Brexit and unmerited complacency

Friday morning was a strange one for me. As I tried to come to terms with the fact that the country has made what I believe to be a catastrophically short sighted decision, at the same time I was receiving emails and Tweets congratulating me on the fact that Opinium were one of only two polling companies (congratulations TNS) to predict a 'Leave' vote.

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Referendums don't settle things!

Hat tip to Tim Oliver on the Democratic Audit blog for this piece which highlights something that's been bothering me for a while.

When politicians and commentators say referendums will settle an issue 'for a generation' or for any length of time, they're wrong!

The 1975 EEC referendum has always been the example used to back this up. If a referendum happens in 2017 as David Cameron promised then it will have been 42 years between the two votes. But in between those two the issue was anything but 'settled'. In 1983 Labour's manifesto called for immediate withdrawal from the EEC. By the mid 1990s the Conservatives were ripping themselves apart over the issue and despite attempts by the leadership to resist 'banging on about Europe' the PM was forced to commit to a new referendum for exactly the same reason as Harold Wilson was.

Other examples are even less supportive:

• Scotland had a devolution referendum in 1979 which failed because of a turnout technicality (which my Scottish father is still annoyed about). There was then another in 1997 on devolution again, the 2014 independence referendum and, given the SNP surge since that result and the likelihood of hung parliaments for the near future, another one seems pretty likely. Indeed Nicola Sturgeon was very clear that it was only Alex Salmond who promised not to hold another vote, not the SNP as a whole.
• The 2011 Alternative Vote referendum was, obviously, a crushing defeat for change but with a hung parliament expected this year and upwards of four parties obtaining a significant proportion of votes, it's again not unreasonable to expect something to happen in the next parliament. In 2011 retaining the current voting system was clearly in the interests of both the Labour and Conservative parties who, in 2010, accounted for 66% of the vote. Depending on this year's result, that won't be such a sure calculation and it's easy to see the Labour and Tory high commands being tempted by the idea of all those second preference votes from UKIP and Green voters.

With both Scotland and the EU, whatever the result of the referendum the losing side (in both cases, the 'change' side) becomes ever more devoted and agitated. In the aftermath of a vote to stay in the EU, UKIP won't go away, they'll talk about how the media was biased and how the public were duped. They'll go after businesses which opposed their position publicly and campaign outside BBC offices.

Referendums don't settle anything unless they result in a decisive change to the status quo. For the losing side they're just a hurdle that can be overcome next time. Because there will be a next time.

A live action bullsh*t Express poll!

The Daily Express (full disclosure, a former client of my employer but long before I joined) has a bit of a history with what we politely refer to as 'bullshit polls'.

Their typical style is to report on phone-in polls of their own readers as if they are representative samples of the British public when in fact they are the worst kind of self-selecting surveys.

For a refresher, the problem with self-selecting surveys is that the only people who take part are those with an axe to grind who are willing to call the premium rate number required to vote. When you add to this the fact that it's only Daily Express readers who are being presented with the numbers to call, itself a skewed subset of the UK population, it's no surprise that the results end up being curiously one-sided in favour of whatever the paper's editorial line is.

Incidentally, fair play to the 2% who don't want to ban new migrants, the 1% who don't want energy companies to cut their bills, the 1% who don't want Brussels to stop meddling in the UK's benefits system and the 1% who think foreigners should get free treatment on the NHS.

This behaviour is not exclusive to the right but at least that's an error rather than an ongoing editorial policy.

Anyway, what's happened this time is that two Conservative MPs (Peter Bone and Philip Hollobone) and the Tory PPC for Corby have staged a "mini-referendum" on EU membership in which 80% of those who bothered to take part said they'd like to leave. I don't know much about the Corby candidate but Bone and Hollobone are fairly well known as being keen for Britain to leave the EU so I'm sure that had no impact on the results.

The sample size looks large, over 14,000 people but this meaningless as it's just a postal version of the self-selecting survey. In fact it's even more skewed because posting a leaflet is more effort than picking up a telephone and the leaflets apparently had the faces of the three men pushing the vote on the cover accompanied no doubt by some neutral information.

