Labour’s position on Brexit is not a compromise, but is taking the wrong side

The elections for the European parliament showed us the implications of a basic imbalance in politics today. Brexit is the dominant issue, yet both of the major parties support one side, the Brexit side. The Labour leadership tells itself that it is trying to bring the two sides together. It tells itself, by aiming for a softer Brexit than May wanted, it is trying to compromise. But as someone once said, Brexit is Brexit, and those voting in the European elections agreed.

To see why Labour’s position will not bring people together, just look at what happened to the Conservative vote. May was trying to achieve a very hard Brexit, where we were neither a member of the Single Market or Customs Union. She failed mainly because the Brexit extremists in her own party did not support her. European election voters punished the Conservatives and sided with the Conservative extremists. They didn’t want compromise.

Suppose Labour, after winning a future general election, enacted their softer Brexit. Would voters come together recognising Labour had attempted to unite both sides? Those voting for the Brexit party of Nigel Farage certainly would not. That slightly more Labour voters from 2017 voted fot the explicit Remain parties combined than Labour in the European elections suggests no appetite for compromise on that side either. Labour would instead suffer the fate of Theresa May and be hated by Remainers and Brexiters alike.

It is for that reason that this discussion is purely academic. Not because Labour would not win an election advocating a softer Brexit: there is a non-zero probability they would. Instead it is because Labour would end up being like Theresa May in failing to achieve their desired Brexit. As I argue here, the Conservatives would say Labour’s Brexit was a betrayal. Labour would only stand a chance of getting it through parliament if they agreed to have a second referendum with Remain on the ballot, and they would lose that referendum badly because Remainers and Brexiters would vote against them.

This dislike of a compromise is not irrational. Brexiters have ending up with No Deal because anything else fails to get complete independence from the EU. They are quite right to say that a softer Brexit would be worse for sovereignty than Remaining, because it amounts to pay, obey but no say. Equally for most Remainers a soft Brexit is qualitatively worse than staying in the EU. Look at the way the EU has supported Ireland in these negotiations, they would say. The moment you leave the club, you lose the backing of one of the most powerful political and economic organisations in the world. They are quite right to point to the many flaws in believing that the 2016 referendum is a mandate for any particular type of Brexit.

Why therefore are Labour antagonising their 2017 voters and their members by having a Brexit position that will be very unpopular and impossible to achieve? The answer normally given is that this is the only way to win a general election. Anything else risks losing ‘heartland seats’ because Labour voters will vote for a Brexit party. While this idea might have had some validity in 2017, it has since become an article of faith rather than an evidence based argument.

The basic problem with this argument is that there are many Remain voters in the constituencies that voted Leave in 2016. Polls throughout 2019 suggest a 3 to 1 ratio: by supporting Brexit Labour are losing three times as many Remain voters as any Leave voters they would lose by supporting Remain. The European elections backed part of that finding up with actual votes, and also suggested Labour are in danger of losing Leave voters anyway with their current stance. If anything like that ratio persists, they will lose their traditional heartland seats because Remain voters will not vote Labour.

The table below is from the Ashcroft exit poll for the European election. It compares the percentage of voters who voted for Labour or explicit Remain parties, and also the Leave/Remain balance, by region. The most Leave orientated regions are to the left. Overall this sample is almost certainly biased to Leave voters, because only a tiny number of young people (18-24) voted, and polls regularly show a small lead for Remain over Leave.

%	EM	NE	York	WM	East	SE	Wales	NW	SW	Lon	Scot
Leave	59	55	54	54	54	52	51	50	50	39	37
Remain	38	38	43	42	42	45	45	45	46	57	59
Lab	11	21	17	17	9	9	12	23	11	17	10
LD,G+	33	28	35	31	40	40	43	34	43	46	62
Lab L	4	7	6	6	3	3	4	8	4	6	3

The first point to make is that the outliers here are London and Scotland. Elsewhere, the Leave vote varies from 59% to 50%, and the Remain vote from 38% to 46%. The idea that leave voters are predominantly in the ‘North’ is nonsense. (If anything, the English divide is East versus West outside London, but it is still a small tendency rather than a real divide.) A key consequence of this observation is that areas like the East Midlands and the North East still contain many Remain voters.

