Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[alfred russel]

Sheilbh, the chart on the age breakdown of the exit / remain breakdown is interesting.

Sometimes a dramatic difference in attitudes between young and old is the result of ongoing changes in attitudes--I'd say gay marriage is an example of that.

Other times it is a function of age--I know there are disputes as to the true impact of the effect--but the stereotype is to be left wing when young, and conservative when old.

It will be interesting to see which category the young Britons fall into. Perhaps this will be something of a high water mark for the leave campaigners (assuming they lose), as in the near future Briton will be less euro skeptic?

[Zanza]

So if the results are 50.3% Leave and 49.7% Remain, will the UK really leave?

Both major parties and the current prime minister are on the Remain side, and it seems like a rather momentous decision for such a tiny majority in a referendum.

They could go the tried and trusted way of EU referendums and just repeat it after getting some concessions.

[Richard Hakluyt]

I'm still inclined to think that when it comes to the actual poll then Remain will get a 10% bounce. It is so much easier to criticise the EU down the pub or in an opinion poll, but for a pragmatic group it will switch to remain in the polling booth.

This certainly seemed to happen in the two recent tests of public opinion, ie the General election and the Scottish referendum.

55-45 I reckon.

[Sheilbh]

Other times it is a function of age--I know there are disputes as to the true impact of the effect--but the stereotype is to be left wing when young, and conservative when old.

It will be interesting to see which category the young Britons fall into. Perhaps this will be something of a high water mark for the leave campaigners (assuming they lose), as in the near future Briton will be less euro skeptic?

I think I've read before that this has always been the case with Europe. That actually it's not that the young are more pro-European, as they age they become more Eurosceptic.

It's also a useful code for being anti-Tory/UKIP. So if you look at the last election there was a similar trend where support for UKIP/Tories goes from 35% for under 25s to 64% for over 65s. On that age chart the other key is that, in general elections at least, turn out among over 45s is 70%, turnout below that is around 45%.

I'm still inclined to think that when it comes to the actual poll then Remain will get a 10% bounce. It is so much easier to criticise the EU down the pub or in an opinion poll, but for a pragmatic group it will switch to remain in the polling booth.

Agreed and I still expect a situation like in Scotland. But I think the big issue is turnout. Leave are hyped. Old people vote. I'm not sure that we'll have Scottish level of turnout which I think was around 85%.

[Gups]

Agreed and I still expect a situation like in Scotland. But I think the big issue is turnout. Leave are hyped. Old people vote. I'm not sure that we'll have Scottish level of turnout which I think was around 85%.

This is true. On the other hand ABC1s vote and C2DEs less so and the former are way more Bremain than the latter.

[Capetan Mihali]

God I feel so worldly knowing what that ABC1 C2DE stuff means.

[Sheilbh]

Excellent piece by Janan Ganesh - voice of the metropolitan elite

The liberals leading the Brexit charge are riding a statist tiger
Janan Ganesh

Maybe next time he will wink at the camera between sentences or cross his fingers as he grips the lectern. Short of these visual clues, Jeremy Corbyn cannot give less sincere advocacy to the European cause than his effort in London last week. Britain's Labour party leader smoked with resentment of the EU while commending it to voters. Everyone suspects he is open to exit because everyone suspects he thinks everything he thought circa 1975, when the far left equated continental integration with the bosses and their flighty capital.

For Eurosceptics, Mr Corbyn's speech embarrassed and encapsulated a Remain campaign made up of conscripts and mercenaries cringing before Leave's unfakeable passion as the referendum nears. But this is Britain. If Mr Corbyn's line on Europe blends grudging trust in continuity with impatience for the question to go away, it is the one feature of his politics that matches the popular will.

Leavers have another, deeper reason to take no joy in his hedged interventions. If such an unreconstructed socialist flirts with their cause, the awkwardness is as much for them as for the other side. The fishiest thing about British Eurosceptics is not the narrowness of their obsession but the breadth of their movement. Here is a coalition of economic liberals and nostalgic statists who dislike the EU for opposite reasons that cannot both be valid and who, for the tactical imperative of campaign harmony, pretend not to notice.

Michael Gove, Boris Johnson, Daniel Hannan, Nigel Lawson: the principal Leavers are ultraliberal Conservatives who smell in Brussels a will to stifle and ossify. For them, exit can Singaporise this country, priming it for an unforgivingly competitive century as a zone of light regulation and porous capital borders. (An account of Britain as it is, you might think). But for almost everyone who will vote their way on June 23, the EU is a callous enabler of markets not a check on them, an intrusion by the outside world not a barrier to it. Their picture of a sovereign Britain evokes Japan more than Singapore: a stable culture, a paternalist economy, a place that forgoes some growth for cohesion.

