UKC

Emily thornberry... seems like a woman of principle! Sod off J.C!

Pretty depressing results so far, or am I reading it wrong??

Still plenty of results to come but the trend seems as expected. Massive surge in Brexit party support and similar on the remain side but split between lib Dems and greens. Conservatives and Labour getting hammered as expected.

And 60% not voting - so who the hell knows what’s going on?

Yeah-that's just weird-how can you be indifferent (either way) on this issue?

Not sure about 'massive surge  in Brexit Party support' means that all that much has changed (copyright T May). Obviously it is a huge  increase for the Brexit Party because it simply  did not exist last time round but not so sure it's a huge surge for Brexit itself. Farage simply seems to have hoovered up at the pro-Brexit votes from UKIP, and sundry other  small parties like Independence from Europe  which put up candidates last time round but have since   fallen by the wayside. Farage has benefited from providing a clear, simple message and a single rallying point for Brexiteers while Remain have squabbled and splintered their vote. I hope they learn their lesson.

Farage is an arse  but he is a very clever arse

Maybe a lot of folk just don’t care that much to get out and vote - although there are clearly a lot of folk full of passion on both sides, quite a lot of folk are relatively indifferent.

Maybe. Clearly the case that previously hardly anyone gave a flying f*ck about EU elections (judged by turnout percentage), but this was always going to be regarded as another referendum by proxy and the last one had, I think I'm right in saying, the highest percentage turnout of the electorate ever seen in this country?

Just been watching it with my 17 year old, very impressionable, son, who agrees totally about Thornberry.  Labour is screwed with JC at the helm, I said it from day one.  

A really good way to seem principled, clear and competent is to stand anywhere near Jeremy Corbyn.

The combined vote for remain parties is bigger than that of hard Brexit parties, but I suspect the only thing we are going to hear about is Nigel Farage victory.

Thats not at all clear given the tories and Labour are both rather riven on the subject. Personally I am relieved, given the low turnout, that the Brexit party only polled a few percentage points above UKIP last time. Its still a sad day when brits in these numbers, even as a protest, vote for a party, led by this snake oil salesman, with no proper democratic constitution, with directors censored for racist comments, no manifesto and plenty of questions to answer over its funding.

There was some good news last night.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/may/27/humiliated-tommy-robinson-s...

LAB manifesto: priority is to execute brexit and to stop freedom of movement -> hard brexit

CON manifesto: the same.

so 60% hard brexit vs 40% remain.

If we accept that people voting for LAB and CON are split about brexit, the remain vs brexit vote comes down to about 50%-50%.

This is not good enough to stop brexit. Something like 60%-40% is required. And this can only happen if Farage's vote collapses.

It is the only major election where I have ever come close to deliberately choosing not to vote and I'm still not sure that I was right to vote.

It was not a single issue referendum, my vote should not be interpreted as a vote on any single issue.   Had I chosen not to vote it would not have been down to indifference.

With that result I am think it is clear that the country actually does want to leave the EU. To me that is very depressing, but it is going to make other people happy today. I am fortunate that I have skills that are internationally marketable and my girlfriend has an Irish passport, so if this place goes to the dogs we can jump ship.

A result like last night's was on the cards - why would anyone vote Tory or Labour given their performances during last three years?

The problem is that, in the same way the rise of UKIP before the 2015 general election had an influence on Cameron and the more anti EU cabinet going for a referendum, the result last night will increase the chances of a hard brexit and that I think would be a disaster.

The parties that want to stop brexit or have another referendum split the vote between then. The percentage voting Lib Dem, Green and Change was slightly higher than the percentage voting for Brexit, but unfortunately I don't think we will get another referendum.

I wonder if David Cameron is pleased with his tenure as PM.

Dave

How do you work that out?

Votes for dedicated Leave parties - 34.9%

Votes for dedicated Remain parties - 40.4%

Conservative - 9.1%

Labour - 14.1%

Split those last two up whichever way you want but in order for it to be a Leave majority 65% of those Conservative and Labour votes would have to vote Leave. That might be realistic for Conservatives, but not for the Labour vote especially if you listen to their top dogs over the last 24 hours.

Alan

I don’t think it’s as clear cut as that. The clear anti - Brexit parties polled higher than the Brexit Party on a low turnout. What’s harder to analyse is what the Labour and Tory votes mean regarding Brexit. It is profoundly depressing though. 

What’s that old quote about lies, damn lies and statistics?

Last night I watched politicians from all parties try and spin the results in order to support whatever positions they already held or wanted to achieve in the future.

Conservatives will take the results as a sign to leave with or without a deal.

Labour will see the results as a need to support a second referendum, provided JC lets them.

Lib Dems and Greens will think that they are actually becoming popular for reasons other than Brexit.

Change UK - not sure what happens to them. Or UKIP.

In parliament nothing has changed.

The Brexit fiasco rolls on.

It's the first election in a long time I haven't voted. There wasn't anyone who represented me I felt 

But I was actually surprised the turnout was so high, originally I was thinking  noone would bother with it as we are voting for MEP's who'll (hopefully) only be in a job for a few months.

But it evolved into a mini in out referendum, but I guess not for everyone.

This is the clearest diagram of the facts that I've seen so far. Facts that the Brexiters don't like and are trying to smother behind lies and distortions.

tiny.cc/owbc7y

I think you are spot on Alan... not many hard brexit types would have been voting tory or Labour. Remain look pretty strong now, especially given the Scotland effect. As I said above, there was every incentive for hard brexit types to vote this time and, depressing as the Brexit party vote is it's much less than I feared (talk of 39% at times).

The tories seem in a real bind... if they push for hard brexit with a new leader the left of their party almost certainly support a vote of no confidence and there is an election where wth a split vote with Brexit the conservatives are in real trouble. For anything at the other end of the spectrum they need Labour's help.

Don't think that's right. The Greens have a right to assume that, following the school strike, Blue Planet and extinction rebellion. We LibDems understand full well that with our robust party infrastructure and clear Bollox to Brexit message we are acting as a rallying point for Remainers. The rest may follow if we manage to save the country... 

I think that the greens will have attracted voters for a variety of reasons, their anti Brexit stance being only one of them. Their environmental policies were surely a huge attraction for many voters.