These voters made their choice on the basis of the current policy stance of their parties. Nationally about a third of Labour voters in the European election want some kind of Brexit (Ashcroft does not give a regional breakdown), and two thirds want to Remain. The final row applies that percentage to the Labour vote in each region to get the percentage of Labour leavers. These are the maximum number of voters that Labour could lose from its European election result if it became a Remain party. Compare that to the total number of Remain voters, nearly all of whom could vote Labour if it became a Remain party.

The article of faith that those who justify Labour’s current stance cling to is that Remain voters will return to Labour in any general election, while if Labour became a Remain party any Leave voters would be lost. Examples in the past of protest votes that have all but disappeared are given to justify that faith. But it is never explained why Remain voters will come back to Labour even though it supports Brexit, but Leave voters will not come back in a general election if Labour supports Remain. In addition Brexit is not like anything in the past. It has divided the country like no issue before it. As I showed above, you really need pretty well all Labour Remainers to return to the fold to get a number smaller than the number of likely Leave losses.

The idea that Remain voters, and not the Leave vote, will return en masse to Labour in a general election relies in part on a universal use of tactical voting that is simply unrealistic. A good example will be the forthcoming Peterborough by-electon, which is a classic example of a Leave marginal that we are told Labour has to keep its current Brexit policy to win. If the European elections are anything to go by, Brexit will win. In 2017, when Labour just won, the LibDem and Green vote was small. Let’s see if Labour voters from 2017 will unite to keep the Brexit party out.

Some say it worked in 2017, so why will it not work in the future? Many things have changed since 2017 (when Labour still lost). The stance of the EU is now clear, and therefore so is the range of deals the UK could possibly get. The Remain movement is much stronger. But the Labour party has also changed. The 2017 election was the era of Starmer’s 6 tests, which included the ‘exact same benefits’. Today those tests are gone, and instead we have prolonged negotiations between the government and Labour over a possible Brexit deal. Too many Remainers who voted for Labour in 2017 feel they can no longer trust Corbyn on Brexit.

The weakness of the argument to keep current policy and ignore the European elections and the polling evidence has lead some to resort to nostalgia. The argument goes that the working class support for Leave is above the national average, and Labour should be a party of the working class. Labour is becoming less and less a working class party. Supporting Remain would be to “abandon much of the working class – and with it any prospect of a Labour government” according to Lisa Nandy.

There are three main holes in this argument. First there are plenty of working class voters that support Remain. Adopting a Brexit policy, even if it is milder than Theresa May’s hard Brexit, is in danger of alienating those voters. Second, Labour stopped being the party of the working class some time ago. Its heartlands today are in large cities and university towns, and supporting Brexit betrays its new heartlands. It betrays the young who overwhelmingly support Remain and overwhelmingly support Labour.

Third, the way you get the working class vote back is by promising or enacting economic measures that help the working class, and not by offering a weaker form (in their view) of Brexit to socially conservative working class voters. If Brexit, then why not immigration? If you think about it, Labour have been trying to appease exactly the same group of voters who voted Brexit for at least a decade, and they have failed miserably for one simple reason. Anyone who wants Brexit enough not to vote Labour is not going to be convinced by a party that is Remain at heart and which is offering them a half baked version of what they want. It was true for immigration under Blair/Brown and Miliband, and it remains true for Brexit.

I said there was still a chance that Labour with its current Brexit policy could win the next election. However the probability that it could win an election with a new policy that fully supports Remain is much higher, and certainly over 50%. The Leave voted could be divided, but the Remain vote if Labour supports Remain much less so. The key to any change in policy is to recognise that, thanks to the Brexiters, a ‘middle way’ (Labour’s current policy) is no longer possible. It will always be opposed by a blocking coalition of No Deal Brexiters and Remainers. The choice is now No Deal, a hard Brexit under the Tories or Remain. Of those three Labour have to support Remain.

