Will Change UK and the Brexit Party shake up the EU elections? D'hondt be so sure

This article was made possible by our Patreon supporters! Special thanks in particular go to our $5 supporters: Harry Jackson, Henry Ellenger and Scott Folan. To support Stats for Lefties on Patreon, visit https://www.patreon.com/leftiestats
 

---- 

With the news that the Conservative Party has begun selecting candidates for the European elections, it’s now looking like a certainty that the UK will indeed be holding elections to the European Parliament. Many Conservatives are dreading the prospect, with Tory Minister Nadhim Zahawi calling the elections an “existential threat” to the Tories. Backbench Tory MP Mark Francois, meanwhile, believes that Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party are “licking their lips” at the prospect of fighting European elections. On the other side of the Brexit debate, Change UK – the party that is being established by members of the Independent Group of MPs – is hoping to win votes from Remainers. 

With the elections conducted under a voting system that ensures parties broadly receive the same share of seats as their share of the vote, Change UK's confidence would seem to be well-placed. However, the United Kingdom’s voting system for the European Parliament is not fully proportional, and the new minor parties may find themselves struggling to gain even a handful of seats. 

The UK’s voting system 

Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), who co-write EU laws and appoint the President of the European Commission, are elected in the UK using a system of proportional representation (PR) known as “Party List PR”. Rather than nominating 1 candidate in a relatively small area, political parties nominate a long list of candidates in super-sized constituencies that elect 3-10 MEPs dependent upon population. Voters can then vote for the party they want, and the seats in that constituency are allocated to each party in proportion to their share of the vote, using a calculation known as the "d'hondt" equation.

The effect on minor parties 

All uses of proportional representation in Britain have tended, over time, to produce better results for smaller parties. The EU elections themselves are a good example of this. Before 1999, European elections in Britain used first-past-the-post, just like elections to the House of Commons; the chart below shows the % vote share in EU elections for minor parties (i.e. other than Labour, the Conservatives and Lib Dems) from 1979-2014. Because Northern Ireland has a different party system, the figures below are for Great Britain only.

The increasing prominence of minor parties in EU elections becomes even clearer when you look at the % of seats won by minor parties; this reached an all-time high in 2014, when parties other than Labour, the Conservatives and Lib Dems won 43% of MEPs. That’s the percentage equivalent of minor parties winning over 280 seats in Parliament.

One thing that you may have noticed, however, is that until 2014 minor parties tended to receive a lot less seats than their aggregate vote share would suggest, even after the introduction of proportional representation. In 2009, for example, 42.9% of voters cast a ballot for a minor party – but minor parties only won 27.5% of the seats. In 2014, this trend was brought to a sudden end, and the proportion of votes cast for minor parties (43.8%) very closely matched the share of seats that they received (42.9%).

The reason for this was simple: prior to 2014, most votes for minor parties were scattered across dozens of different small parties (in 2009, a total of 8 small parties received more than 1% of the popular vote). In 2014, however, most of the votes cast for minor parties were cast for 1 minor party in particular: UKIP.

This phenomenon, whereby minor parties do relatively badly in European elections despite the use of a proportional voting system, is what I’ll explore below.

Proportional, yet not proportional 

Ironically, the proportional voting system used for the European Parliament has often disadvantaged minor parties (relative to their vote share). This has happened because the voting system is not strictly “proportional”. If it was, the Lib Dems’ vote share of 7% would have led to them winning 5 MEPs (7%) in 2014. Instead, they won just 1 MEP. This was because their vote share was so low in every constituency that they didn’t have enough votes to elect an MEP outside of South East England, which has the most MEPs available.

The Green Party of England and Wales frequently faces the same problem: despite winning 8% of the popular vote in 2009 (their highest since 1989), and gaining 274,000 votes (+2.4pts) their total seats (2 MEPs) did not change. This was because, outside of London and South East England, there simply were not enough seats available in the other regions for the party to win.

In the East of England, for example, the party won a reasonably high 8.8% of the vote; in the South East (10 seats), this would have been enough to elect 1 MEP. However, the East of England only had 7 MEPs available, so the Greens fell short. This story was repeated across the country, and for other parties. In the North East of England in 2014, for example, the Conservative Party received 17.7% of the vote; that would have guaranteed it at least 1 seat in London (8 MEPs) or the South East (10 MEPs). But the North East only had 3 MEPs, so the Tories got no seats at all.