In order to take part you would have had to take that leaflet, fill in the form and post it. Apparently of the 100,000+ leaflets handed out around 14,000 were posted so that's a 14% response rate. Around 11,000 of these wanted to leave the EU which gives us around 80%.

Imagine that you're an ordinary voter who doesn't have a strong opinion on the EU but, if push came to shove, you'd prefer to stay in. Would you take part in this? Or would you put it in the bin with the rest of the junk mail?

This poll is utterly meaningless. All it tells us is that there are just over 11,000 people in Northamptonshire who really want to leave the EU. So out of the potential electorate of about 45 million voters, 0.02% are confirmed "Out" voters.

It's just a larger scale version of the type of bullshit 'readers poll' the Express publishes every week and is just as flawed and misleading. but that won't stop many people who should (and in many cases probably do) know better citing it as fact.

EDIT: One thing I forgot was when the Express hilariously put out a headline saying a YouGov poll (a proper polling company rather than Express readers with a landline handy) had put UKIP in second place above Labour! This was swiftly debunked as being just a subset of the YouGov poll filtered to Sun readers. Wishful thinking on the Express's part I assume.

EDIT: Anthony Welles has an (as usual) excellent take down of this at UK Polling Report

Has George Osborne single-handedly kept Britain in the EU?

Before David Cameron's game-changing-but-not-really-game-changing speech (details here) I put a couple of Tweets out:

Things we know about Cameron's migration speech 1: it won't be enough for Philip Hollobone or Peter Bone and the rest of the Tory 'outers'

— Adam Drummond (@AGKD123) November 28, 2014

Things we know about Cameron's migration speech 2: Labour will either say it was their idea or (shamefully) that it doesn't go far enough

— Adam Drummond (@AGKD123) November 28, 2014

Things we know about Cameron's migration speech 3: It will keep immigration at the top of the agenda which benefits nobody but Nigel Farage

— Adam Drummond (@AGKD123) November 28, 2014

Things we know about Cameron's migration speech 4: some scandal will happen before May forcing Cameron to make more concessions to the right

— Adam Drummond (@AGKD123) November 28, 2014

I'll check in with these predictions later on but to focus on the speech, the major news is that it's going to be about cutting in-work benefits rather than anything more restrictive (and illegal under EU law) like imposing an absolute cap or any sort of points system that would have been impossible to implement without the UK leaving the European Union.

It's not really a game-changer but it does set down a bit more clearly what form the 'renegotiation' will take and will no doubt calm the nerves of pro-Europeans (and businesses) who were afraid that Mr Cameron would be forced by backbench pressure to demand utterly unrealistic fundamental changes and then be forced to campaign for an exit when he failed to achieve them.

The problem Mr Cameron has always faced is that the gap between the minimum that the Conservative backbench 'awkward squad' will accept and the maximum that other EU states will give is unbridgeable. He was always going to have to make a choice between pragmatism and keeping the 'outists' happy and it looks like he's finally chosen the former.

Reports are that the Chancellor, George Osborne, is the one who spiked the possibility of an emergency brake or arbitrary cap on the number of EU migrants who can come to the UK in favour of a the cap on in-work benefits. As the master strategist, Mr Osborne has no doubt noticed that a central part of Labour's appeal to business is that EU membership would be safe under a Labour government but at risk under a Tory one. Today's speech, while obviously aimed at pacifying Tory backbenchers and appealing to Tory-UKIP defectors, will also be aimed at neutralising that advantage.

The Conservative leadership's hope was that this speech would dislodge immigration as an issue enough to be able to talk about the economy and make that the focus of their 2015 campaign. It remains to be seen whether this will be the case but, as my predictions show, I wouldn't count on it.

David Cameron has proved Radek Sikorski completely right

If you followed the Jean-Claude Juncker battle David Cameron has been waging with other EU leaders (my thoughts on the whole thing are here) then you'll have seen that the Polish foreign minister had some less than savory words about the prime minister's strategy when it comes to EU affairs.

Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland's foreign minister, said that Cameron's approach to the Juncker debate had displayed "a kind of incompetence in EU affairs" and accused him of listening too much to the 'stupid propaganda' of Eurosceptic backbenchers. He also said that Cameron had 'fucked up' several earlier encounters including his much noted veto of an EU fiscal union treaty back in 2011.