Their leader was spouting on last night, even as the results were being announced, as to how they had attracted the young voters - a pretty quick analysis of the results without any evidence to back it up and an indication of how all parties were spinning the results.

Link doesn't work for me Gordon.

MEPs for dedicated Leave parties - 28

MEPs for dedicated Remain parties - 23

Conservative - 3

Labour - 10

These are the people we are sending to represent us in the EU, the majority of which are all for leaving the EU. Not sure what sort of message that shows.

Sorry about that. I shortened it with tiny url. Here's the long one back:

https://twitter.com/ajmpolite/status/1132885832107548672?ref_src=twsrc%5Etf...

The exact same as the message last time. I doubt any of those Labour MEPs are anything other than the softest of brexit with most really being remain.

I just expected better since we now actually have the facts on wtf is going on. But plenty of people don't seem to mind. I am still amazed with Wales, having a majority Brexit Party, despite so much money and improvements filtered in by the EU, I just don't understand.

That isn't right. The 34.9% is votes for dedicated NO DEAL brexit parties.

40.4% for parties dedicated to remain and/or a second referendum containing a remain option.

and 23.2% for parties who support some sort of hard brexit, but not no deal (though the Tories might well go no deal anyway).

Scotland and NI still to declare, lowish turnout, and the fact that this wasn't actually a referendum on brexit anyway, and I think the only real conclusions you can draw from the UK result is that people are still very much divided, and pissed off with both the Tories and Labour.

I agree that it is unbelievable that 1/3 of the population who bothered to vote, can consider voting for a despicable charlatan like Farage, but that is the way it is. Brexit has broken the country and it will take years to repair it.

However the figures from these votes indicate what most of the polls have been saying - a definitive swing towards remain in the population as a whole. Not to the 60:40 level that probably would be required to nail the coffin shut, but possibly enough to bring a second referendum which could at least stall things.

Wishful thinking maybe.

Alan

What isn't right?

Are you saying that that 23.2% would all be Leave voters if there was a second referendum?

As I said, in order to swing it 2/3 would have to vote Leave. That 14% for the Labour party is unlikely to be made up of Leave voters since most of them would have defected to the Brexit Party for this vote.

Alan

Amazingly the turnout is only 1.8% up on the 2014 elections (36.7%). Turnout just over 16.6m.

Mind you it’s nice to see leavers (who often cite the EU as being undemocratic) embracing European democracy.

Well the EU money in those projects has cleared failed. 

And to be honest if you visit these projects you understand why. from what I see they create infrastructure which  then fails to attract jobs. Or you create things like cafes or art centres in tourist areas with low paid zero hour type jobs. 

I think the 23.2% would mostly be leave voters - they were voting for leave parties. Labour is a leave party, as stated by their leadership. (Just not a no deal leave party). Lots of labour leave people will have defected to the brexit party, yes - but quite possibly a larger number of labour remainers will have defected to Lib Dem and Green.

But more than that, what I'm saying is that you simply can't use these results to predict or infer the outcome of a hypothetical second referendum.

Yorks and Humber looks pretty good. Big shift from Ukip and less so, Cons to New-ukip, no big anti-eu sentiment gain, its just rebranding. 

Shift from Labour to Green and LD. Well deserved by all three of them as parties.

Jk

Perversely it also illustrates that the current withdrawal  deal is probably still the way forward for both Labour and Conservative centrists ....... 

Scotland and NI to be added yet...

I don't think Scotland can result in anything other than 3xSNP, 1xLib Dem, 1xTory and 1xBrexit Party, now; only the Western Isles haven't declared.

Mr Corbyn on Sky news at the moment refusing to back remain and not calling for a second referendum.

He does support a deal and putting it to a public vote.

And he says he’s listening to his supporters/voters/the people.

I missed that bit, hope yet.

re turn-out. Belgium puuting all of us to shame with an announced turn-out of 88%!

May be we deserve the shit we're in.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that brexit has cost us not only a lot of jobs and business and opportunities but also the Conservative party as we know it with roots strained in the center ground. What comes next will at least make Italian politics seem grown up and stable. Dangerous times. 

Jk

Brexit is not the cause of the current mess,  it is just one of the unpleasant symptoms.

That's pretty much the approach I took last night; Tory and Labour votes are unclear, so I discounted them from remain/brexit counts.

Yes, but that quote is bollocks. Statistics do not lie. The fact is that more people DID vote for dedicated remain parties than for dedicated leave parties. Farage is lying (as usual) when he says the results give a clear mandate for Brexit.

The fact is the country is still pretty evenly split. The only new bad news from last night is that if there is a general election (and I think there is now a strong possibility of a confidence vote precipitating one as we head for no deal), Farage might get first shot at forming a government - heaven help us! 

We could conclude that but there has to be the usual 'I always vote xyz' inertia around Labour and Conservative votes. I'd guess that makes up a good half of their remaining vote share. Your point stands though, we can read what we want into these results but until we're asked to accept terms on brexit or reject it we are just guessing. Thankfully the drubbing the Cons and Labour received make a referendum the lower risk form of democratic engagement for them and until we're reengaged on the subject the parliamentary arithmetic remains an obstacle to progress in either direction.

Jk

Mmm, yeah.

There's a bit of a thing maybe coming up.

The Tories can elect a new leader as they see fit, but as far as I'm aware, there has to be a majority in parliament for them to become Prime Minister. And that might prove interesting.

I think we'll probably get a no deal brexit in October now (I can't see parliament repealing article 50, and I struggle to see them agreeing on anything that would persuade the EU to give another extension), and probably a general election around then too. And I think that'll be one hell of a mess.

I'd be delighted if someone could point me towards a more optimistic, yet credible, possibility...

Yes and no. I see our electoral system and 'austerity' as the root cause of this mess but brexit isn't the inevitable outcome, its a massive self inflicted wound that has through poor leadership become gangrenous. 

Jk 

Yes, I spent last night looking at numbers of votes and adding them and when that's done I believe there's a majority for remain assuming most Labour voters would vote remain in a second referendum.

While turnout was fairly low and a lot more people would come out to vote in a second referendum, this fairly close result reflects the clear picture shown in the opinion polls over the last year or so that there is a steadily growing majority of people who would vote remain in a second referendum.