The table below shows the average minimum % of the vote required in 1999-2014 to elect an MEP in each region and nation of the UK.

As you can see, the average minimum winning percentage ranges from 7.9% in South East England (10 MEPs) to 23% in North East England (3 MEPs). The fewer MEPs a constituency has, the harder it is for a minor party to win seats. And unfortunately for minor parties, most of the UK’s constituencies don’t have many MEPs.

The consequence is that, despite European elections using proportional representation, major political parties end up winning a share of seats that is often far higher than their share of the vote. In 2009, for example, the Conservatives won 28% of the popular vote in Great Britain, but won 25 of 69 seats (38%).

So what does this mean for Change UK and the Brexit Party?

Effect on Change UK and the Brexit Party

As we have seen above, unless a political party wins 10-15% of the vote in multiple regions, it is unlikely to win more than 1-2 seats across the UK. This is enough of a challenge for the Greens, who as a centre-left, environmentalist, pro-EU party at least have a unique selling point in elections. But for single-issue anti/pro-Brexit parties like Change UK and The Brexit Party, reaching this threshold is going to be hard. There are already other parties (the Lib Dems and UKIP) who appeal to the same voters, and if all of them stand in the same region, none of them could reach the threshold needed to win a seat. Indeed, in Wales and Scotland there will be 4 anti-Brexit parties competing against each other! 

This isn’t just speculation on my part. So far, four voting intention polls for the European Elections have been published. An average of the four produces the following results:

 As we saw earlier, the European elections electoral system can produce a result for the major parties that isn’t as proportional as one might expect.

In this instance, Labour would win 27 seats out of 70 (39%) on a vote share of just 28%. The pro-Remain parties, meanwhile (the Lib Dems, SNP, Green Party, Change UK and Plaid Cymru) would win a combined 26% of the popular vote, but only win 8 seats out of 70 (11%).

The pro-Brexit parties would do much better, winning a combined 27% of the vote and a near-proportional 29% of the seats. But even they could do much better as a united bloc; the joint Brexit Party/UKIP vote would be enough to deliver 34% of seats if their vote wasn't split.

So how does this happen? Once again, it’s all about the constituencies. Take this example from the Yorkshire and the Humber constituency:

In this instance, Labour would win 3 of the 6 seats in Yorkshire and the Humber (50%), despite only winning 32% of the vote in the region. This is largely because the anti-Brexit vote would be split 3 ways; thus, despite winning a collective 20% of the vote in that region (enough for 1 seat) none of the anti-Brexit parties would win anything.

The West Midlands is another good example. Despite being projected to win only 29.3% of the vote, Labour would win 3 out of 7 seats (42.9%). The anti-Brexit parties would collectively win 17% of the vote (enough for 1 MEP) but because they would split the vote three ways, they would win nothing. The pro-Brexit parties, meanwhile, would win a joint 31% of the vote, enough to deliver them 3 seats - but because the pro-Brexit vote would be split, they would only end up with 2 MEPs.

Conclusion 

The Brexit Party and Change UK will likely poll well in the European elections. Polls suggest that the Brexit Party is averaging around 16%, a very strong showing for a party created just a few months ago. Change UK, meanwhile, is doing worse, averaging around 5%.

There is no doubt that the two parties will affect the results of the European elections. But if no electoral pacts are formed, then the number of seats won by these two parties could be surprisingly low, simply because they will be splitting the vote of other parties with nearly-identical positions on Brexit.

All of this could change, of course. The parties could well form electoral pacts, or their popularity could increase as we get closer to the elections. But what this data shows is that the voting system for European elections has its own obstacles, just like first-past-the-post – and it would be wrong to assume that the new minor parties will find the European elections very easy just because they use proportional representation. Politics is never that simple!

It’s my party and I’ll lose if I want to: why a new centrist party would fail spectacularly

Well, folks, the myth of the new centrist party has returned once again. It seems that the saga never ends. 

This month, an anti-Brexit Labour MP (David Lammy) raised the prospect of a new anti-Brexit party splitting off from the Labour Party and contesting elections in its own right. Lammy, bizarrely, said that any split would be Corbyn’s fault. Setting aside the ridiculous suggestion that the people who stay in the Labour Party are more responsible for splitting the party than those who actually leave it, the idea of a new centrist party is worth examining.