What about a small shift in Labour policy, supporting an unconditional People’s Vote where Remain is always a choice on the ballot? The trouble with that policy is it traps Labour with endless questions of under what circumstances Labour would support Remain. Instead of the campaigning party Labour should be on Brexit, it becomes in most voters eyes the party of convoluted explanations. The next Brexit battle is to stop No Deal, and Labour can only do that effectively if it stops pretending it can achieve a softer Brexit.

The response to the European elections will define politics for some time

When I woke up on Monday morning and saw the European election results, I wrote this tweet

“Woke up to a triumph for Remain. On latest vote count from BBC, UK clear Remain 40.3%, clear No Deal 34.9%, Lab 14.1% Con 9,1%. Clear Remain even just beat No Deal Brexit in England. If that is not the headline you are seeing, it is another example of Brexit bias I'm afraid.”

For the next two days I got hundreds of messages telling me I was delusional (or worse), and often including a funny picture rather than any kind of argument.

Here is Farage doing exactly the same thing to exactly the same point on television. It is what people like him do when they have no answer. Here is the BBC making the same point, but badly because they mislabel No Deal parties as just pro-Brexit. Both Labour and the Conservatives are pro-Brexit.

Of the responses to my tweet that contained more than half a dozen words, the desire seemed to be to argue that Remain had not beaten abstract Leave. Indeed they had not. According to Ashcroft’s exit poll, 50% of voters backed Leave and 46% backed Remain. The reason why Leave won is obvious if you look at the age breakdown of who voted. In these kind of low turnout elections the old are more likely to turn up than the young, and this was no exception: only 3% of those who voted were between 18 and 24.

Why did I call the Remain vote a triumph? The Brexit party vote was neither unexpected or remarkable. It was clear from the start Farage would get nearly all the UKIP vote, and that he would also capture voters who want Brexit and were fed up that the Tories had not achieved it. He also got a few Labour votes. What was unexpected and I think remarkable that the Remain parties won so many votes. Previously I had hoped that the combined Remain parties vote might equal the combined Brexit party and UKIP vote, so I thought the actual performance was tremendous.

Did it matter that more Leave than Remain voters turned up? I cannot see why. What will shape politics in the months to come is the Tories reaction to Farage’s success, Labour’s reaction to Remain’s success, and whether this victory leads the Remain parties to cooperate in the next general election. The other important point is that abstract Leave totals mean less and less, given the chances of a Brexit deal passing parliament any time soon are zero. Their main relevance right now is whether those voters when faced with a No Deal Brexit back it or prefer Remain.

I have written recently about how the Tories are likely to respond to these results. Labour have already responded by making their support for a referendum unconditional, but they have not said that any referendum would contain a Remain option and they have certainly not said they would always support Remain. Corbyn’s dream of a Labour deal remains alive and party policy, and he seems not to have realised that he could never implement it. Whether what they have already done is enough to win back enough Remain voters in any general election seems 50/50 at best, so their current stance certainly puts an election victory at risk.

Before anyone mentions seats in the North East, according to Ashcroft 15% of European election voters who voted for Labour in the 2017 election voted for the Brexit party. An amazing 45% of Labour voters in 2017 voted for combined Remain parties. That 3 to 1 ratio matches what opinion polls have been saying, but it is one thing to say it to a pollster and quite another to break in many cases a habit of a lifetime and actually vote against Labour. And to those who say Labour cannot desert its heartlands, what about those in the North East that want to Remain? Ashcroft suggests that 42% of voters in the North East think they voted Labour in 2017, and 38% of voters in the North East want to remain in the EU. See this post on how attempts to attract Brexit voters in Brexit constituencies are more likely to push away the considerable number of Remain voters in those constituencies.

Labour’ choice is do they keep being a Brexit party and stay an opposition party with a romantic dream of becoming once again being a party of the working class, or do they follow their voters and members and become a Remain party that can win an election and actually do something for the working class. The European elections showed up a fundamental imbalance. Brexit is the policy of both major parties, so no major party supports Remain, and that is a vacuum that will be filled. (The Tories got punished because they failed to deliver Brexit.) Hence Labour should support Remain.