My point was that people used the results for their own ends even if it wasn’t supported by the evidence.

e.g.

Emily Thornberry stated that Labour remain voters had defected to the Lib Dem’s/Greens and that this showed overwhelming support for another referendum.

All this after about two results had been declared.

It might be true but it was hardly evidence based.

We had a Lib Dem spokesman (Ed Daley?) saying that they’d made the most gains of any party.

We have John McDonnell saying that Labour has to fully back a second  referendum.

All based on their interpretation of the results.

Which may, or may not, turn out to be true

But they’re all opinions when delivered minutes after the results are announced.

Yet Brexiters call letting the people have another say 3 years later 'undemocratic' ... These are sick times in which all truth is inverted, and all meaning perverted.

All main party offices will be aware of how the exit polls have evolved throughout election day, including the analyses of voter migration, quite some time before the results are made public. This is done precisely to enable them to respond when the results are finally made openly available.

You may disagree with the conclusions offered by a given politician (which may well vary within one party...), but accusing politicians at the top end of the parties, who will have been in the loop all day, of arriving at these conclusion without evidence is at best naive. Of course, this does not help when the exit polls say that things are too close to call, or there is no clear picture of voter migration.

CB

Did you watch the live results programmes?

Not a mention of the exit polls that you use to disagree with my statements.

Just politicians from all parties attempting to spin the results to achieve their own aims.

They’re still at it this morning.

As I said before, the Brexit fiasco rolls on.

They've had three days to analyse exit polls. I'm not sure the actual results would have been that much of a surprise.

Yes, forgot that you guys already voted on Thursday.

CB

FYI it was Ed Davey - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Davey

I don’t think that the results were a surprise to anyone. They could have been predicted before a single vote was cast and before a single exit poll was taken.

The country remains very divided and politicians from all parties spin results to suit themselves and their aims.

i disagree that they are not fact based. Almost nothing in politics is as quantitative and clear as vote counts and the exit poll analyses. What you make of these facts, and which conclusions you draw for the future, is the actual core of politics.

This is their bloody job.

Good, they better be! 

It will be interesting to see which direction it will roll. Tory PM candidates towards no deal, Tory MPs to no no deal, Labour to split between May's deal and a second ref?

CB

No disagreement with that.

Just watching the news; still the same line from Tories that the result means we need to press on with Brexit, and Corbyn being mealy-mouthed and equivocal as ever.

And another thing, you understandably have a very Brexit-centred look at these elections. However, the broad brush strokes at EU levels are much more interesting. Green subjects such as climate change have been ranked at the top for importance not only for Green voters, but also for conservatives in the old EU states. The topic is not going to go away in the future, and the old establishment will have to do better than pay lip service to the issue.

All thanks to the FFF/ER students!

CB

Thanks for that.

I actually meant to type Davey but must have hit the l key instead of the v - probably because they’re so close together on the keyboard!  

Or I could blame predictive text.

That’ll teach me to check before posting.

I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said there.

There greener our politics the better.

It does, however, reinforce what I said in a previous post - that people probably didn’t vote f the greens just because of their Brexit stance but be of their possibly more important and urgent environmental policies.

My guess is we get an extension for 'democratic engagement' pushed onto whichever opportunistic, out of their depth vulture is in no. 10 come October. Faced with a choice between the end of a disastrous 3month premiership and the Con party or a hard to sell referendum we get the referendum, albeit one Cons and Labour can claim was forced on them by the big bad EU and in exchange they get a couple of years to spin the whole thing while with luck we move on to the next spoon-fed obsession. 

Jk

I'm sure that's true but I doubt many brexiteers voted Green. To take an example close to home, while you have just voiced broad approval for Green policies, you voted Brexit party not Green party.

Much as I dislike our jaded 2 party system, I'm not sure that it is the root cause either. The general mood of the country is surely the root of it all.

Brexit like many symptoms was not ineveitable but sadly was left to fester and develop due to a failure to treat the primary cause. IMO, worthless though it may be, the true root is the intolerance which so many people across the entire political spectrum cultivate in order to further their own selfish ambitions.

Nobody was thinking about the LAB/CON manifestos for the last Westminster election when deciding whether to vote LAB/CON yesterday.   

My take:

a. almost all the Tory/Labour voters who feel strongly about hard Brexit voted for the Brexit party.  It's a single issue protest party in an election they don't think matters, when it comes to a Westminster election they will be back in the tribal Labour/Tory camp.

b. some fraction of the Tory/Labour voters who want to Remain voted LibDem.  But a fair number of them didn't because LibDem is a serious long term rival to their preferred party and that's a hard step to take for a tribal Lab/Tory supporter.  There's also people who are so angry about stuff the LibDems did when they were in coalition with the Tories they wouldn't vote for them in any circumstances.

c. probably the largest faction in the Lab/Tory categories is 'I always vote Labout/Tory' because my dad did.  For this group voting Labour/Tory tells you nothing about how, or if, they'd vote in a Brexit referendum.

My reading is the vote from last night suggests there is now a small majority for Remain.

The Scottish vote says that there's not much more work to do to get more than 50% voting  YES in indyref2 and that any kind of hard Brexit would probably do it.

I’m sure many brexiteers voted Brexit party just as many remainers voted Lib Dem.

Both had a clear Brexit message and not much else, if anything in the case of the Brexit party in the way of other policies.

The greens were possibly a mixture of remainers and environmentalists or both.

The point of my argument being that counting all Brexit party votes as support for leave - and an extreme leave at that - is correct.

While counting all Lib Dem votes as support for remain is probably correct but the same can’t be said of the green voters where other policies besides stopping Brexit might have played a part.

None of which really matters as the position in Westminster remains unchanged.

Any future referendum is completely hypothetical. The depressing fact is, 58% of those who voted gave their vote to a party with an official policy of leaving the EU.

I voted Labour because of reasons I explained on a previous thread. I wanted to make sure there was a left majority in the EU parliament. I was also very much aware that this vote was probably a symbolic one and in the short term at least would have no direct effect on the course of government.

I also want a second vote and would vote Remain like at least 70% of Labour voters so the numbers are far from depressing.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I do not think the Conservative party even published a manifesto for the EU election we've just had. If so, I wonder why anybody would vote for it?

