Why did committed Remainers flock to the pro-Brexit Labour Party?
A new survey among committed Remainers provides a solution the puzzle.
The General Election on 8 June 2017 resulted in a hung parliament. One of the reasons was that many Remain voters turned to Labour. Yet Labour is a pro-Brexit party. A hard Brexit (end to freedom of movement, and therefore, an end to unfettered access to the single market) is even in their manifesto. How do we make sense of this? Here are three possible explanations:
- Remain voters have not read the Labour manifesto. They fundamentally misunderstood Labour's position and think it is a pro-Remain position (see Matthew Goodwin's tweet below for an exemplification).
- Remain voters don’t think Brexit is all that important anymore and have gotten “over it”, or they found domestic issues more crucial in determining their vote.
- Remain voters voted tactically for Labour to frustrate the extreme Brexit strategy the Conservatives were pursuing. This is dubbed the "revenge of the remainers".
Let's examine how plausible each of these explanations are.
Did Remain voters misunderstand Labour's position on Brexit?
Many voters (not just in the UK but worldwide) are blissfully uninformed by what candidates and parties stand for. Was this the case here? Maybe to some extent.
Labour has been consistently pro-Brexit, even pro-hard Brexit (leaving the single market, although they also try to assuage their voters by calling their version of Brexit a “jobs first” Brexit).
But Labour has also been careful not to talk about Brexit if they could help it during the election campaign. Instead, they focused on domestic issues, such as tuition fees and the NHS. In this way, they could kill two birds with one stone: their pro-Brexit stance made sure they did not alienate Leave voters. And by not talking about Brexit, they also kept their Remain voters by making it less salient. As Keir Starmer said "the strategy we were adopting was a strategy that neither appealed to the 52% nor the 48%, and Labour would be the party of the 0%… I do feel vindicated: and it wasn’t just a clever lawyer’s answer; it was politically astute".
Was Brexit less important than other issues for Remain Labour voters?
Leave and Remain are closely tied to features of personal identity, such as cosmopolitanism, acceptance and celebration of diversity (Remain) and support for the death penalty and distrust of diversity (Leave) — see this Wordle I did on why Remain voters like the EU below. Peace, freedom, diversity, cooperation, community. Values of tolerance, diversity and cooperation.
But prior to the run up to the campaign, nobody in the UK really thought about the EU all that much. In a sense, this testifies to the enormous success of the EU, a political and economic institution so efficient it smoothly runs in the background, with people unaware of its working. Successful government is invisible. It only becomes visible when it is frustrating, inefficient, or corrupt.
Only now, with less than 2 years to go for the Brexit negotiations, the UK are waking up to the reality of what leaving the EU will mean for its economy and institutions, including cancer treatments that might become inaccessible (due to the UK leaving euratom) to losing the "crown jewels" of banking and medicine agencies, and the re-introduction of roaming fees for mobile phones.
As I’ve argued earlier, there are not 23% re-Leavers. Nor is there (yet) widespread bregret. What shapes the identities of Leave and Remain is not so much the EU, but what it stands for. Indeed, I’ve heard Remainers talk about plan B (there is even a separate FaceBook group devoted to plan B, with many members), about such destinations as Canada, New Zealand and the US. Obviously, Canada and New Zealand not in the EU, and neither is the US (although it is a closely integrated large market with freedom of movement).
And perhaps this is why Remainers flocked to Labour. Labour exemplified Remainers' ideals: a kinder, more inclusive society, with functioning public services.
Did Remainers vote tactically to stop the conservatives' extreme Brexit?
To test this hypothesis, I conducted a survey (N= 2221) among a large Remainer FB group called "the 48%". It has over 60,000 members. It is important to note that this group is not representative of Remain voters as a whole. If you look at the sample below, the percentage of Conservative voters in 2015 in this group was only 10%; it was 38% for Remain voters according to recent surveys.
People on this FB group describe themselves as "committed remainers", "staunch remainers", or even "hard remainers", some insist on the term "remainers", saying that "hard remainer" is tilting the discourse to normalise Brexit. These people are, invariably, deeply upset about Brexit. Just to be sure I had the right demographic for my survey, I asked respondents.
"If it were up to you, what do you think the UK’s position with the EU should be?" (Choices: Remain in the EU, Leave the EU, including the single market or customs union, Leave the EU but remain in the single market or customs union).
Unsurprisingly, 98.5% of my respondents chose "Remain in the EU". Taking out the non-Remain respondents, I then asked them what they voted in 2017, 2015 and why they voted the way they did.
This graph shows the flow of voters between 2015 and 2017. A few interesting observations: committed Remainers are not representative of how the UK voted in 2015. There are relatively few conservative voters (only 10%) and this vote evaporated in 2017. Only 5 committed Remainers voted conservative.