Right now we want a Labour leadership that is actively campaigning against a No Deal Brexit, telling people how a No Deal Brexit Britain would become an impoverished and powerless satellite of the USA like Puerto Rico but with a tax haven status for the rich. We do not want a Labour leadership who spend whatever air time they get explaining what their Brexit policy actually is.

If Labour think things can only get better, they may have already inspired what could be a sea change in any general election. The lesson for the Greens and the Lib Dems is that if they cooperate they could do remarkably well in a future general election, particularly if the Conservatives go for No Deal and Labour stay a Brexit party. Cooperation would involve the LibDems giving way in some seats where both they and the Greens are strong, but in exchange being the only party of Remain in most other seats.

If that happened, it would be a disaster for Labour. I have made it no secret that I believe the next government must be a radical party that can challenge neoliberal hegemony and also do something about the sorry state of our media, and I do not think the LibDems are there yet, although they are moving back to their traditional left of centre position. I therefore view anything that could stop the next government being Labour as a disaster. It would be tragic if that was to happen as a result of Brexit.

Labour Remainers can no longer trust Corbyn not to do a deal with May

I have argued in an earlier post that it is highly unlikely that Labour could get Brexit through parliament after winning an election, because the Tories will unite to oppose it, and they together with Labour Remain MPs would defeat it. The NEC recently agreed they want a People’s Vote on any Brexit that the Labour leadership disagree with. So the only way that Labour’s current policy might allow Brexit without a People’s Vote is if the Labour leadership come to some accord with Theresa May and her government.

The general expectation has been that a deal between May and the Labour leadership on Brexit is pretty unlikely. With many senior ministers focused on who will succeed May as Prime Minister, any deal with Labour is likely to see May’s cabinet collapse. The same should apply to the Labour side. The Tories are suffering because they are totally split and take the blame for not delivering Brexit. Why would Labour want to take joint ownership of this toxic project? Even if May and Corbyn could agree, the chances of any deal getting through parliament without a People’s Vote also attached are slim.

But May has nothing to lose, and unfortunately the reality as a result of Tuesday’s NEC decision is that Labour Remainers cannot trust Corbyn over Brexit. The argument before the 2017 election that Corbyn’s stance was just triangulation, or an attempt to shift the debate on to ground where Labour have an advantage, no longer holds because opinion has shifted to Remain, and a recent UCL study shows the switchers are predominantly Labour voters. The same study shows that for Labour, at least a fifth of their voters in every region say they are going to vote for a different party – and in every region defecting voters are overwhelming plumping for parties holding a definite Remain position. As Peter Kellner points out “Labour voters in Leave areas now back Remain by a margin of more than three to one.”

The excuses for Labour’s equivocation have therefore melted away. It looks more and more that Corbyn wants to avoid an unqualified commitment to a People’s Vote because he wants the path clear to do a Brexit deal with the government. That is obviously not in the interests of Remain voters. It is also a huge hit to his brand: the leader of principle who will give power back to Labour members. Remain voters' obvious response is to vote for one of the clear Remain parties. This is what seems to have happened in the local election today, and it will happen again in the elections for the European parliament.

There are two objections to Labour voters doing this. The first, and more powerful, is that seats in the European Parliament matter, and the more left leaning MEPs there are the better. If Corbyn is unsuccessful in doing a deal with the government, or if that agreement collapses, then this is a real cost. The second argument is that not voting Labour makes it more likely Farage will win the election. But as I have argued elsewhere, its votes not seats that matter in that election. Labour voters are going to keep forsaking their party as long as their commitment to People’s Vote is less than 100%.

How the media can frame our understanding of elections

What will the European elections mean for the future of Brexit? We know that Remain is clearly ahead in polls and has been for some time, but an actual election has additional validity. What better to focus on the EU issue than elections to the European parliament. So quite rightly everyone will be looking to the result to gauge popular opinion.