I don't see Brexit getting anywhere in a Westminster election.   To do that they'd need credible MP candidates and detailed policies.   As soon as they attempt to define policies they will argue among themselves and split their vote.

The money going into the Brexit party just wants a tool to force the Tories to support hard Brexit.  All they need is the threat that if the Tories don't take a hard line then Brexit Party will split their vote in a Westminster election.

I think this might backfire on them. If the Tories do take a hard line then they may well be brought down by a no confidence vote and then both parties will lose out in the resulting general election with a split vote. I think the tories may now be in a lose-lose situation with their response to Brexit. I'd put money on a general election leading to a second referendum - there just seems no other way out. But I'm probably wrong!

This would be my guess. We had a definitive leave date but nothing was agreed so we got an extension but we were told categorically not to waste it because there would not be another chance. But then we got a second extension.

It's all a ploy, cause more and more disruption until we can back out of article 50 without public outrage because the public have got to the point they don't care anymore. 

Did you not say that these elections had nothing to do with independence?

After this mess any idea that a just over 50% vote for independence would be followed by a swift orderly separation surely lacks any credibility whatsoever. 

Indeed. can you imagine the outrage and chaos if we have to apply for a visa every time we fancy an evening's bouldering in Northumberland? There could be other teething problems with the divorce too.

Voting is compulsory in Belgium if you're on the register

I think there's a 200€ fine if you don't vote but I don't know if this is strictly applied

Neither did the brexit party, beyond their name...

Yes, and obviously they don't.  MEPs have no say on Scottish Independence.   These elections were mostly a proxy referendum on Brexit.   I was correct in my previous comments about splitting the pro-EU vote between SNP/LibDem/Green/Change UK.   It allowed the Conservatives to sneak in with one MEP.

Equally, once the election is held there's data that can be analysed but it's just informal, it doesn't have any legal weight.

The Tories are about to elect a total nut-job to be party leader and try and force a hard Brexit.  Orderly isn't going to happen whether we stay in the UK or leave.   It could be that the Brexit experience makes a swift exit more likely.  

That's true. It's obvious what their single platform is though: leaving the EU.

Don't think I'm defending Farage and co. What I was pointing out that it's almost incredible (and I think without precedent) that the Conservative Party - one of the UKs's two major parties - didn't publish a manifesto.

Not for Labour, especially in these elections. I'd say most who did vote Labour are members and supporters who get the reality of situation, and would vote remain if there was a second referendum.

In large parts of England Labour is the party of local governance, and the only realistic choice for those of a left and centre-left persuasion. Leaving the party in a strop over lack of Brexit policy or current leadership won't achieve anything but a further fragmentation of the centre-left vote.

A few on this thread seem to know for sure what Labour Brexit policy is...... those who follow the party will know there isn't an agreed position!

One way of looking at it, or the current MEP split accurately reflects the result of the brexit referendum in Scotland. 

Yes but if you argue for people to support your party on the basis that on this occasion its not about independence and then use those votes as reflective of support for that it might be seen as a tad disingenuous . 

That seems like brexiteer's logic. Because I want it to be swift it will be, everybody else will just fall in line with my wishes. 

I happily stand corrected

But I still consider them a hard brexit party.

If you were right and both were hard Brexit parties, we'd have left the EU already.

based on https://lordashcroftpolls.com/2019/05/my-euro-election-post-vote-poll-most-... 50%-50% of CON voters voted leave-remain in 2016 and 30%-70% for LAB. Assuming most people haven't changed their minds, the vote last night suggests a small majority for remain. (But the turnout was much lower than that of a potential second referendum, so large error margins).

It is probably good enough to win a referendum, but the small size of the majority makes it hard to convince politicians to actually legislate for one.

If their party leaders have been and are fence sitters, if their policy and actions don't seem to go in a set direction, it's fairly likely they'll attract voters who read into it whatever suits their view, so I'd been amazed if their voters weren't as divided as the parties themselves. 

R4 pm programme states: "The Brexit party has won a clear victory in the euro elections"

This is just incorrect on so many levels. At the most basic level they did not gain an overall majority in the European parliament (29 out of 751). They won more seats in the UK than any other single party (29 out of 73, not even an overall majority of seats in the UK.)

I am not one to knock the BBC normally but this is an an outrageous headline to keep spouting.. 

Thankfully for the leaders of both Con and Lab, party power is a higher priority than Brexit, and neither is willing to allow the other to appear to have succeeded, even though both are trying to achieve quite similar outcomes.

If there really are significant numbers of people who want to remain, but decided to vote for one of the two big leave parties, in what looks like the last significant vote before Boris takes us out of Europe, that is even more depressing.

Indeed. I voted SNP rather than Lib/Dem because it was the strongest anti-Brexit vote and therefore also the strongest anti-independence vote also; if there's one thing that is going to swing Scotland towards independence, it's Brexit.

I don't understand.

The reason the UK hasn't left yet is that various groups in the house of commons voted against the deal. Some for reasons that the proposed deal was not hard enough (ERG), some for reasons that the proposed deal was too hard while still preferring a hard brexit (labour leadership). There is a large majority in principle for hard brexit in the HoC, there is just a lot of discussion about how hard it is actually supposed to be.

In contrast the soft brexit position has very little support. Nick Boles, Kinnock, etc. Which is a shame, because staying in the single market is actually a reasonable compromise. But then again, I see mostly advantages of freedom of movement....

PS. For clarity, I use soft and hard in their original meanings: soft is single market with or without custom union, hard is customs union, free trade deal.

PS2. I agree with you that the LAB position is not agreed within the party. But as long as the leadership states that LAB wants freedom of movement to come to an end, I consider LAB as a hard brexit party. Maybe I should consider it a hard brexit party with a lot of rebels in parliament....

I was talking about Labour not the tories and you should bear in mind that despite the equivocation, if Labour hadn't consistently opposed the Government in every Brexit vote we'd now be on our way out of the EU.

I imagine that Remain supporting Tories mainly followed Michael Heseltine and voted Lib Dem.

The choice Scotland faces is whether to carry on dealing with the chaos of the English political scene and hope it somehow improves, or take the hit of separation in order to take control of ours own destiny.

