Nigel Marriott's Blog

An independent statistician using data to understand our world and to predict the future

You are here: Home / Elections / EU Referendum 2016 #1 – How and why did Leave win and what does it mean for UK politics? (a 4-part special)

EU Referendum 2016 #1 – How and why did Leave win and what does it mean for UK politics? (a 4-part special)

By

I am delighted to announce my 4-part series describing my analysis of the EU referendum results is now complete and available on Youtube. The full list of the clips are:

Part 1 – Where and How did Leave win?

Part 2 – Why did Leave win?

Part 3 – What does the leave vote mean for the next general election?

Part 4 – How will Brexit play out in the Richmond & Sleaford by-elections

I have analysed the results of the EU referendum in some depth and I hope you find my insights informative. Some specific highlights are:

  1. I estimate that Leave won 400 of the 650 parliamentary constituencies, a landslide in other words.  Note the youtube shows 403/650 based on an older model.
  2. With my seat level results, you can do some nifty analysis of leave votes by demographics. Class & Education comes through strongly, but I also show that Age & Ethnicity are being over emphasised here and the differences there are largely at the extremes.
  3. I take an in-depth look at the Lord Ashcroft survey and suggest that one reason why leave won is because Remainers conceded the argument to Leave when it came to Sovereignty & Immigration.
  4. The Leave & Remain campaigns were successful in focusing the voters’ minds on the Economy, Immigration & Sovereignty.
  5. Ultimately the discussion about the Left Behind/Disaffected misses the point that they are a minority of the population.
    • For Leave to win, they needed a larger segment of the population who are not left behind but who are opposed to the EU.
    • The debate on sovereignty, especially when it came to who should control Britain’s immigration policy, allowed these two segments to combine and win the referendum.
  6. Brexit has left the main political parties in a variety of states, specifically:
    • The Conservatives are very well positioned to exploit Brexit.
    • Labour votes comes from 2 wildly different extremes and leaves the party with an identity crisis.
    • The Lib Dems can use Brexit as a way back to political relevance but the Richmond Park byelection is all or nothing for them.
    • UKIP can make significant inroads into Labour’s working class seats provided they can pull their act together.
    • The Greens are effectively the Lib Dems in disguise and realistically they need to consider an alliance with the Lib Dems.

I hope you find these clips interesting and I would love to receive your feedback.