There is only one problem. The obvious thing to look at is votes cast, because these are unaffected by a voting system that penalises small parties. There are three main pro-Brexit, anti-People’s Vote parties (Con, Brexit and UKIP), five anti-Brexit, pro-PV parties (Green, LibDem, CHUK, SNP and Plaid) and Labour. Although Labour is officially a pro-Brexit party, it is likely something in excess of three quarters of those who vote for Labour are anti-Brexit.

But as I have written before, the media will focus on Nigel Farage. What is also almost certain is that they will focus on seats won rather than votes. As Ian Dunt writes

“Sure, Remain might end up doing as well as Brexit parties in the popular vote, but it won't matter. That's not how journalists think and it's not how Westminster thinks. They care about who wins: how many MEPs are returned and from which party.”

I can confirm, based on a twitter conversation with a journalist for a major broadcaster, that this is exactly how they will behave. They will focus on the large number of seats Farage wins compared to the small number of seats that the anti-Brexit parties win in England and declare a victory for Brexit. This journalist even said it would mean the death of a People’s Vote.

Now if this was all about the UK’s representatives to the European Parliament, then of course it would be right to focus on seats. It seems likely that had the Greens, LibDems and CHUK cooperated they would win more seats each than if they fight each other. But if you are trying to assess what the vote means for popular sentiment on Brexit you should look at the vote. Ask any pollster. But the media will to a large extent ignore this.

The only defence for the media’s approach is that politicians will also focus on seats. But will they? I think the truth is that the political parties that do well in terms of seats will do so. Those that do well in terms of votes will focus on votes. In particular the winner in terms of seats will make a great deal of fuss about that fact. The media loves to focus on winners for understandable reasons. The problem comes in letting this focus spill over into statements about issues where its votes not seats that matter.

Suppose the result in terms of votes and seats (excl Northern Ireland) is something like this (not a forecast, but just reasonable numbers to illustrate my point):

Labour 27% Seats 23

Pro-No Deal parties 28% Seats 25

Conservative 14% Seats 10

Anti-Brexit 31% Seats 12

Suppose Farage gets all of those 25 seats. He will be the winner, and we will see celebrations by him everywhere. But does that imply that a People’s Vote is dead? Of course not, as PV parties will have won 58% of the vote. Does it imply we should leave with No Deal. Of course not: no deal parties have only 28% of the vote, which is less than the anti-Brexit parties. Can we trust the media to make these points? I suspect not.

It is depressing how people internalise media behaviour. I have read countless tweets, articles and podcasts saying that the failure of the three anti-Brexit parties to cooperate is a huge mistake, because it will damage Remain’s cause. This is from Remainers themselves, not their opponents, and Remainers who know how the media behaves.

Why is it so difficult for the media to focus on reality, rather than make up a false truth that is sympathetic to certain politicians and newspapers. Maybe the reason is just bias - a bias imposed by the partisan press that too often sets the agenda. Maybe it reflects the media’s obsession with parliament and MPs, where MPs from Remain parties are few in number. Maybe it reflects how the media sees elections as horse races were only the winner matters. None of these reasons are good, so it is a shame that so many people internalise the media's framing rather than challenging it.

Why the European Elections will be painful to watch for some Remainers

In theory the forthcoming European Elections on 23rd May should be an opportunity for Remainers to translate the clear majority for staying in the EU that we see in the polls into actual votes. Remain has been ahead of Leave since the summer of 2017, and recent majorities have been above 5%. Indeed some in the smaller anti-Brexit parties have been suggesting exactly this: the EU elections should be about Remaining rather than Leaving. Unfortunately things are not that simple, as the following YouGov poll illustrates.

The smaller columns for the parties represent the data with ‘Would not vote’ and ‘Don’t know’ included.

The first point is that the anti-Brexit parties are polling at around half the level of the pro-Brexit, anti-People’s Vote parties. The key problem, as it has always been for the Remain cause, is that the Labour vote is mostly made up of Remainers. In this poll, 77% of Labour voters voted Remain in the 2016 referendum, and some of the other 23% may have changed their minds since then. Labour is an overwhelmingly Remain party in terms of who votes for it, but its leadership is in favour of its own form of Brexit and appears ambivalent towards a People’s Vote.