One striking feature of this election is that in Scotland the results are broadly aligned with the rest of Europe (centre-left, green) whilst in England things have lurched even further to the right.

Surely it's worth the short term pain of the separation for a better long term relationship with the rest of Europe?

I very much bear it in mind. With utter contempt.

Labour have opposed the government in order to try to be the party in power when we leave, not to try to keep us in. 

As a result, the chaos rumbles on, and BJ is likely to be PM very shortly. 

Doesn’t follow - the Tories as a party don’t have a majority of MPs willing to follow party policy - which was no deal is acceptable.  Neither do Labour, even if they had a clear policy, and they can’t be seen to be working with the Tories.

Tories are quite likely to elect a leader willing to do no deal and if they do they’ll take Brexit voters, which translates to a win in a general election.  Question is what do those Tory MPs do if that leader’s elected - follow policy (so accept no deal) or force an election, lose their jobs and risk a Corbyn win?

Indeed. I put it down to an almost childish sulking.

It's quite simple. The Tories have a very small majority, so they ought to have been able to carry the deal vote. But they were utterly slaughtered three times. This means that very large numbers of Tory MPs were against the deal. This is for different reasons; some are swivel-eyed lunatic no deal brexiteers, some are ardent remainers. This is equally true of labour, although they don't have the same level of swivel-eyed no dealers. Neither lab nor con can be considered full-on brexit parties; they are both utterly divided by the issue. Whereas the LibDems, Greens, SNP, Plaid and Change are firmly remain, and farage's Brexit & ukip are obviously brexit, with no other real policy.

It's a compromise, but it only makes sense for the sake of compromise. If you're going to stay in the single market, stay in the EU, and have some say about how that single market is regulated.

I don't agree. The real reason Labour leadership did not back the WAB is because it would tear the party apart. John Arran is also right, Jezza wants to damage the Tories by that isn't the main reason. A mostly remain membership and MPs have allowed the ambiguity because they know the Brexit party is a big threat in many constituencies. 

... and in the membership. That's one way to look at it but it doesn't reflect the situation well.

Exactly, without hard Brexit MPs Labour aren't a hard Brexit party.

A party is more than its MPs.  If they weren’t JC wouldn’t be leader.

Aha, interesting. Do you think a LAB government presenting the same WAB but with a political declaration with a customs union and labelled a jobs first brexit to the HoC would not tear the party apart?

It would. The only policy that would get through is the above with a confirmatory referendum with stay on the ballot. That's my assessment as a member. Brexit is crap for Labour, the only consolation is it's also crap for the Tories........ and their shit to own.

I think the chances are very likely (above 90%) that the UK will be in the EU in 10-15 years time. It simply is a global phenomenon that welfare in countries depends on interconnectedness. And small countries need to be in larger bloc in order to have power. At the end there is only the choice between being an EU member and being in the EU sphere of influence for the UK.

The reason the compromise makes sense is in risk analysis. What is worse: 10 years of a lack of influence on the EU or an xx vs xx% chance of either directly remaining or having a brexit that seriously impacts welfare in the country? The answer depends on the xx's and I don't know them. Good government is risk averse. This is why the brexit process (a50 notification) should have been avoided and a compromise outcome should have been searched.

We are on course to leave - any party that does not have a policy of changing direction at this stage is a full-on brexit party.

Ah yes, destiny. Whatever that means.

Actually the results are quite confused but yes, in some countries populist nationalist parties did well. The SNP are in no way a socialist party. The Scottish results are most closely reflected by those in London.

Leave with a deal, hit to GDP is 2%.

Leave the UK, hit to Scottish GDP (long term) is 10%. Check out your own party's growth commission report if you don't believe me.

So 2% or 10%, tricky choice.

If you want to chase a romantic vision, have some particular ideology that favours borders or just don't like the English then fine base your argument on that but I'd steer clear of the economics.

I think Scotland has it's own chaos. We are as divided as anyone else. There is no evidence to suggest that the divide has got any less. 

That is an interpretation it is hard to put on either the English or European results. In England the remain vote (from the EU elections) is quite probably greater than the leave and the 2017 election could hardly be seen as a lurch to the right as the conservatives lost their majority 

Short term? How long is that? A few decades perhaps.

All the failures of the leave campaign to appreciate the forseen and unforseen problems in leaving the EU are replicated in the idea of a quick exit with short term pain in the event of independence.

Unless there was a very commanding majority and a very compliant rUK (in the way the EU hasn't been over brexit) and a compliant EU there is no reason to suppose that independence would be any less stressful than brexit.

That in itself is of course no reason for those who have a philisophical attachment to independence not to work towards it but it is a similar philisophical attachment to brexit that has caused today's problems.

The message is that we are on the way to being as right wing a country as Viktor Orban's Hungary. Great, isn't it...?

If you prefer a more pragmatic term we can have "direction" instead.

Are you seriously trying to associate Greens/EFA with the likes of the ENF and EFDD? If I was going to be uncharitable, I might suggest that if you're going to base your arguments on then you might want to steer clear of politics.

If we don't stop trying to measure how successful we are solely on how large our GDP is, the world is going to become uninhabitable pretty quickly. The UK is one of the richest and most unequal countries in the world. We can afford to take a hit to the headline figure in order to create a happier, more balanced country. 

Having spent about 15 years of my life in England, i would be quite masochistic if I didn't like the people. I have no love of borders - I would like to see Scotland and rUK in Schengen, and I would like to see the EU continue to expand, removing borders and creating freedom of movement as it goes. 

You seem desperate to protect some sort of right wing, xenophobic slant onto my desire to escape the increasingly right wing and xenophobic UK political sphere, why is that?

I would hope that if an independant Scotland could make a good fist of being a progressive European nation, England might look North and think "you know what, it looks OK up there, maybe we should have a re-think?". What is so wrong with that?

Everybody should see these two charts :

https://twitter.com/EuropeElects/status/1133046982296186882

The picture is that of a country that has actually now shifted to remain by a good margin, Labour vote decimated by LibDems and Greens, and pretty much all of the tory electorate going to the Brexit party.

Of course Scotland has its own chaos, but to suggest all nations are equally divided is bizarre. England wants to leave Europe, deal or no deal. Scotland wants to stay.