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Just put Juncker in and do it better next time

A lot of the arguments we hear about the 'Spitzenkandidaten' process have focused on how 9 out of 10 people can't name the person who apparently won it. In Britain his name was scarcely mentioned until after the elections when David Cameron moved to block him as European Commission president.

They talk about how he's a figure from the 1980s when Europe needs change and reform, they talk about how he's too much of a Brussels politician, he's not dynamic enough, he's too "federalist" (which, ironically in this context means he favours centralising power in Brussels).

All of this is true but it also misses the point entirely.


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More people think the EU is a 'good thing' so why would they still vote to leave?

Here's a link to a post I put up on the Opinium site a few weeks ago. It looks at the divergence between the two EU questions we ask regularly on political polls. The first asks whether the UK being a member of the European Union is a 'good thing' or a 'bad thing' while the second (more widely reported) asks whether respondents would vote to leave or to stay if there was a referendum tomorrow.

Until recently these have tracked fairly closely but now the percentage saying it's a "good thing" has overtaken the figure for "bad thing" for the first time while more people would still vote to leave than stay.

Anyway, click the link to find out why.

There's a democratic deficit in the EU and Britain's parties don't care

"Unelected bureaucrats", "Brussels Eurocrats" imposing their will on the British people against their wishes. Europe's democratic deficit is well established both academically and in popular culture and it's certainly one of the things that got mentioned most in the study I ran last year when we asked people what they least liked about the EU (alongside immigration).

The idea of "foreign bureaucrats telling us how to run things" is so entrenched that it's a wonder nobody has done anything about it. Why hasn't the European Union decided to do anything so that voters can have their say over what it does?

The answer is that they did. It's just that nobody in Britain seems to care.


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Treat yourself to a poll on Europe done by (mostly) me

Here's my festive, Christmas post and it's all about the EU!

The big project I've been working on for the last few months has been this (I wrote the report, not the article) which is all about the European Union and Britain's place within it.

Although there's far more data in the tables than we were able to include in the report, the basic conclusions were that British antipathy to the EU has three main sources:

• There's a hostility to the perceived impact it has on immigration which is why I think you can't rely on the "EU" figure being so low in things like the Ipsos MORI issues tracker. Immigration is seen as much more important than "Europe / EU" but the two issues are intertwined as our study shows. Immigration overwhelms the positive effects people think the EU has on areas like travel and the advantages for businesses
• There's a cultural barrier between the UK and the rest of Europe. We're far more likely to feel closer to other English speaking countries than those physically close to us and therefore things the EU does are viewed from a default position of hostility and suspicion regardless of the actual effects it has. It's not so much what the EU does but the fact that it's doing anything at all
• People don't think leaving the EU would be a particularly bad thing for Britain. In most areas (e.g. trade, relations with other countries) they think it will have a neutral or positive effect and therefore the answer to the "in or out" referendum question becomes more of an "eh, why not leave" rather than a "you can never take our freedom!". This second group does exist and is very large and vocal but not a majority and there is a large portion of the population who don't really think about Europe very much and are reacting to referendum polling questions with "well I suppose on balance it'd be better to leave"

The whole thing is worth a read (although I would say that) and there's plenty more data that we weren't able to fit into the report so we'll be coming out with some more tidbits and interesting nuggets as time goes on.

If you're wondering what connection a poll on the EU has with Christmas then that's fair. We published it in early December so for the last few months my to-do list has had the following items next to each other: "Write Europe report. Publish Europe report. Buy Christmas presents. Wrap Christmas presents..." and the two concepts have largely merged in my mind.

If you're looking for something to get you into a proper festive spirit, I suggest this followed by the 6th greatest Christmas film of all time.

Why isn't the EU more popular?

There's an interesting article by Pieterjan Desmet and Claes de Vreese saying that public perceptions of the EU and EU institutions vary from country to country depending on the public view of their own national institutions.

I've only read the summary but the basic point is that in a country such as Bulgaria, where confidence in national democratic institutions is not terribly high, the institutions of the European Union seem better by comparison. In a country like Denmark, however, where people are fairly confident in their national democratic institutions, the flaws in EU institutions are more apparent and viewed more critically. The ongoing democratic deficit is a good example of this.

