Sunday 12 May 2019

'Devastated Remainers' in a quandary

A thinktank has been surveying Remainers and its spokesperson reports the results in the Observer. None of these polls can be relied upon, and I can't be bothered to track this one down,but it finds:

Polling by BritainThinks confirms that all voters have much to protest about, with 83% telling us that they feel “let down by the entire political establishment”.... Our “Brexit Diaries” work shows that Remainers – 48% of total voters – divide into two segments. The first group we call the Accepting Pragmatists: the 14% who voted Remain, were disappointed by the referendum result but see some upsides to leaving the EU. The larger group, at 34%, are the Devastated Pessimists, who voted Remain and continue to see nothing good coming out of Brexit...

The Devastated seem to be about as numerous as supporters of the Brexit Party, then. Who are they?

they are very much more unhappy with events than other voters, and much more pessimistic about the future. Despite everything, almost half of the population as a whole are fundamentally optimistic, agreeing that “regardless of the outcome on Brexit, Britain will thrive over the next 10 years”, but Devastated Pessimists buck the trend: only 14% anticipate Britain thriving. BritainThinks also found that overall six out of 10 agreed that “anxiety about Brexit is bad for people’s mental health”, but among Devastated Pessimists this rose to 79%.

Our Devastated Pessimist group are young. They make up 53% of 18- to 24-year-olds, but only 21% of those aged 65-plus, and are well educated and middle class: 44% of the AB social class, but only 24% of DEs....  [Curiously]...This makes them natural Labour supporters but they are particularly angry with Labour, with more than half agreeing that, on Brexit, “Jeremy Corbyn is more concerned about his political career than the national interest”

They seem to have nowhere to go now that Magic Santa has lost his appeal:

...the Lib Dems were criticised for being “invisible” and “really quiet these days”, with some voters unsure about where the party stood on Brexit. It remains to be seen whether the ‘‘Bollocks to Brexit” campaign unveiled last week will be eyecatching enough to address that. Meanwhile, Change UK has yet to register real impact, with almost 50% of voters saying they still do not know enough about the new party to have any sense of their potential, while the Greens are still seen as a one-issue party....[No joy so far for arguing that the way to stop climate change is to stay in the EU?] Remainers keen to do the right thing may well explore sites such as Gina Miller’s tactical voting site Remain United, although this presumes significant motivation – and many may conclude it is wasted effort

The hints of low motivation lead to new devastating conclusions:

we might have sensibly predicted that it would be Leavers who would cause that to plummet. But Farage has offered them a reason to act. Oh, the irony if the no-shows on 23 May turn out to be voters who passionately wanted to remain in the EU but now find themselves without an obvious electoral home.

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