You don't think the rise of Nigel Farage to become one of the key players in English politics, and the expectation that the racist populist Boris Johnston is about to become PM, is a sign that England is moving right again?

Of course it will be stressful. I just think it's worth the stress to become a more progressive, fairer and integrated European nation.

As I replied above, lumping right wing populist movements and centre-left progressive movements together is a completely false equivalence.

I was referring to the equally deep and bitter division over independence. 

I think it is easy to dismiss brexit as a racist right wing affair but probably inaccurate. Unless millions of Labour supporters were closet right wingers and the ethnic minority brexit supporters are all dupes the situation is rather more complex than left v right. 

Will we? Are we so much better than our neighbours? I doubt it. 

Is the SNP centre left progressive? There is no evidence for it in its constitution. It is a nationalist party that espouses social democratic views as the apparently most effective way of delivering its objective of independence rather than espousing independence as the most effective way of delivering social democracy. If those circumstances change the policies will change to whatever is most likely to deliver independence.

Of course it's complex, but with Farage and his breaking point posters at the front, it has absolutely been led by a right wing, isolstionist xenophobic movent.

It's not a question of being better, is a question of having a different political outlook. We keep voting for progressive policies, whilst our neighbors keep voting for conservative policies. Do you seriously believe that the minute we became independent we'd all start voting Tory?

I would disagree with your assessment - the SNP moved left a long time ago and the  demographics of the party membership and representatives have changed to match that shift, but what does it matter? We're not going to stop having elections after independence - if we don't deliver on the policies that have made us popular, the people of Scotland will vote for someone else who will. Scottish labour, the lib Dems and the greens would all be looking for that vote. It's not about the party, it's about the people having a voice.

Yeah, among the 37% of the electorate who could be bothered to vote. I'd be massively wary of predicting either a general election or a second referendum result based on this.

"England" doesn't want anything - some people who claim to speak for England and a small majority of its electorate in 2016 might want that.

Otherwise I'm sure you'd agree "Scotland" wants to stay part of the UK.

Fair point 😁

Those really are the terms that opponents put on it. Right wing leadership yes but do they see themselves as isolationist? I think they see it as out of a sclerotic EU and into the world. Rather like out of a sclerotic UK into Europe. Xenophobic? Again I think that is a lazy label that sees a desire to control immigration as necessarily racist. 

I think brexit is a foolish and to my mind wrong move but that doesn't mean its supporters are bad people. 

Given that the SNP support ranges from Brian Souter, through Tasmina Ahmed Sheik through Fergus Ewing, through Keith Brown to Pat Kane it is likely that it incorporates a lot of centre right as well as centre left members. 

Who are 'the people'? To me that is the problem with nationalism. It relies on differentiation of people from their neighbours and then division by highlighting and emphasising difference. We have far more in common with our neighbours than we have differences and that goes for the UK as well as the EU. In both cases I think we are better together but to respond to the break up of a recent looser union with the destruction of a closer more complete union seems to me to be following a bad decision with a worse one.

(I appreciate your reasonable argument and tone) 

Indeed, so why do it ?

You said the country has shifted to remain by a good margin. I just don't think it's that clear.

Unless and until theretis another referendum it's not just a question of simple arithmetic either, its also priorities.

If you are for staying, but were prepared to vote Labour or Tory in the European elections, remaining is clearly not that that high on your list of priorities. Leave still seems to be pulling more voters from the main parties than remain so they are exerting much more influence on the big two.

A desire to control immigration is not necessarily racist, but rehashing nazi propaganda, displaying lines of brown faces as a reason to reduce freedom of movement in Europe, as they did, very clearly is.

Agree completely. I'm contracting in Newcastle at the moment, and thus surrounded by a core leave demographic. I have quite a number of very lovely friends who voted leave for a variety of reasons. I happen to think they are misguided, but they think the same of me. None of that changes the fact that racism, isolationism, xenophobia and British exceptional has played a major role in brexit.

No party is entirely defined by a single position. By and large though, the SNP are promoting a fairly centre-left political position. If we stray from that, I may leave and join the greens, but for now I'm fairly hair happy with the direction.

The people are the constituents. If you want to have representative democracy, you need boundaries for the selection of political representation. I think there are too many levels of government for Scotland - we don't need a Scottish government, a British government, and a european parliament.

I want ever closer European integration, and westminster is an impediment to that.

Also appreciate your reasoned arguments... no reason that political discourse had to be hostile - nobody ever gets anywhere by shouting at each other 🙂

Are there any good analyses of exit poll data showing how the votes have actually moved around from GE17 to EU19 or EU14 to EU19? It's easy to assume:

Majority Con/Minority Lab/UKIP/Assorted English nationalists > Brexit Party

Majority Lab > LibDem/Green/Home nation nationalists

Minority Con > LibDem

but we know what is said of assumption!

jk

Like in Australia then! That would make sense. I am assuming that Denmark has something similar in place with 84% of voters?

In a way, I am quite inclined to do something similar. That way people cannot argue about empty figures- what is 48% of 30odd % if you have never managed to play with numbers?

France had a 50% particpation, with  Italy similar-ish. Spain and Germany were a over that at 60odd%- almost twice as much as the UK (but then some folks would have made a point of not voting?).

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/c7zzdg3pmgpt/european-elections-2019

I think compulsory voting is a bad idea. 'You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him think.'

Give people the opportunity. If they choose to take it, good; if not, equally fine.

I think of all the blood, sweat and tears involved in getting universal suffrage, this precious right. I don't think apathy should be an option. I think everyone should vote, but there should be a box to abstain if you wish. What harm is there in that?

I myself regard the right as very important.

Apathy can't be legislated against. If you force somebody to go to the voting station, but they still don't give a shit - what then? And why bother?

Potential harm is the chance of the 'Donkey Vote.'

There's an argument that if you don't have a clue then its better not to vote than to cancel out the vote of somebody that's spent time developing a clue.

I think we should get away from the elections on Thursday thing and do it at the weekend like in other EU countries, that would make it easier for people to go.   Even better let people vote with an app on their phone.    Making it easier to vote would get the turnout up without any need for compulsion.

The problem is that you need to have a bit of a clue to know you don't have a clue.

This is a terrible idea! When things can be kept simple and a pencil and sheet of paper can't be manipulated or interfered with by malign bodies.