As they put it:

"Being confronted with low-quality institutions at the national level makes citizens more positive about European institutions"


This makes sense because when Britain joined what was then the EEC, one of the reasons that sticks in my mind (I can't remember where from I'm afraid but it may have been Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain) was that the UK was in such a state, and the political class seemed so unable to solve its problems, that the EEC seemed more competent by comparison.

The reason for my confusion then is that the currently UK reports relatively high levels of satisfaction with national institutions at a time when confidence in politicians and the political process has rarely been lower. Current polling shows little confidence in Labour or the Conservatives and only the biases of the electoral system make a hung parliament in 2015 less likely than in 2010.

UKIP are doing well as a way of kicking the political class but two years ago, the electorate endorsed the current voting system by a margin of 2-1. Obviously the AV referendum was more complex than that (natural bias towards the status quo, irrelevant focus on cost and the shocking, staggering, Romney-like ineptitude of the "Yes" campaign") but on the surface it looks like a vote of confidence in the current system.

Charles Grant points out that one of the reasons for Britain being more eurosceptic than most of the continent is our "relatively glorious role in the Second World War" so maybe the answer is that people have confidence in the institutions because of their proven history but not in the people that run them at present?

I don't have an answer but it's an interesting dichotomy.

The Europe speech (finally!)

I've been meaning to write something on David Cameron's "game changing" (or maybe not?) speech on Europe in which he promised a renegotiation of Britain's membership followed by a referendum to either ratify the new arrangement or leave the EU entirely.


Bottom line is that the biggest impact will be if Labour decides to match the renegotiate/referendum commitment or whether they stick to their current position of not offering one.

Because while David Cameron says he wants Britain to remain in the EU under more favourable terms, that scenario relies on a huge number of "ifs". By "huge number", I really mean 3:

1. the Conservatives win a majority (currently being offered at 13/8 on Ladbrokes)

2. the other EU leaders are willing to grant any sort of concession to the UK

and of course:

3. the public back whatever settlement is presented to them

I'd say the chances of a Conservative majority, especially after the boundary change was voted down, are fairly slim (though not impossible) and my prediction for 2015 is currently a toss up between narrow Labour majority or a hung Parliament with the Conservatives as the largest party. The referendum promise therefore requires the consent of whoever gives David Cameron the necessary majority in the Commons to remain as PM.

The second also seems very unlikely and this is something that I've talked about before. The "renegotiate then referendum" approach was tried before by Harold Wilson in 1975. He achieved a fairly meaningless renegotiation but it was enough to say that membership was now acceptable and campaign for a "yes" vote.

I expect David Cameron to achieve even less because at least in 1975 there was some good will towards the UK for the tortured process it had to endure when joining (namely the double deGaulle veto and high financial costs imposed that other members thought unfair). The rest of Europe currently sees the UK as carping from the sidelines and using a moment of existential peril for the Eurozone countries as an opportunity to take advantage for itself. A bit like war profiteering. It probably doesn't help that some Eurosceptics talk about the leverage for renegotiation in precisely these terms.

If David Cameron goes in and unilaterally demands better terms for Britain while remaining a full member of the single market, he will be met with frosty glares and awkward silence. His only hope is if Angela Merkel believes Britain is important enough as a liberal (and fiscally conservative) counterweight to protectionist (and fiscally profligate) countries like France that it is worth granting some minor concessions to keep the UK at the table.

This may be why David Cameron's speech tried to make the renegotiation issue less about Britain seeking unique terms of membership than about reforming the whole EU to make it work better for all members (i.e. work better for Britain, the others being a side benefit).

My prediction is that Angela Merkel and the other EU leaders will offer David Cameron some minor, fairly meaningless concession on an area unrelated to the single market but that even if this is not offered, Cameron will present the result of "renegotiation" as success and campaign in a referendum for it to be accepted.
He will be joined by Labour, the Lib Dems and most of the business community and the public will vote to remain an EU member under the "new" terms.

However, as mentioned, all this depends on either a Conservative majority in 2015 or whichever party props up a Conservative led coalition acceding to his European policy. The odds of which seem slim at the moment.

