Analysis

Just been doing some of my own analysis of the European Election results in Excel to see what can be gleaned and the cut through the rhetoric (click on the image to blow it up).

Assumptions:

Now it's not logical to believe all the Conservative votes were in support of Brexit. Similarly it's not logical to believe all Labour votes were in support of Remain. The Conservatives are more Brexit oriented than the Labour vote - the EU is, after all, a social project.

I had to resort to analysis of opinion polls and the consensus seems to be that 25% of Conservative voters are pro Remain and 69% of Labour voters are pro Remain - this seems a reasonable assumption. I split those votes accordingly.

Results:

Total votes: 16.5m, give or take a coupe of thousand from the much smaller parties most of us haven't even heard of. That's a turnout of 36% on the basis of the December tally of registered voters, which has actually decreased slightly from the tally of 2016. Not impressive by any standards and rather surprising given the situation.

929k more votes from Remain parties than Leave parties: 47% Leave and 53% Remain. Even allocating all the Conservative votes to Leave shows Remain having more votes than Leave, by a small margin of 172.8k votes, but that stretches credulity too far given the Conservative party is split and fighting a civil war.

Compared to the 2016 referendum, the total Leave votes for the EU election were 45% of those cast in the referendum; the total total Remain votes were 54% of those cast for the referendum.

Analysis:

Nothing meaningful can be derived from such a low turnout - not the result of a 2nd referendum, nor the result of a General Election, where turnouts are much higher. It can, however, suggest the percentage of the electorate within which Brexit is a crucial issue, being a third of the electorate with the rest of us not really giving a damn.

Given Ukip has descended into the Very Silly Party, that only really left the Brexit Party and the DUP as staunch repositories for a Leave protest, with the Remain protest spread around a number of parties having differently nuanced manifestos, but being united on the single issue of remaining in the EU. 

The Brexit Party didn't even have a manifesto - so that is an almost pure protest vote. It's not as if it would have been difficult for Farage to produce a manifesto - all he had to do was to copy and paste from his time in charge of Ukip and it's not as if there's more than a handful of members with Farage being in total control of them (contrary to popular theory, registered subscribers are not party members - look it up if you don't believe me).

I find it perplexing that given it's not 100% certain we will leave the EU, why anyone would vote for a party with no manifesto other than an articulated wish to get us out of the EU? Should we end up remaining (and I still give the chances of that happening as more than 50%), we would end up with (on past performance) a large contingent of MEPs who only turn up 61% of the time and are not interested in fighting the UK's corner and present for crucial votes, such as fishing. If we leave it's academic, but if we remain it's disastrous and a self-fulfilling prophesy that the UK will become irrelevant. That alone suggests the Brexit Party support was a protest vote.

Given the foregoing, none of this can be extrapolated to an indication of a General Election result - well, not unless 11% of the electorate (more if scaled up to a GE turnout) is prepared to give Farage a blank cheque. He is on record as supporting the replacement of the NHS with an American style insurance system - the pensioners among his supporters will love that. It's the absence of a manifesto that makes the Brexit Party an existential danger to itself; that and it's proposed alignment with European far-right parties. I can see Brexit Party votes vanishing in a General Election, as they have done previously for Ukip. Manifestos mean more to the electorate when they involve taxes and their pockets, which is slightly perverse when you consider the consensus among 'experts' is that Brexit will hit all our pockets.

Farage is a seasoned tactician - it's the very absence of a manifesto that holds his party together, as it's policy that will split it, being an alliance of left and right, united only on one issue. Very shrewd. Once policy comes to the fore, expect a split.

For Ann Widdecombe to articulate that the Brexit Party should be party to the negotiations on the basis of this result is a nonsense - the Brexit Party is not represented in Parliament for a start and therefore has no right of representation under our constitution. I don't doubt that the EU will simply refuse to negotiate with anyone not having a constitutional right to negotiate on behalf of the government of the day. Any Brexit Party negotiators probably wouldn't bother showing up anyway. Then there's the idiocy of negotiating a No Deal Brexit.... Perhaps it's time she was put out to pasture.

One thing that can be gleaned from the election results is the number of people for whom the EU is an important issue and who won't change their minds - the hardcore. That, however, leaves a much larger number who could change their minds...