Of course they can.  Pencil and paper elections get manipulated all the time, all over the world.   The most recent example being making it difficult for EU citizens in the UK to exercise their right to vote in the EU parliament election.  Another example was the election in Tower Hamlets a few years ago.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-32428648

I don't know what the situation is on average, but in all my time voting in the UK I have only ever had to walk about five minutes (or less) to get to my polling station. I don't see that voting on a weekend would make any difference.

No thanks. Having voters turn up in person is a system which is far less easy to subvert en masse.

This is one of those things which seems to have massive appeal to people who have no idea what they're talking about and has all the appeal of a barbed wire codpiece to those who do.

A phone with biometric sensors is far more secure than a granny with a printout and a pencil scoring peoples names off.    If the security on a phone is good enough for banking why isn't it good enough for voting?

If a vote was ever subverted en-masse it would be obvious and it would get reversed.   There's all kinds of after-the-fact checks you could build into the system.  For example, people could log in and check how their vote was recorded after the election if they were worried.

I'm not saying voting with a phone should be compulsory, just that it should be an option, like postal voting.  It would be trivial to make voting with a phone app more secure than postal voting.

Ah, great. So there'd be an on-line database recording exactly who voted for whom, right?

Again, no thanks.

Can any sensible comparison be made between the local elections, the EU elections and a general election?

The first two are fine for indulging in protest votes when you are electing 3rd rate wannabe politicians who won’t have any significant powers but people will be far more circumspect when electing the MP’s who could end up running the country.

There are reasons the so-called liberal democrats have spent years in the political wilderness after the coalition government and does anyone really think the greens or the brexit party could actually run the country?

I think GE17 and EU19 could be meaningfully compared since they were both fought on the same ground.

Jk

Well it is all trackable now, there's a number on the voting slip and they put it beside your name on the printout they cross off.

There wouldn't need to be an online database recording exactly who voted for whom in order for a person to check their own vote had been recorded.  A little bit of cryptographic magic could solve that.

There's no good reason not to allow voting on-line or via an app when you allow postal votes.  They should just do it and let people who want to vote on their phones do so just like they let people vote by post.  There's no reason to give luddites a veto.

The problem with online voting isn't just security, it's the perception of security and the ability in what is a complex murky field to make a compelling case should the integrity of a result or the anonymisation process be called into question.

Jk

It's mainly just psychology.   If you think about the things people trust their phones to do - e-mail with years of confidential and valuable information, personal photos, banking apps, payment systems like Apple Pay, their address book, health monitoring apps and now the Government are trusting a phone app to scan passports and apply for settled status.   The whole tax system is now online.

Then think about just how insecure paper postal votes are and the actual cases of them being misused.

From a technical perspective there is absolutely no justification for not allowing voting via a phone app.  If it was implemented most people would forget about all the horror scenarios and go for convenience.

Of course but a democracy with no faith in the legitimacy of its elected government is a very dangerous thing. A leaky email system is merely bad, people adapt. 

Jk

I'd say it's more than that.  Online voting is easily trivialized and influenced by adverts etc.  Physically going to a polling booth does require some positive action and hence, hopefully, some serious consideration of how votes are cast. 

Similar problems arise with online purchases but there are rules about cooling off periods and so on to allow people to correct impulses they later regret.  I can't see it being easy to implement similar systems with online voting

Trump, Brexit....

I think having to fill in and click through a number of ID/eligibility verification screens in a dedicated app much like phone-banking (without the credit card ads!) to exclude browser adverts and eavesdropping from the voting experience would suffice. I'm not sure the walk to the village hall adds much gravitas in reality considering how we vote (and don't) as a population!

jk

Conjecture, I suppose, but there are rules around campaigning outside polling stations for good reasons.  If this could influences people's votes, I'd be surprised if targeted, online "Vote Brexit Party now - kick out pesky foreigners" ads wouldn't.

If it's done like that in your polling station then they are guilty of some serious misconduct! 

It should work as such;

Your name is found on the list of registered voters. As you are handed a voting slip your name is crossed from that list. Each voting slip has a unique number, which is noted onto a list of slips handed out. This is to ensure all voting slips are accounted for. There should be no way of linking the slip to the voter, that's the fundamental basis of a secret ballot.

I got a postal vote for the first time in my life for the EU elections. The security is appalling not because of the postal system or anything related but because there is absolutely no guarantee that the vote is made without coercion, intimidation or other undue influence. These same issues arise with any system based on phones or any other devices where the voter cannot be seen to go into a secluded solitary space and then be seen to record that vote. Any body who has any experience of dealing with domestic violence offenders or victims will recognise this problem. With voting there is the potential to expand this problem beyond the domestic.

Any system must be private in public so that the vote can be seen to have been made by the voter without duress in secret.

You're wrong. In all UK elections the number of the ballot paper is recorded against the name of the voter. So it is all traceable.

See for example https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,,-1051,00.html

One can argue about whether this practice should continue, but in any event there is no comparison in scalability between the tracing this system affords, and the tracing on-line voting would afford.

Beyond that, and back to the suggestion of on-line voting: such voting completely removes the scrutinization safeguards currently available at the count.

'GoogleVote'? Once again - no thanks.

Without disrespect to those who suffer domestic abuse it is not an electorate scale issue and there is no suggestion abusers are organised, all pushing in the same direction.

Same with postal vote fraud, it is of course possible for individual or family groups of postal votes to be co-opted or made under duress as we've seen in previous trials. Equally it is possible they are somehow tampered with between issue and count but doing so in an organised manner at significant scale without leaving a clear and actionable trail of evidence is just not credible.

The same cannot be believable said of phone-voting at present. Whether or not it can actually be made secure (debatable, we simply have no idea how advanced counter-cryptography technology is) it would still be trivial for a malign actor to irreversibly damage faith in the technology and the government it delivered.

I wouldn't take such an absolute position personally but I am wary of introducing technology for the reasons covered.

jk

Conjecture indeed. Still, there's nothing to stop you flicking through those hypothetical ads as you walk to the polling booth. At least with a dedicated app you could have a couple of minutes respite from advertising (on the screen in use anyway) before voting.