Therefore the interesting thing is whether Labour will offer a referendum or not. Tony Blair agreed to a referendum on the European Constitution to stop Michael Howard using it against him and the Conservatives, and Eurosceptic press, are already hitting Ed Miliband for his refusal to offer one on Britain's membership.

But despite the coverage it gets, Europe is still nowhere near the most important issue for the public and elections are decided on the state of the economy and the competence of the potential government. Labour are still blamed for the state the economy was in two years ago but with a potential triple-dip recession, the Conservatives advantage on this issue may disappear and Labour may end up in government despite taking a beating on Europe throughout the campaign.

However, if Labour does promise a referendum on the topic then, as I've also blogged about before, EU exit becomes more likely as the defeated Conservatives will likely lurch to the right and unite in favour of withdrawal. The in/out referendum then becomes (unpopular) Labour government against the media and a united right making withdrawal much more likely.

Eurosceptics therefore may find themselves facing a strange situation in which a Labour victory is more likely to lead to Britain leaving the EU than a Conservative one.

Expect to hear more Tories making this argument

So I mentioned a little while ago that we're starting to see some response from what we're going to term the "realist right" to the idea that Britain could be drifting towards leaving the European Union.

There was the Economist article last week citing the likely costs of leaving the EU and now (well five days ago) we have Damian Green calling out the "free market only" position as a fantasy.

Crucially he points out that the reason why it's a fantasy is that any change in the arrangement would require the agreement of the other EU states. If this comment from Francois Hollande is any indication, that's not going to happen.

It's looking more and more like the key decision on whether Britain will remain in the EU will be made by Angela Merkel. She'll have to determine what level of concession Germany would be prepared to accept to allow David Cameron to save face and secure a "renegotiation" in return for keeping a potential pro-austerity ally in the EU.

For David Cameron's part he needs to lower expectations for what a potential renegotiation could secure so that what he manages to eventually wring out doesn't seem like a complete surrender. Killing off the idea that Britain can reduce it's EU membership to the single market alone is the first step in that process.

Boris Johnson's high wire act on Europe and other quick points

I mentioned a few posts ago that the issue of whether to leave the European Union or remain a member would split the Conservative party between its business backers, who would want to stay in, and its more emotional (or, to use a nicer term, idealistic) members and activists who would instinctively want to leave.


Two things in the last week or so have illustrated this quite nicely.


The first is that Boris Johnson had originally called for a referendum on EU membership some time ago but recently seemed to hedge his bets by talking up the virtues of the Single Market and appeared to back away from the referendum idea. He has since tried to merge these positions together by calling for the UK to remain a member of the "single market council" while stripping away most other elements of EU membership.

Boris is essentially trapped between two opposing constituencies on this issue. As Mayor of London, a city which relies extensively on being an international harbour for capital and services, he must do whatever he can to prevent anything which might harm the prosperity of the city (and the City). This means reassuring the business community that the increasingly eurosceptic tone of the Conservative party doesn't portend anything which would hamper their ability to make money, much less the massive instability and economic chaos caused by a "Brexit".

However, as a potential candidate to succeed David Cameron as Tory leader, he must pass the Conservative party's eurosceptic litmus test whereby even mentioning the benefits that EU membership brings the UK is heresy.

Boris has in the past been more than happy to take unpopular stands on behalf of business (witness his regular condemnation of banker bashing) but in those cases his stands were more popular among the Conservative party than the general public whereas on Europe the situation is reversed.
To solve this dilemma he has adopted the line favoured by most Tories who aren't in favour of total withdrawal: taking the good bit (membership of the Single Market and the benefits for British business that it brings) and trying to separate it from the bad bit (everything else about EU membership). The problem for Boris, and David Cameron, is that getting the good without the bad isn't really an option.

This brings us to the second thing which was the Economist, in a leader article and an extensive feature, making the business case for remaining in the EU. The article calls withdrawal a "reckless gamble" and says that "Britons would suffer far more than they currently realise" if that route were taken.

But aside from listing the potential downsides of leaving the EU the real service that the Economist provides is explaining why the holy grail of a renegotiated relationship, involving Britain keeping all the benefits of the Single Market but being bound by fewer obligations and rules, is a pipe dream.