The idea of a centrist-led split in the Labour Party has been repeatedly suggested ever since Corbyn’s first campaign for the leadership in 2015. We’re not going to dwell today on why a new centrist party might be formed. Instead – assuming that it is formed – we’re going to examine what impact it might have on British politics. 

“I Don't Wanna Be a Loser”: people vote for the Labour Party, not their local MP 

If a new centrist party is formed, it will almost certainly be composed of incumbent MPs from the Labour Party who will then seek to be re-elected as their new party at the next general election. This was the tactic of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), a centrist party that split from Labour in 1981, and some news outlets have speculated that this would also be the strategy of a new centrist party. There is a problem with this plan, however: when MPs leave their parties, they have a terrible track record of getting re-elected in their constituencies under a new party label.

Since 1950, of 33 MPs to quit their parties and re-stand in the same constituency as a different party or an independent, 27 lost. Just 6 were re-elected, 2 of them in Northern Ireland, which has a different party system to Great Britain. Labour MPs have an even worse track record: of 21 Labour MPs since 1950 to leave the party and stand for re-election in the same seat, 18 lost.

The difficulties that MPs have faced in getting re-elected should not be surprising. Polling conducted by YouGov in June 2017 showed that just 6% of Labour voters supported the party primarily because of their local candidate or MP, compared to 28% who voted for the 2017 election manifesto and 15% who voted for Jeremy Corbyn. Even more recently, polling in October 2018 showed that just 1% of current Labour voters are voting Labour primarily for their local candidate or MP. Given that only 22% of voters can name their local MP, this is not surprising.

In short: Labour MPs who leave their parties historically find it very hard to win re-election. Barely any Labour voters back the party primarily because of their local MP. And very few people even know who their local MP is.

So without a local membership willing to campaign for them, without a large base of supporters in their constituency and without the resources of a major political party, an MP is almost certain to lose if they leave their party and stand for re-election on behalf of a new political party. This makes it very unlikely that any MP would risk leaving their current party and losing their seat. And yet, unless any new party attracts significant numbers of MPs, it will not be taken seriously, nor will it be able to attract the publicity or resources necessary for the party to succeed. 

“I Can't Make It Without You”: you can’t wish First Past the Post out of existence 

One inescapable reality that any new political party always has to confront is that Britain uses a single-member plurality voting system (“First Past the Post”) to elect its MPs. Winning 5% of the national popular vote, which would guarantee you around 5% of seats in countries that allocate their seats in Parliament proportionally, means nothing in British politics. In Britain, if you want to win seats in Parliament, you have to win the most votes (usually 35-40%) within a specific constituency. This is particularly challenging for parties that only represent a small minority of public opinion, such as the environmentalist Green Party, because most environmentally-minded voters are not concentrated in a single constituency but are instead distributed across 650 different constituencies. This particular problem has also affected centrist parties in Britain. The Liberal Democrats, as well as the Liberal Party and the Social Democratic Party before them, have struggled to win significant numbers of MPs even whilst winning substantial numbers of votes.

The tables below show the election performances (% of votes and % of seats) of all parties other than Labour and the Conservatives since 1945.

 

As you can see, third parties (and others) can receive millions and millions of votes in British elections (reaching an all-time high of 10.4m votes in 2010) and yet only win a handful of seats in the Commons. UKIP found this out firsthand in 2015. The party won an impressive 3.9 million votes (12.6%), an increase of 9.5 points from their 2010 result. But they only won 1 seat out of 650. By comparison, the SNP achieved a total of 1.5 million votes (4.7%) and won 56 seats. Even the Lib Dems have only ever managed to win a maximum of 62 seats (in 2005).

Yes, the Greens managed to win 1 MP, after over 30 years of trying. Yes, UKIP managed to win lots of votes very quickly after 25 years of existence. And yes, the SNP won a landslide majority of seats in Scotland (after 70 years of existence). But a new centrist party would aspire to govern, or hold the balance of power, in the next general election. That would require a new party, starting from scratch, to win dozens or even hundreds of seats. That simply has never been done before in modern British politics. 