As one respondent wrote:
I don’t want brexit, even less a hard brexit but I voted conservative because I was seriously worried about the prospect of John McDonnell as chancellor because I think free markets and business friendly policy is the best way to maximise wealth for all of us. Despite Theresa May being worryingly anti free markets, but the prospect of McDonnell running the country is even scarier.
Why did the Committed Remainers vote the way they did?
I looked at the reasons that figured into the way the Remainers in the sample voted. I presented 11 reasons in randomized order for each participant which were: Privatisation of social care (so-called “dementia tax”), School cuts, Rights of EU citizens in the UK/UK citizens in the EU, Funding for the NHS, Ending/reducing tuition fees, Police Funding, Ending (hard) Brexit, Maintaining the triple lock on pensions, Pay rises for public services, Planned Internet regulations/restriction, Privacy/ending mass surveillance through internet, phone. Participants were asked to order these from 1–11.
What were the top reasons?
- Ending (hard) Brexit, chosen by 67% of respondents as top choice
- Funding for the NHS, chosen by 20% of respondents as top choice
- Rights of EU citizens in the UK/UK citizens in the EU, chosen by 7% as top choice
- School cuts, chosen by 3% as top choice.
All other choices had less than 2% as top choice, including the dementia tax. Labour voters were in line with these responses. Even for Labour voters, 56% of respondents offered ending hard Brexit as a top choice, and for 76% of Labour voters it was among the top-3.
What happened to the Liberal Democrats?
On the face of it, the Liberal Democrats had a brilliant strategy — they appealed to the 48% who had no political voice. The result was decent, 12 MPs up from 9 (8 compared to 2015), but not the hoped-for fightback. These results can show what happened.
Note that it is significant that members of the 48% FB group voted for Labour in large numbers (over 50%). This was mainly at the expense of the Conservatives, but also the Greens lost votes from them. As can be seen in the first graph, the Liberal Democrats gained, but not as much as Labour did. Some authors such as Polly Toynbee thought it was because Remain voters were over it, and now thought en masse that the "will of the British people" ought to be respected.
However, this is not the case here. The reasons were a mix of tactical voting and being impressed/excited by the Labour manifesto, which seemed to many respondents to offer hope for a different Britain.
Last minute decision to vote Labour rather than Lib Dems. Influenced by tactical voting sites. I hadn’t realised how many deposits the Lib Dems lost because of tactical voting.
It was difficult to choose between most of the above as even many of the bottom ones were equally important to me. For me when I do a “which party should I vote for” survey the answer is Lib Dems But I was impressed with Corbyn and liked the labour manifesto, I was also concerned May was going to get a hard brexit, and even though labour were going to honour the referendum they seem to be angling for staying in the single market and customs unions, A soft Brexit seemed a better option than a hard Brexit with the unlikelihood of another referendum. Also as my area is a safe Tory seat I felt it was important tactically to send a message to government, I had noticed the noise on social media and was starting to believe there may be a upset.
Labour were clearly against austerity and were offering a vision of a society that I wanted to live in.
Possibility of a different approach to Government practice, alternative to austerity mentality, being unafraid of kindness in politics, accepting collective responsibility, being honest about need for tax increases.
I surveyed the same Facebook group at the end of 2016, and I asked them at that time for their current voting intention. As can be seen in the graph below, a whopping 72% was intending to vote for the Lib Dems. However, only 38% ended up doing so.
To what extent was the vote a tactical vote?
I also presented respondents with choices of voting considerations to get a better grasp of the degree of tactical voting, with each choice on a five-point scale from not at all important to very important.
As can be seen on this graph, the top choice was: I voted for the party that best represented me, at 3.9, followed by a tactical vote to stop (a hard) Brexit
So as can be seen here, tactical voting and voting with one's heart were both at play.
Not many respondents swapped their vote. Presented with a list of what they did in the run-up to the elections in 2017, only 2% of respondents swapped their vote. The top actions they engaged with were
- Posted on social media about the elections (Twitter, Facebook, etc), 21%
- Tried to convince family members/friends to vote, 17%
- Urged young people to register to vote, 15%
- Donated to political parties, 11%
In conclusion: Was this the revenge of the remainers?
My survey shows that committed Remain voters did vote Labour for tactical reasons, but they were also attracted by the Labour manifesto and identified with the party's anti-austerity message. They voted for Labour in spite of its Brexit stance, not because they were all of a sudden pro Brexit.
Labour should take the result of this survey into consideration for two reasons. First, they need to be aware that there is still resistance against Brexit in a subset of their voters. It is not known how big this subset is, but it likely contributed to their surge. Second, if Labour can govern in the next few years and are going to realise their manifesto, they need the UK to be part of the single market and customs union. This fact has not changed, and if Labour finds itself in the tough situation that it would have to impose more austerity to help fund Brexit, voters would likely be angry.
Several years down the line, the divisions between Leave and Remain will be less salient than they are now. By this time, appeal to the "will of the people" as living standards plunge will not be as politically expedient as it is now. Labour, take heed.