This matters because "renegotiated" membership is the most popular choice among voters as well. When presented with a straight choice between "in" and "out", voters choose "out" by some margin. However, if a middle option of a renegotiated, looser relationship were on offer then the YouGov poll cited shows that 46% would choose it while only 26% would withdraw.

However, any renegotiation of Britain's position in the EU would require the consent of the other member states (that's what "negotiation" means) and not only would demanding all of the benefits but none of the obligations of EU membership be difficult at the best of times but the other states are becoming increasingly annoyed at Britain's posturing and refusal to help resolve the euro crisis. The Swiss and Norwegian positions that eurosceptics so often cite are less attractive than they appear but also completely unrealistic for a country the size of Britain, particularly given that the EU already regrets the arrangement that was granted to Switzerland.

Some push back against the possibly looming Brexit appeared a few weeks ago mainly in the form of articles in the Guardian and Observer but now we're starting to see other publications come at the topic from the right. It will be interesting to see which approach proves most convincing in the event of a referendum.

UKIP are probably smart to avoid a pact with the Tories

Just a quick post relating to this news that Michael Fabricant MP, a vice chairman of the Conservative party, has called for an electoral pact with UKIP followed rapidly by Nigel Farage saying “No deals...it’s war” on Twitter.

Ignoring the fact that the photo makes him look quite sinister, Mr Fabricant’s proposal is superficially quite logical. UKIP’s threat to the Tories is not that they might win seats themselves but that enough potential Tory voters in marginal constituencies might vote UKIP to deny the Conservative candidate victory.

In 2015 the Conservatives already have a significant hurdle preventing them from winning a majority as the current arrangement of constituencies and voters means that if both main parties have 37% of the vote, Labour would have 309 seats and the Tories 267. To get a tiny, barely workable majority of 6 seats, the Conservatives need to win the election by 7 points while Labour would need a 1 point win.

The proposed changes to the boundaries, to make this situation more even, have been vetoed by the Lib Dems and have almost no chance of passing unless David Cameron can buy off every other minor party to pass the changes by a tiny margin.

So it’s not surprising that lots of Conservatives have looked to UKIP as the potential solution to this problem given the purple party’s current position at third in the polls. (Tip for any aspiring Conservative MPs, if you want the media to instantly promote you to “Top Tory” status just call for a pact with UKIP).

However it’s also not surprising that Nigel Farage has reacted the way he did, for three main reasons, excluding the offence taken when David Cameron called UKIP a collection of closet racists:

1. As this chart from the ComRes poll last week shows, although 2010 Conservative voters are the largest single group of new UKIP supporters, they also draw from both the Lib Dems and Labour parties as well as from those who did not vote. Associating themselves directly with the Conservative party would risk putting off the 32% of voters in that chart who did not vote UKIP or Conservative in 2010.
2. As the Lib Dems are finding out now, in coalitions the junior party almost invariably suffers more than the senior party as it loses most of the supporters who voted for it as a protest against the establishment but doesn't have the base that larger parties do to withstand the mid-term unpopularity that governments endure.
3. (This is the big one).  If UKIP’s primary goal is (logically) for the UK to leave the EU then that may be better served by a Labour victory in 2015 than a Tory one.

Daniel Hannan may despair of the lost opportunity of a Conservative/UKIP pact but picture the two possible scenarios:

Some sort of referendum on the UK's EU membership (either a straight remain/withdraw vote or some sort of ratification of a "renegotiated" arrangement where rejection will be taken as a vote to withdraw) is almost certain to be in the Conservatives' 2015 manifesto and will likely be matched by a commitment in the Labour manifesto. Either that or Labour commit first to outflank the Conservatives and David Cameron then has no choice but to commit as well.

If, by whatever parliamentary arithmetic, the Conservative party continue to govern after that election, presumably with David Cameron in Downing St then we'll see a split in the right when that referendum comes.
The "stay in" campaign will have the support of the the Labour party, the government and the establishment voices of the Conservative party while the "leave" campaign will have the right wing of the Conservative party, UKIP and a few right wing newspapers. The government's mid-term unpopularity won't be so much of an issue because the main opposition party will be on side and therefore unwilling to exploit it.