“Back Together”: Conclusion 

When the Social Democratic Party was established in 1981, its founders declared that “the need for a realignment of British politics must now be faced”. British politics did indeed re-align as a result of the SDP’s creation, but their much-hoped-for centrist realignment never arrived. Instead, the relative success of the SDP/Liberal Alliance in the 1983 election (25% of the vote) only had the effect of splitting the opposition vote and enabling Margaret Thatcher to increase her Parliamentary majority from 43 seats to 144 seats. Thatcher’s overwhelming victory, achieved because the opposition vote was split evenly between Labour and the Alliance, allowed her to not only carry out her policies in the 1980s but also define British politics for the next 30 years. As she famously declared in 2002, her greatest achievement was “Tony Blair and New Labour”.

A new centrist party is incredibly unlikely to succeed, if we define “success” as wielding any kind of formal power (i.e. governing or holding the balance of power in a hung Parliament). But it would almost certainly split the opposition vote just enough that Labour could lose a close election that they might otherwise have won, leaving the Tories in charge. Would that lead to a realignment of British politics? Absolutely – but it wouldn’t be the centrist, pro-EU future that a new anti-Brexit party might want. Instead, the Tories would be fully in control of a post-Brexit UK, with the left marginalised and centrism totally abandoned.

Is that really what centrists want?

Poor Expectations: why the Liberal Democrats are doomed

How times change. When Stephen Lloyd MP, who quit the Liberal Democrats this month in order to vote for May’s Brexit deal, first stood for Parliament in 2005, his party had 62 MPs. Following his departure, they now have 11. After Lloyd was elected as an MP in 2010, his party took part in a UK government for the first time since 1931, and within the previous decade had also governed as part of coalitions in Scotland and Wales. They were, in a very real sense, a major political force. Now they are struggling to have more seats than the DUP.

The party’s position on the fringes of British politics is a consequence of the 2015 general election result. In one devastating night, the Liberal Democrats’ participation in the Coalition undid over 45 years of electoral progress. Under Clegg, the party won just 8 MPs (-49) and 7.9% of the popular vote (-15.1pts). On both counts, this was their worst result since the general election of 1970, but it was also the biggest drop in Liberal support since 1931, and the biggest percentage loss of seats (86%) since 1918. Given that the 1931 election saw the Liberals stand 400 fewer candidates than in 1929, and that the 1918 election saw a temporary split in the Liberal Party, it is fair to say that the 2015 result was their biggest ever defeat in a ‘normal’ election.

Is it even possible for a party to recover from that, let alone to recover enough that they are in government again? Maybe. Stranger things have happened. But it would take a long time, and there are significant obstacles in its way. In this article, we’ll examine what they are. 

Part 1: Hard Times 

The Liberal Democrats’ entry into the Coalition government in 2010 was the culmination of an 80-year journey, in which the party dragged itself out of the political wilderness and back to the Cabinet. And yet, despite spending decades trying to return to power, just 5 years in government has left the party barely existing as a political force. Their local government base has been depleted, after over two thousand of their local councillors (51%) lost their seats; their representation in devolved Parliaments is virtually non-existent; their European Parliament representation is at its lowest level since the UK switched to using proportional representation; and their group of MPs (11) barely outnumbers those of the Democratic Unionist Party (10).

It is tempting to point to history as proof that the Liberal Democrats will never recover. But the truth is, it is hard to know. The party has never experienced circumstances as bad as the ones they experienced in 2015. Yes, the party has been stuck on a low vote share before, and yes, the party has gone through decades without winning more than 12 seats.

But since 1924 (when they lost 118 seats) and 1935 (when they lost 17.1pts in vote share) they have not experienced a mass withdrawal of support in any way similar to that experienced in 2015. Yet those examples set a worrying precedent. After dropping from 23% to 7% in 1931, the Liberals did not win more than 20% of the vote until 1983. And after dipping below 100 seats for the very first time in the 1924 general election, the party never won anywhere near that number of seats again. To this day – 94 years after the 1924 defeat – it still hasn’t. So if history is any guide, the Lib Dems’ defeat in 2015 will leave them on the fringes of UK politics for a very, very long time.

As former Leader Tim Farron told the Independent in March 2018: 

“There is no doubt it [the Coalition] possibly fatally damaged the party”. 

Part 2: A Tale of Two Elections 

But history is not the only indication that the Lib Dems will struggle to return to power – on this question, the present is as much a guide as the past.