Eurosceptics at the top of public life are early middle-aged, hyper-educated and sanguine to the point of credulity about Britain's future as an entrepôt. Their sensibilities formed under Margaret Thatcher and the west's liberal turn since the 1970s. Eurosceptics in the country are older, poorer and bitterly disrupted by the same liberalism. Their sensibilities formed during the Keynesian imperium of the mid-20th century, when jobs were for life and economic flows between nations were for wise men to modulate.

You can see dazzling heterogeneity in this or you can see a lot of people lying to themselves and each other. They do not just want different things, like the trade unions and employers who favour the EU for distinct but compatible reasons. They want opposite things. This dissonance was plain in the spring, when free-market Leavers pretended to mind European state-aid rules that proscribed the subsidisation of Welsh steel. It was plain on Sunday, when Mr Gove promised curbs on both EU and non-EU migrants that lie far from his instincts.

Prominent Leavers go through these contortions because they know their audience. It is, in its taste for a more ordered past, nearer to Mr Corbyn than to them. It is also nearer to Nigel Farage, who leads the populist UK Independence party, and the hard-to-place Labour MP Frank Field. The telling axis does not run from left to right but from openness to closedness, from liberalism to control.

If liberal Leavers feign illiberalism during the campaign, the problem is not their cynicism. Politics is what it is. The problem with their pact of convenience is that it only makes strategic sense for the other signatories, the illiberal Leavers. In a sovereign Britain, they would have the electoral numbers. The clamour to become an even more globalised economy under a nightwatchman state is, despite Mr Hannan's fluency, nearly nil.

David Cameron, the prime minister, campaigned on Monday with the leaders of the Greens and the Liberal Democrats — and Harriet Harman, as if the Labour grandee also led her party. Mr Corbyn's equivocation says something about Remain's half-heartedness but more about Leave's incoherence. For a cause fronted by such market-friendly futurists, it tempts many who think the British economic model was just right around 1970. Liberal Leavers must look at the tiger they are riding and wonder if they and everything they cherish will end up inside.

Edit: For what it's worth Ganesh's views are similar but opposite to mine. No to leaving now, maybe to leaving in ten years, in his case if Northern Europe is still propping up economic basketcases in the South and the drive to liberalisation, single market reforms continues to peter out

[Jacob]

God I feel so worldly knowing what that ABC1 C2DE stuff means.

Please share with the rest of us

[Capetan Mihali]

God I feel so worldly knowing what that ABC1 C2DE stuff means.

Please share with the rest of us

Going from memory, it is a ranking of socioeconomic class devised by British sociologists (and maybe the government?) in the 60s or thereabouts -- from "A" executives and professionals down to "C1" skilled labor down to "E" basically unemployable.

So Gups is noting that higher-class individuals tend to turn out to actually vote more frequently and that they are much more likely to vote "Remain" than their lower-class counterparts who've been polled on the issue.

[Sheilbh]

Yep. See poll on this page:
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/04/eu-referendum-campaign-polls-fault-lines-politics

And this interactive:
https://yougov.co.uk/turnout-o-meter/

Thought I had today. What if we stay, England and Wales narrowly vote to leave but NI and Scotland enough to keep us in?

[mongers]

Yep. See poll on this page:
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/04/eu-referendum-campaign-polls-fault-lines-politics

And this interactive:
https://yougov.co.uk/turnout-o-meter/

Thought I had today. What if we stay, England and Wales narrowly vote to leave but NI and Scotland enough to keep us in?

I've been looking for online odds where I can bet on what we discussed yesterday or the above result.

[Jacob]

Going from memory, it is a ranking of socioeconomic class devised by British sociologists (and maybe the government?) in the 60s or thereabouts -- from "A" executives and professionals down to "C1" skilled labor down to "E" basically unemployable.

So Gups is noting that higher-class individuals tend to turn out to actually vote more frequently and that they are much more likely to vote "Remain" than their lower-class counterparts who've been polled on the issue.

Gotcha. Thanks

[Josquius]

Interesting fault lines. 
Scotland and London United against the rest

[Sheilbh]

Really interested why Wales turning to UKIP for their anti-establishment politics, not Plaid.

[mongers]

Really interested why Wales turning to UKIP for their anti-establishment politics, not Plaid.

Plaid, in part an establishment party of the liberal and well-off?

Also might have something to do with the North/South divide in Wales, perhaps?

Oh and a lot of Welsh working class people are proud to be British.