If Labour win, either an outright majority or in coalition with what remains of the Liberal Democrats, then the Conservatives will presumably depose Mr Cameron as their leader and revert to the form they showed after 1997 with the more Eurosceptic candidate becoming leader. Being in government forces moderation upon a party and once freed from that burden, the Conservative party will be able to indulge the Eurosceptic wing even moreso. In this scenario there is still a split in the Conservative party but the right wing is clearly dominant and the opposition, and the Conservative supporting press, is united in favour of withdrawal.

If we accept that an EU referendum is likely to happen no matter which party wins in 2015 then a Eurosceptic vote is more likely under a Labour government (which, given recent economic news, is going to be unpopular) with the Conservative party and the whole centre right united behind one position than under a Conservative or coalition government where the right is split between moderates like David Cameron and the more UKIP inclined members of his party.

There really aren't any compelling reasons for Nigel Farage to accept any offer from the Conservative party.

Would 56% of the UK really vote to leave the EU?

So the main finding of this week's Opinium/Observer poll is that if presented with a hypothetical in/out referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union, most people would vote to leave.

The Observer have presented this very nicely as always with a patriotic looking Nigel Farage standing in front of a union flag but there are always a couple of caveats about polls involving referendums, Europe and particularly those involving both.

The first, from Anthony Wells, is that when a polls asks if people want a referendum on any topic the answer tends to be "yes". This is because even if people have a modicum of respect for their own local MP, they are distrustful of MPs in the aggregate and will always choose to have their own say rather than delegate authority to politicians. However, as we saw with the AV referendum and more recently with the Police and Crime Commissioner elections, wanting more direct democracy in the abstract doesn't necessarily translate into a willingness to take part if a vote actually happens.
For this reason we didn't think it was worth while even asking whether there was widespread public demand for a referendum on EU membership as the numbers would have come back as expected and in any case public demand rarely features in the decision to hold a referendum or not.

The second is from Mike Smithson which is that in the two UK wide referendums to have been held (on EEC membership in 1975 and AV in 2011) the vote for maintaining the status quo has been twice as large as the vote for change, 67% to 33% in 1975 and 68% to 32% in 2011. The implication here is that the UK tends to vote for the status quo with the campaign often focusing more on the cost of making the change (as was certainly the case with AV) than the pros and cons of the current arrangement. If a referendum had been held on whether to join the EEC before the Heath government did so then I have always thought that the public's answer would have been 'no'.

Although I have no doubt that the Opinium/Observer poll is an accurate representation of how the public would respond to such a question if asked now, it's important to remember that any actual vote would come at the end of a long and, no doubt impassioned, campaign of voter education.

When we ran the question we did discuss the possibility of giving respondents some background to help them make an informed choice as we do with work for clients when the questions are on a topic that people may have limited knowledge of. However we decided against it not only because we couldn't possibly hope to include all of the information required but also because we have no idea how the campaign would turn out and what information voters would ultimately be responding to.

With the standard voting intention question it's understood that people are responding to the current state of events and that the numbers are a reflection of how each party is doing at the moment, something which could change during an actual election campaign but where most voters can be said to be receiving a reasonably balanced mix of news praising and criticising the government.

With the European Union, there is effectively no "yes" campaign. At the moment the news that the public receives about the EU is almost entirely negative with virulent criticism from the most popular newspapers (save only the Guardian, Independent and Daily Mirror) along with news of impending financial apocalypse and of Greeks and Spaniards rioting.


Until recently I would have expected an in/out referendum on the UK's EU membership to produce a status quo result similar to the other UK wide referendums as the costs of leaving the EU became apparent and the 'leave' campaign had to sell the public on benefits which necessarily remain hypothetical. The business community would make the point about potential tariffs and the effect on exports while the basic unfairness of having to abide by EU rules but having no say in how they are made would ultimately lead more people to stick with the devil they know.

However, the seemingly never ending crisis in the Euro-zone and the possibility of dramatic changes in the institutional makeup of the EU mean that the "status quo" may no longer be the safe and benign "devil you know" and be morphing into something that fundementally changes Britain's relationship with the EU. If that happens then the structural advantage enjoyed by the status quo in any referendum starts to disappear and factors like the majority of the popular press having a very clear agenda on one side start to make a difference.