The 2017 result, in which they made a net gain of 4 seats, would seem to suggest that they are recovering. But outside of Scotland, where anti-SNP tactical voting saw them gain 3 MPs, and a few key seats, the party simply collapsed further. For the first time since the 19th century, there are no Liberal MPs in Wales at all, after its last stronghold of Ceredigion was won by Plaid Cymru in 2017. In England, the party now holds just 7 seats out of 533, only 1 more than their 2015 result (which was their worst since 1970). And contrary to expectations – given that 48% of the voters backed ‘Remain’ in 2016 – the strongly pro-EU Lib Dems failed to increase their vote share in the 2017 election. Instead, they went backwards, falling to 7.4%, their worst share of the popular vote since 1959. The party lost half of the seats (4 out of 8) that they had won in 2015 – it was only by gaining 1 new seat (Oxford West & Abingdon) and regaining 7 seats they had held in 2010 that allowed them to make net gain of 4.

Even more worryingly for the Lib Dems is the fact that they have collapsed in many of the seats they used to hold. The table below shows the 57 constituencies won by the party in 2010, and compares the Liberal Democrat vote in 2010 with their vote share in 2015 and 2017.

As you can see, in 35 of the 57 seats, the party did worse in 2017 than in 2015.



And in 29 previously-held Lib Dem constituencies, the party’s vote share has undergone a dramatic collapse since 2010, falling by more than 20pts.



Effectively, the 2017 election confirmed the message of the 2015 election: the Lib Dems’ support base has dramatically shrunk, and it is not growing. Between 1983 and 2015, the party never received less than 17% of the popular vote. Yet they have now received less than 8% of the vote in two successive elections for the first time since 1959, and they have not averaged above 10% in the polls in any month since their landslide defeat in 2015. This is not a party on the cusp of returning to relevance. Yes, the only way is up – but ‘up’ is a long, long way away. 

Part 3: The Mystery of Brexit 

The final question worth considering, when it comes to the Lib Dems, is (what else?) Brexit.

You might not know it, but Brexit has affected the Liberal Democrats’ base as much as it has affected the Tories and Labour. A YouGov survey conducted after the 2017 election found that only 20% of the party’s voters had backed ‘Leave’ in 2016. This might not be surprising, but amongst people who had voted for the Lib Dems in 2015, 29% had voted Leave. YouGov found that 73% of these ‘2015 Lib Dem Leave’ voters backed other parties in 2017. Even more worryingly for the party, a YouGov exit poll after the 2017 election suggested that the Lib Dems had retained only 42% of the people who backed them in 2015. By contrast, Labour retained 83% of its 2015 voters.

Think about that: the Lib Dems couldn’t even convince half of the people who voted for them after 5 years of the Coalition to stick with them just two years later. Granted, it’s not quite as bad as the Green Party (who lost 86% of the voters who backed them in 2015) and the Lib Dems did manage to win a handful of new voters from other parties, arguably because of their stance on Brexit. But the party faces an uphill party even to stand still. As Tim Farron himself said in 2018, if it weren’t for the Lib Dems’ stance on Brexit: 

“There’s no way we’d have 12 seats and 100,000 members now. We’d be doing a David Owen now and winding up the party”. 

The mystery, though, is this: when Britain leaves the European Union (as it will), how long can the Lib Dems continue to be the party of Remain? The party’s voters back remain by an 80-20 margin. Nearly 6 in 10 of its voters didn’t back the party in 2015, and even its former Leader thinks that the only reason the party is still viable is because of its Brexit stance. When Britain has left the EU, why would those people continue to vote Lib Dem? We don’t have an answer to this question. But neither do the Lib Dems. And that should really, really concern them. 

Conclusion 

Inhis speech to the 2010 Lib Dem conference, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg claimed that coalition government would soon become the norm for Britain; that “Liberal, plural politics will feel natural” after 5 years of the Coalition. “Hold our nerve”, he told his party, “and we will have changed British politics for good”.

It’s easy to see why he thought that. Earlier that year, his party had won its highest share of the popular vote (23.0%) in over 25 years. Despite declining slightly from their 2005 result of 62 seats, the Lib Dems still had 57 MPs, more than it had held at any point from 1931-2005. And for the first time since the early 1930s, Liberals were part of the government.

Yet 5 years later, it wasn’t Clegg giving the Leader’s speech to Lib Dem conference. He had resigned a few months earlier after leading the Lib Dems to their worst defeat since 1918.