My other concerns about internet voting stand: perceived and provable security/integrity, perceived and provable anonymity.

jk

I'm wondering what your technical expertise for saying this is? From my perspective here are a few of the reasons why I think a phone app is a shitty idea no matter how many times it comes up.

As you say, it's trivial to outwit the polling station attendants and cast a fraudulent vote. If you're really good you might even be able to do so a dozen or so times before getting spotted. Well done, you've cast a dozen fraudulent votes, with a conspiracy of a few thousand you _might_ be able to impact the election but such a conspiracy is comparatively easy to uncover/infiltrate. If it is discovered then we may need to rerun one ward or one constituency's vote, we may need to exclude/include postal votes but ultimately the overall national result is unlikely to be affected.*

Postal votes are very problematic, particular when it comes to things like sheltered housing and care homes where people may be able to manipulate the votes of a significant number of vulnerable people. For the most part though, it’s exceptionally difficult for someone to cast more than a few hundred fraudulent postal votes and any arguments in this area probably apply equally well to voting via phones.

Phone app, there are literally hundreds of models of phone out there with hundreds of different access controls which may or may not control access successfully. Each of those different devices, operating systems, app versions etc provides an attack surface which will provide you with thousands of potential votes, all without the need to recruit thousands of conspirators, all attackable remotely from, say, an office in Moscow.

Then there's the server-side headaches, before the vote we need to provide a way for users to tie their phone to their electoral roll record in such a way that it's secure but easily updated, I can't think of a way to do this that is anything other than a massive headache. We need to store vote information in a way such that they can't be modified after the event and that their integrity can be independently verified**. We need to account for network outages, protect the site agains DoS or other attacks which could disenfranchise a significant chunk of the electorate. We need to provide the ability for independent, probably human, re-counting. We need votes to be non-traceable to an individual and yet we also need the ability to ensure that individuals aren't voting multiple times. We also need each step of this to be robust in the face of determined, state level bad actors. Any security breach at this level probably invalidates every. single. vote. in the database. The whole election is potentially suddenly void. 

Actually, I say “suddenly”, in reality these investigations would likely take weeks or months, during which time we have no way of knowing who our government is*** and, most likely, no oversight of the investigation process. All of this is pretty bad in the event of a relatively benevolent overseer but in the event that the electoral commission is compromised by politically motivated actors then secret investigations of a hidden problem taking a significant period of time is basically the worst imaginable setup for democracy.

When it comes to recounts, we have to trust what the DB spits out, there is no paper trail whatsoever to say that when Doris clicked to vote for candidate A, the DB recorded a vote for candidate A and that that vote was counted. We simply have to trust that the system is  In a pen and paper election you can watch your vote go into a box, watch that box go into a van, follow that van to the count, watch your vote being counted, recount the votes immediately yourself (in theory). There’s very little opportunity for compromising of the votes once they’re cast.

I haven't really thought about this so I'm sure there's a shedload more problems but the idea that there's no technical challenge in this is transparently wrong.

* A good argument against FPTP is that it maximises our exposure to these kinds of attacks
** That rarest of things, an actual use case for blockchain? Oh no wait, it’s probably too slow for this level of point load.

*** Or worse, we have a government fraudulently elected who now have responsibility for the people investigating their own fraud.

The point is that a non private vote can be influenced and has been, think of the Birmingham City council elections in 2004 (or 5?)

Well yes which is a good reason to limit their use as far as possible.

I agree but I don't think that is the issue

Yes

I take that position because all other options are open to abuse. There is no market at the moment for the sale of votes as there is no mechanism for the buyer to know that they bought wisely. Any system where the vote does not have to be made privately is open to intimidation or sale. We don't currently have this problem but we used to and it took quite a lot of reform to remove it.

Well put.  The idea that having to use pencil and paper rather than an app is even a vaguely significant part of the problems with democracy and governance is absurd. On the contrary, voting in person is robust, reliable and simple.

Quite, that's the case I was thinking of when I acknowledged some minor abuses have been identified.

For the protection of the individual's rights perhaps but where abused votes can reasonably be assumed to be both few and randomly assigned I don't see that as a threat to democracy. Any remote voting restriction to protect the rights of the abused has to be weighed against the benefit to and rights of those who otherwise couldn't to engage with their democracy without some form of remote voting. For me that balance falls heavily toward enabling people to engage rather than imposing paternalistic restrictions.

Agreed but it was simply intended to provide a counterpoint to the e-vote case where tampering at a electorally significant scale scale is potentially possible to achieve, difficult to detect and perhaps most importantly hard to convincingly prove not to have occurred.

Verification of the purchase is possible with a sold postal ballot but we still don't see a significant market in blank postal ballots, presumably because the probability of getting caught approaches one long before you get your hands on an electorally significant number of cards. There's no reason why e-votes couldn't be similarly difficult to trade

I appreciate the history and value of the secret ballot concept but again, the threat of significant or perceived to be significant abuse has to be carefully weighed against the benefit of facilitating universal access.

TLDR: I think the benefit to our democracy and individuals of postal/remote voting outweighs the risk to our democracy and individuals. I'm to be convinced in the case of e-voting.

jk

Would you be allowed to vote by mobile if you owned a Huawei? 

Also the Russian Crazy bears and Kaspersky types would probably  have a field day hacking the system when bored from making millions hacking bitcoin servers etc....

The postal vote requires some effort to get. Any mobile phone vote would presumably be accessed by mobile with little effort. I know plenty of people who would quite happily sell anything especially if obtained with little effort. (Although I probably have a distorted view of society as most people I meet through work are criminals of some kind)

I hope you are right on the former and agree on the latter 

There is research on blockchain based e-voting systems which address this by allowing people to change their vote right up to the point the election closes.   There's no point in coercing or bribing someone if they can just reverse what you forced them to do after you leave.

The probability that the phrase “there is research into blockchain based x” is true for any given x is rapidly approaching 1. The number of systems making it into production using blockchain in a meaningful way continues to hover around zero.

From a technical perspective there is every reason to not allow any form of electronic voting.

Here is some nerd explaining why:  youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI&

Who has possession of the mobile phone?

That point may (or may not) address the 3rd party market in votes, it would not address controlling behaviour in family or other social groups. Although that might restrict, as jk points out above, because of the numbers involved, any organised electoral fraud to local elections that would not be great for those in that council area.