017, where Labour were a very close second and the Tories needed a confidence and supply arrangement.
So in the final calculus, it was BREXIT wot won it for Bojo.
Or if you prefer the Scot Adams persuasion analysis, Jeremy and Theresa both looked nearly equally awful in 2017 in order of importance to the general public, 1 – appearance, 2 – policies and 3 – election strategy.
Theresa looks like a lifeless robot, her policies hurt her base, her strategy for the election was to gobble up left wing votes with left wing policies that repelled her base, both leaver and remainer and take ages doing it so the whole country was sick of hearing about the general election and gave her much longer to expose her personal god-awfulness to voters.
Jeremy Corbyn looks like Trotsky’s failed geography teacher turned rough sleeper, his policies appealed to the left wing of his base, but not the right, his election strategy was to appeal to low probability voters like students.
“How much more losing can the losers do before everyone accepts that UK Independence is a decisive (not necessarily only or of interest to the biggest percentage) vote winner?”
Careful! One of the traps we all tend to fall into when we find ourselves on the winning side of an issue we feel strongly about is overestimating the degree of support from other people.
A parliamentary majority gives the Tory Party the keys to drive the bus, but wise Tories will remember that 56% of voters did not vote for them. The Tories commitment to Brexit was not much of an attraction for voters.
The numbers say that Labour lost 2.6 Million voters — but the Tories did not pick up many votes. One could argue that all those Labour switchers voted Tory — but then one would also have to argue that an almost equal number of former Tory voters abandoned the Conservative Party. In the next election, will those Tory & Labour Party switchers stay switched or come home? Time will tell!
Everything now depends on how successful Boris’s largely Left-Wing policies will be in making all “voters feel both richer and good about themselves” — not just former Labour voters.
And this has to be accomplished during a period of probable increasing global economic turmoil, as governments around the world have to face up to the unsustainability of their past practices of borrowing & printing money. Voters are likely to blame today’s incumbent politicians for the consequences of policies which long pre-date those unfortunate incumbents. Interesting times!
Winning coalitions of interests that is a general election win don’t just need to be the biggest issues. The need to be compatible issues.
BREXIT is essentially binary at the electoral level (not the political of course) so it can be a decisive wedge issue whilst only adding a million or two votes for the winners and suppressing a million or two for the losers.
Independence was decisive and powerful across party lines repeatedly. Therefore a necessity for the winner this time.
It’s not everything, it’s just too big to ignore or publicly fudge. Theresa and Jeremy discovered this in their own way.
Your concern remains a bit weak sounding and defeatist. It is unpersuasive even if right.
Also ineffective at coping with the cause of concern, so pointless.
What concrete action do you propose? Or just most empty hand wringing?
We voted in the Bojo DC godzilla. Now we have to let our chosen leader time to act and accept our medicine when it comes.
Itellyounothing — the concrete action is to be realistic about the situation, and to act in accordance with that. Do not make the Brexiteers mistake of acting Triumphalist and over-estimating popular support.
Boris has a big majority in Parliament, which lets him do things. However, he has no majority among the people of the UK. For all his bravado, Boris may recognize this — essentially adopting policies on fracking, climate change, NHS, infrastructure, borrowing, de-emphasizing London, etc that may have more support outside the Tory Party than inside it.
Apart from a small minority, most people are tired of Brexit. They will be quite happy with whatever form of BRINO Boris can slide through — just so long as he can get Brexit off the front pages.
For the rest of it, you are quite right — the electoral system has given the Tories a majority in Parliament, and the Tories have (for now) Boris as their Prime Minister. It is time for him to govern as best he can, in the interests of the population as a whole, and deal with the surprises that the next 5 years will throw at us all.
Maybe, maybe not. Certainly the Remoaners would have us think exactly that (q.v. Nicola Sturgeon – Scottish First Minister / Wee Jimmy Krankie impersonator and her band of demented porridge wogs.
What it DOES mean though is that he has the power to pass legislation in the UK and sign treaties on the UK’s behalf, which is all that really matters.
As for those who didn’t vote or voted for other parties. They are just shit outta luck. Try again in 5 years.
John — Don’t be obtuse! It is a published fact that 56% of those who cast votes did not vote for Conservative Party candidates.
As you point out so eloquently, the minority status of the Tories among the voters does not matter in the UK’s electoral system. Tories have a parliamentary majority, and are able to do anything they can get the majority of their own MPs to vote for — even dumb things, like making the UK “Carbon Neutral”.
However, prudence would suggest that Tories keep a weather eye on the majority who did not vote for them, and try not to do dumb things.
@Gavin – You don’t live here so why don’t you just fuck off with this regular bollocks about “the majority don’t agree with this, that or t’other”.
It doesn’t fucking matter what people think. It matters how they vote and if they chose not to vote they don’t get a say.
That’s not obtuse, it’s the way democracy works here in the UK.
Happy New Year, John!