Instead, the new Leader Tim Farron gave the speech. The 2015 election result “was utterly devastating”, he told members. But he did not criticise the party’s performance in government. Instead he said: 

“I am proud of what we did in government and I am determined that we will return to government. Did we make mistakes in Government? Of course, but show me a government that didn’t. When we come to measure our time in Government the scales are heavily weighed in our favour…We paid a heavy price for our time in government, but we did right by our country”. 

Two years later, Farron led the Lib Dems to their lowest share of the popular vote since 1959. He resigned not long after.

Despite the electorate rejecting them decisively in two successive elections, the Lib Dems have not shown any desire to apologise for the Coalition. Indeed, after Farron resigned, the party elected Vince Cable – a former Coalition minister – as their new Leader unopposed.

And that, ultimately, is why the Lib Dems are doomed: not because they lost badly in 2015 (which they did), not because they declined further in 2017 (which they did) and not because they continue to struggle in opinion polls (which they do). They are doomed as a party because they fundamentally will not accept that the decision to join the Coalition is what led to them losing 80% of their seats. As ‘The Newsroom’ famously stated: “The first step in solving any problem is recognising there is one”. Until the Lib Dems acknowledge their mistake, they will remain stuck in the political wilderness.

And to be honest, that’s where they deserve to stay.

Should I stay or should I go? Labour’s Brexit dilemma

To support Stats for Lefties on Patreon for as little as $2 a month, visit https://www.patreon.com/leftiestats

--

With the government having finally put its proposed Brexit deal on the table, and with a Parliamentary vote imminent, the Labour Party and its 257 MPs face a dramatic test of their Brexit position.

Despite the vocal demands of the “People’s Vote” campaign, Labour has declined to back a second EU referendum, and has instead prioritised a general election so that Labour can form a government and negotiate a Brexit deal that meets its “6 tests” for a good deal. As part of this strategy, Labour will vote against the Tories’ Brexit deal - the idea is that if the Tories’ Brexit deal cannot pass the Commons, then the government will be forced to call a general election to obtain a mandate for May’s deal. Labour can then win the election and renegotiate a new deal. If Labour cannot obtain an election, then all options (including a second referendum) remain on the table.

The nuanced approach of Labour’s policy has often left pro-EU campaigners frustrated and angry – many ask why Labour doesn’t simply back a second referendum or support stopping Brexit outright. The reasons for Labour’s complex strategy, however, are equally complex, and in this article we’ll try take a look at the statistics that illustrate Labour’s dilemma.

Part 1: Play to Win 

On the face of it, Labour’s base is mostly anti-Brexit. In the most recent Survation poll (the most accurate pollsters in 2017), the pollster found that 65% of those who voted Labour in 2017 would vote ‘Remain’ in a second EU referendum. Other surveys have found that 90% of Labour members support ‘Remain’, and that 78% of Labour members back a second referendum on Brexit. With the Brexit vote having gone to Leave by only a 4pt margin (52-48) in 2016, and with public opinion having slightly shifted towards Remain since 2016, you might think Labour’s path is clear: it should follow the advice of its voters and members, adopt a ‘Stop Brexit’ (or second referendum) manifesto pledge and win the votes of the pro-EU 48%. Simple. 

But the problem Labour faces is this: the House of Commons isn’t elected through a national popular vote. It’s elected through individual constituencies. And on the question of Brexit, the vast majority of those constituencies lean more strongly one way or the other than the nation as a whole. Within England, Wales and Scotland, just 18 constituencies recorded a vote that matched the national figure (52% Leave, 48% Remain). 350 gave a higher vote share to Leave (on average, 60% for Leave), whilst 264 gave a higher share to Remain than the national figure (on average, 59% for Remain). And if Labour wants to become the governing party, especially with an overall majority, it has to win dozens upon dozens of constituencies where the voters backed Leave. 

In total, Labour needs to gain 64 new seats (and retain its current ones) to win an overall majority. The smoothest path runs through the 76 seats where Labour is behind the opposition by less than 10 percentage points. 42 of these voted Leave (with a 59% Leave vote, on average), and 36 voted Remain (with a 61% Remain vote, on average).

