So Is The E U S S R Election In Effect A Second Referendum?

[ToraToraTora]

Several pundits on the TV this morning have commented that if you add up the votes for the pro brexit/pro remain parties it almost exactly mirrors the original referendum. So we have the answer, 3 years after the original vote the country is still pro brexit so can the SGB stop whining about a second referendum.

[jim360]

The turnout was around half that of the 2016 referendum, so clearly trying to argue that this election definitively and unambiguously reaffirms that vote seems about as bad as the reverse version of the argument in your OP that I've seen, whereby adding together Green + LD + CHUK + SNP + PC + Labour is greater than the sum of Brexit Party + UKIP + Conservative. The argument that these elections show that the country is now in favour of Remaining in the EU is, to be sure, even more dubious (are we sure that all Labour voters are for remain?), but my real point is that, at best, we can say that the country remains more or less evenly divided between the two sides based on this election.

[ToraToraTora]

they took half of Labour and the Tories jim, they are both split.

[Gromit]

The flaw with that is both Labour and Tory voters are divided between Leavers and Remainers.
And both main parties are confused as to which they support.

[jim360]

I didn't watch ITV so I didn't know how they'd done it. However, I'd have split the Labour vote 3:1 in favour of Remain and the Tory vote 2:1 in favour of Leave, which appears to reflect polling data slightly better. I don't know how much that tweaks the result, but really no amount of fine-tuning could override the main point: there is still no consensus on the way forward.

I mean if we're really doing this then surely you should take the Brexit Party's "surge" (=UKIP), lump that under a particular vision of Brexit, ie No Deal as a goal, and say that only 35% of the country supports that, and the rest is still seeking either reversing Brexit altogether or to find some sort of messy compromise that honours the 2016 result, however technically, whilst minimising potential damage.

[jim360]

In any case, let's just make my final point: the vote share of the avowedly Brexit-supporting parties is 35%, and that of anti-Brexit parties is 40%. And that's only across England and Wales. How you split Labour and the Tories is a matter of taste, but I don't think that the numbers will skew in favour of Leave.

[ichkeria]

Definitely not.
I’m rather cheerful this morning : Labour look like they’ve been spooked into supporting a second referendum properly. The Tories will probably become even more a Brexit party. And I don’t think they’d win a general election on those terms.
Turnout was up more markedly in “Remain” areas, which also sounds like a reason to be cheerful. Locally our area went LD, one of the few outside London and Scotland not to go cyan on the map :-)

[ichkeria]

In Wales it went 53-47 “Remain”, and that’s allocating all the Tory and a third of labour votes to the Brexit side

[Zacs-Master]

I don’t think you can make any conclusions based on a 40% turnout.

[JF85]

At the time of the referendum the Conservatives had a parliamentary majority and a mandate. Three years on they have no majority and clearly their own politicians do not support Brexit.

If anything, the local and EU elections have shown that there are more than two opinions in the country, and that FPTP might not be giving us the nuanced government we want.

[ichkeria]

You can’t predict the result of a referendum of course, but you can get a sense of the way the wind is blowing and I think despite Mr Farage’s success last night, the wind is blowing towards Europe.
It was also heartening to see that the predicted populist surge in the rest of the EU didn’t really happen. And Le Pen’s narrow victory over Macron in France ought to feel like a defeat for her.

[ichkeria]

And turn up was up across the EU for the first time in 25 years.
If you look at opinion polls on the EU in the other member countries you find that Italy is the arch Eurosceptic, with 70% only supporting remaining in.
That’s one reason why the so called populist parties in other countries are not actually arguing for *-exit.

[cassa333]

Labour was a leave party. Albeit on different terms and conditions so Leave had 58.1%. A bigger margin than the original referendum.

Added to this the fact so many leave voters (probably more than remain voters) were disaffected by the government not doing what they were supposed to do they didn’t bother to vote.

[jim360]

I don't think there's any meaningful sense in which all of Labour's votes can be assigned to the Leave vote.

[ichkeria]

Your second paragraph is a point well worth making, although it’s impossible to say whether those voters would would turn out again.
And needs to be set against the large numbers of first time voters who presumably also did not turn out in large numbers and who are overwhelming anti Brexit - of any sort,
The first paragraph is wishful thinking.
Congratulations if you think you know which side Labour supports because no one else does ;-)

[Spicerack]

You talk such mind-numbing botox, ichi, you should consider getting a job with the aBBC.

[ichkeria]

Also, if you look at the profile of the seats won, it looks like 38 of the 73 MEOs will be anti-Brexit assuming the NI results go as expected.
That assumes all the Tory MEPs are Brexiters and all the Labour proRemain which I’m a lot more confident of.

[Ryzen]

TTT...I think they want a best of 5 now.

[Old_Geezer]

In fairness though, you have to factor in that many remain voters opted not to participate in protest of having lost the referendum the undemocratic parliament had not delivered the result they had hoped not to occur, but knew, in the circumstances, it was right to follow through on. Probably.

[ichkeria]

Actually make that 39, as the Alliance candidate looks like getting in in NI

[ichkeria]

And fair play to the DUP’s Jeffery Donaldson for congratulating the three women who look certain to get elected in NI, even tho only one is a fellow (so to speak) unionist and Brexiter