It was a big CON to LAB Remain voter swing that cost the Tories their majority

It was a big CON to LAB Remain voter swing that cost the Tories their majority

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It’s possible that LAB could’ve fared better with a unequivocal Remainer as head

More serious analysis of the extraordinary GE2017 result is now coming out and is reflected in the Tweets above from leading political scientist Rob Ford of Manchester University who works closely with Prof John Curtice.

The big expectation throughout the campaign was that the Tories would benefit from Leave supporters and the collapse of UKIP. As it turned out that proved to be insignificant. What is striking is that amongst Remain voters the CON vote went down by 5 points while the LAB vote went up by 13.

This, of course, all happened in spite of the GE17 policy of Corbyn’s Labour which was in many ways pro-Brexit. Yet that was not how it was perceived and did not seem to inhibit a big swing amongst Remain voters to the red team.

The main data that’s available on this at the moment is featured in the Ford tweets. But the big message should be very worrying for Theresa May and her party. Many of the 16.1m Remain voters were Tories and the party cannot assume that they will continue to back the party. In many ways it is quite extraordinary that they were ready to use their votes to back Labour.

We’ll never know this, of course, but I wonder how many Remain backing Tories were put off from switching by Mr. Corbyn.

Mike Smithson


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