This in itself shows Labour’s challenge – it cannot win a majority without taking seats that went heavily for Leave AND that went heavily for Remain. However, the challenge is greater than it looks. Of those marginal seats, 23 of the 36 pro-Remain seats are held by the SNP or Plaid Cymru, and taking seats from the two nationalist parties doesn’t increase the number of anti-Conservative MPs in the Commons. Labour could take every single one of these seats and it wouldn’t make any difference: the Tories would still form the government. 

The seats that matter most are the 54 Conservative-held Labour target seats. And of these 54 seats, a full 41 voted Leave (with an average Leave vote of 59%), and just 13 voted ‘Remain’ (with an average Remain vote of 57%). These 54 seats are listed in the table below.

The upshot of it all is this. Labour voters might be pro-Remain. Labour members might be pro-Remain. And the national vote in 2016 may have been close. But in most of the marginal seats that Labour must win in order to form the next government, the voters leaned heavily towards Leave in 2016.

A Labour Party committed to overturning those people’s votes and keeping Britain in the EU against their wishes might well win a handful of votes from the Liberal Democrats, and take some seats from the SNP, but the price might well be losing to the Tories in dozens upon dozens of marginal seats. That doesn’t sound like a risk worth taking. Labour’s nuanced and unifying Brexit policy, that respects the referendum whilst reaching out to Remain voters, may well be the only way for the party to win in these marginal seats. After all, it’s that strategy that saw Labour win 42% of the popular vote in England in 2017 – its highest share of the vote since 1997.

Part 2: The Magnificent Six 

But Labour’s electoral challenge extends beyond their marginal target seats. There are a total of 54 Labour-held seats where the party leads its opponent by less than 10 points, and to win power Labour must also hold all of these constituencies (or all but a few of them). Of these, Labour is being challenged by the SNP in 6 of them, meaning that regardless of the result the seat will elect an anti-Conservative MP. Of the other 48 Labour-held marginal seats in England and Wales, the Tories are in second place in 46, with the other two being Labour/Lib Dem marginals. And most of these (36, to be exact) voted Leave.

But how do we know that these seats would vote Conservative if they want Leave? After all, many have voted for Labour for decades. Unfortunately, those long-held loyalties are crumbling under the pressure of a motivated and active pro-Brexit electorate. 

Take Stoke-on-Trent-South. The seat voted Labour from 1950 (when it was created) until 2017, when it elected 26-year old Jack Brereton as its first Conservative MP. Stoke-on-Trent-South was one of six Labour-held seats lost to the Conservatives in 2017, all of which had one thing in common: they all voted Leave by big margins in 2016. Stoke-on-Trent-South itself voted Leave with 71% of the vote.

 
In many more pro-Leave seats, Labour came close to losing. In Ashfield (71% Leave), Labour’s majority fell from 9,000 votes to 441, with the Tories increasing their vote share by 21pts; in Dudley North (71% Leave), it fell from 4,000 votes to just 22 votes; in Bishop Auckland (61% Leave) it fell from 3,500 votes to 502. The story is the same in dozens of other Labour seats; the table below shows all 69 Labour-held seats where there was a net swing to the Tories in 2017. As you’ll see, every single one of them voted Leave.

The six lost Labour Leave seats, and the fact that every single Labour seat that saw a swing to the Tories in 2017 voted Leave, are a warning for Labour to stay away from a ‘Remain-at-all-costs’ position. Leave voters have shown that in heavily pro-Leave seats, loyalty to Labour is less important to them than their desire for a swift British exit from the EU. The potential gains of a ‘Stop Brexit’ standpoint (gaining 15 Tory and Lib Dem seats) are outweighed by the potentially devastating downsides (losing 36 Labour seats to the Tories). The potential gains are minimal, and the risks are very high. Far from proving to be electoral gold dust, a Stop Brexit stance could be destructive for the Labour Party. 

Part 3: Every Little Bit Hurts

The final point to make about Labour’s dilemma has already been implied above, but it is worth restating it specifically: two-thirds of Labour voters might be pro-Remain, but a third of them are not, and it is those Leave voters who are making Labour competitive. Losing them, especially losing them to the pro-Leave Tories, would be devastating.

