Tuesday 22 June 2021

Polling - what does it tell us?

A recent Yougov poll seems to show the nation is still sharply divided about Brexit, contrary to what Lord Frost told his German audience last week. The survey has some surprising (or maybe not) results when people are asked about how well or badly Brexit is going. What I think it tells us is that the real impacts of leaving the EU are yet to be felt by many people. Yougov tweeted the survey by choosing to give preference to those who think Brexit is going very or fairly well:

An amazing quarter of the population think things are going well, but splitting it between leave and remain voters the figure is 45% and 8% respectively. And while no remain voter thinks things are going VERY well, it is telling that as many as 8% think it’s going fairly well.

You don’t need to be too smart to realise that these voters are clearly not paying attention and have yet to see or experience the impacts personally. They are either ignoring the effects or have been insulated from them and don't care.

If Yougov had decided to give priority in the headline to people who think things are going badly the figures would be:

  • Con voters 10%
  • Leave voters 16%
  • British public 38%
  • Remain voters 66%
  • Labour voters 68%

It’s clear many more people think Brexit is going badly.

I also take heart from the fact that twice as many leave voters (16%) think it’s going badly compared to remain voters who think it’s going well (8%). This has been the case since mid 2016, always with more regret on the side of the leave voter, and I think the gap is slowly increasing.

At the moment, another quarter of the population thinks it’s neither going well or badly and a further 13% don’t know. This means 63% of the British people think it’s going well, are indifferent or don’t know. This is not what revolutions are made of.

I am reminded of a piece in Orwell’s novel 1984 where Winston Smith stumbles across a crowd of women in a market fighting over some saucepans, “wretched, flimsy things, but cooking-pots of any kind were always difficult to get” and he wondered why they couldn’t fight over something that mattered.

Orwell (Smith) thought that the “proles” would eventually rise up and took heart from the fact they were prepared to get angry when things were in short supply.

"If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within.”

But he went on:

"Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious."

When will the reality of Brexit seep into the consciousness of the average voter? Answer, when they personally feel the effects.  The huge disparity in the polls shows we are, for many, still at the emotional stage rather than reality, but that may soon begin to change.

This week we get reports that a lack of HGV drivers caused by the return of 15,000 drivers to the EU will mean a shortage of chilled products very soon and the FT are reporting that Dover is worried that new checks on passports of passengers travelling to France will mean long delays when travel starts to return to normal.

Dover Council is taking the government to courts over its 'irrational' decision not to fully fund additional infrastructure at the port and they say new checks requested by the French will slow the rate from 500 passports per hour per lane, to just 50. With five lanes at the moment and 20,000 cars per day crossing at peak periods, this is likely to result in massive queues when restrictions are lifted and volumes return to normal.

So, I just wonder if when things like this finally bring home to people the reality of Brexit, they might become “conscious” of it and rebel? I think sooner or later, they will.

The question will be what happens then?

I am convinced the Tory party will blame it on the EU and a sizeable chunk of the population will mistakenly accept that the fault is in Brussels, not London. It is the logical thing to do. The Conservatives cannot admit Brexit was a mistake even if a new generation of moderates came to the fore, and that’s not likely to happen anyway. It might take 50 years for a senior Tory to deliver a mea culpa but it may never happen at all.

It will be like Tony Blair and the Iraq war and much worse than the poll tax which many Tories did concede was wrong. Brexit's impacts are so damaging and so far reaching it will be extremely difficult if not impossible for any Tory to admit it was a mistake. Certainly, nobody with  ambitions of becoming leader could do it.

So, they will try to frame things initially to lay the blame at the feet of the EU, and to return to my Orwell theme, Britain will become Airstrip One and the EU will become Eurasia and we will be into a permanent propaganda war that could last for years.

Johnson seems to survive anything and even Cummings' recent attacks have simply bounced off him but I do wonder of the PPE scandal will finally succeed where his enemies have failed?

Another six companies have been revealed to have received multi-million pound contracts for PPE via the so-called VIP systems, despite have no experience and some at least with close links to the Tory party.
Even the section of the press which supports the government will be hard pushed to defend enriching a lot of party acolytes with single bidder PPE contracts - it seems almost like the excesses seen in Putin's Russia or in the Chinese Communist Party apparatus. Stories of taxpayer's money finding its way into the pockets of already wealthy people as the use of food banks is on the rise and a second wave of austerity arrives is not going to help.

Johnson's gravity defying popularity cannot last forever.

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