The recent 20,000-sample poll by Survation (the large sample gives us more accurate demographic breakdowns) showed that Labour is currently attracting the support of 51% of Remain voters. However, this large support from Remain voters constitutes just 23% of the overall popular vote. Even assuming that those backing Labour who didn’t vote in 2016 are pro-EU (these non-voters are currently delivering 6 points’ worth of vote share to Labour), this still leaves Labour on a mere 29% of the popular vote, less than in 2015. Labour only gets to 40% (1pt ahead of the Tories) when you take into account Leave voters, 26% of whom are voting Labour. These ‘Labour Leave’ voters constitute a sizeable 12 percentage points of the overall popular vote.

Thus, Labour’s 40% share of the vote is made up of three groups:

• People who voted Remain in 2016 (22.8pts)
• People who voted Leave in 2016 (11.6pts)
• People who didn’t vote in 2016 (5.9pts)

Some Remain campaigners argue that Labour could win on the votes of Remainers alone, as they made up 48% of the total votes in the 2016 referendum. But this is a misreading of the situation. At present, a full quarter (26%) of ‘Remain’ voters are voting for the Conservatives – the party driving us towards a Hard Brexit. If they will vote for the Conservatives even now, then Brexit clearly isn’t their priority or their main objection to the Labour Party, and adopting a 100% Remain position will not win them over.

The remaining 'Remain' voters are backing the Lib Dems, Greens or SNP. Together this accounts for 9 percentage points of vote share overall. So if Labour ignored (and lost) its pro-Leave voters, adopted a ‘Stop Brexit’ position and managed to get ALL pro-EU Lib Dem, Green and SNP voters, they'd still only get to 38% overall - less than they are polling now.

So: if Labour loses Labour Leavers (12pts) to the Tories, and the Tories retain Tory Leavers (25pts), Tory Remainers (12pts) and new Tory voters (2pts) they would be polling at 51%. If Labour gains all other Remain voters, keeps Labour Remainers (23pts) & new Labour voters (6pts) they'd be polling 38%. 

Simply put: the numbers don’t add up. Labour cannot win the popular vote without winning at least some Leave voters, and if the party drives away all of its Leave voters, then a landslide Tory majority (the sort predicted in 2017) will be the result.

Now, some will say that it’s unrealistic to assume that all Labour Leave voters would leave if Labour adopted a Stop Brexit position. And that’s true. But the point of the stats above isn’t to predict what would happen – we don’t know. It’s to illustrate that in order to win with a Stop Brexit position, Labour would need absolutely everything to go right. It would need to retain all its Remain voters, keep all of its new voters and gain almost every single non-Conservative Remain voter. And even if it did all of that, and retained at least two-thirds of its Leave voters (after promising to overturn their referendum vote) Labour would end up with a 3pt lead in the popular vote – barely within the margin of error of its current polling.

Given the massive risks, and the small gains possible even with everything going right, is it really worth alienating half the voters for a poll lead barely bigger than what we have now?

Conclusion

Referendums are really tricky for the Labour Party. For the 118 years in which it has existed, questions of constitutional reform have never been a fundamental, existential priority for the party. Unlike the Liberals, it has never championed proportional representation; even with a massive majority in 1997-2005, it left the House of Lords virtually unchanged; and when the whole of the UK last voted on a major constitutional issue (the referendum on the Alternative Vote) the party remained strictly neutral. Whilst the party has taken many stances on constitutional issues, they have often been cautious (such as on electoral reform), have only introduced limited changes (such as the incremental devolution for Wales and London) or simply dropped the policy entirely (regional devolution for England). Other issues have consistently been regarded as more important.

There has been one recent exception: Scotland.

In the run-up to the 2014 independence referendum, the Scottish Labour Party sided completely with the unionist side of the argument. The party became dedicated to the question of keeping Scotland in the union, with former Labour PMs and Chancellors becoming key spokespeople of the 'No' campaign. And even as the electorate became more and more polarised, Scottish Labour decided to firmly align itself solely with the 55% of the voters who voted ‘No’ to independence.

The response of the electorate was overwhelming: in the 2015 election, Scottish Labour lost 40 of its 41 seats. In 2016, it fell behind the Tories. And in 2017, despite gaining seats, the party ended up third in the Scottish popular vote and all but 1 of its MPs have tiny majorities. 

Hopefully, UK Labour will learn from what happened to the Scottish Labour Party and steer clear of being defined solely by its position on a polarising constitutional question. If it doesn’t learn from the past, the much-predicted landslide Tory majority we heard so much about in 2017 may well turn out to have been merely delayed, and not prevented. Let's hope we never have to find out.