Some Remainers would love voters to desert Labour and vote for one of the three unambiguously anti-Brexit parties. But this is very unlikely to happen. Many voters, even though they might support Remain, want a Labour government above all else, and they will vote for Labour despite this being about elections to the European Parliament. This is of course exactly what happened in the 2017 general election. Voting left is hardly an irrational choice for these Remainers, because if we do not leave the EU the European Parliament does play a minor role in EU affairs and it is important to have left wing voices there.

The second point is that the elections for the European Parliament is actually about voting for MEPs, so seats matter as well as the popular vote. The D'Hondt voting system used in British elections for the European parliament combined with voting for MEPs on a regional basis does penalise smaller parties. The Liberal Democrats only received 1 seat out of 73 in 2014, even though they got nearly 7% of the overall vote. As a result, if the Remain vote splits badly it is conceivable that the total seat count for the Remain parties combined may only be a few seats, which will not look good compared to the double figures that Farage will get.

A very good question is why the anti-Brexit parties have not cooperated. It would be difficult to choose just one of the three parties to stand in each district, but it would not be impossible. Without this cooperation, tactical voting is unlikely to prevent the anti-Brexit vote being split three ways in each England region. It would seem these parties think it is more important to fight among themselves than unite in sending a clear message on Brexit. That will be sad if this failure leads to MEPs only being in the job for a few months. Remain can get a million on the streets and 6 million signatures, but it seems getting small parties to cooperate is a more difficult task.

Another possibility would have been for the People's Vote campaign to do as Nigel Farage has done, and put up candidates themselves on a pro-EU ticket. Unlike Farage, the People's Vote campaign would face problems in doing so. Electing individuals on a simple pro-EU ticket only makes sense if these MEPs only have a very short tenure. If the campaign is successful, you want proper MEPs representing different political perspectives. That is probably one of many reasons why the People's Vote campaign will not field candidates of its own, and is perhaps another reason why the smaller parties do not cooperate.

Given Labour's position and the lack of cooperation among the anti-Brexit parties, Remainers should not turn these European elections into a vote about being anti-Brexit, because they will lose badly. The combined vote for UKIP, the new Brexit party and the Conservatives is almost certain to exceed the combined vote for the LibDems, CHUK and the Greens. A smarter tactic would be, through the People’s Vote campaign, to make these elections into a vote about a People’s vote. The key difference of course is that Labour can potentially be counted as being in favour of a People’s Vote, and so making the European elections as a kind of referendum on a People’s Vote might succeed. Using the poll numbers above, the pro-People’s Vote parties have an overall majority.

In reality Labour’s position on a People’s Vote is nuanced, or perhaps just confused. It is in favour of a People’s Vote for a deal it does not like, but is rather ambivalent if the deal is its own. The leadership is divided on the issue. Apparently Keir Starmer was described by Tories in the joint government/Labour negotiations as the ‘ideologue’ for wanting a People’s Vote, while his colleagues were described as more reasonable! The European elections could force Labour’s hand on the issue. This is obviously what the People’s Vote campaign will hope for, but how much the Electoral Commission will allow it to campaign over the election is unclear.

If Labour did unambiguously commit to a People’s Vote in all circumstances it could take votes from the smaller parties, and this may well dominate any votes it my lose from Labour leavers. Labour has the opportunity for an overwhelming victory in these elections, as Brexit will take many votes away from the Conservatives to pro-No Deal parties. However that inducement may not be enough, in part because Labour are constantly thinking about the possibility of a General Election where they do not want to be painted as the anti-Brexit party. Remainers should also have the sense to see that a Labour victory in a general election would be a better option from a Remain point of view than a People’s Vote, for reasons I set out here.

Without a general election, the Brexit position has become a stalemate. Theresa May is set against holding a People’s Vote, and so are Brexiters. Behind all their guff about such a vote being an insult against democracy (“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength”), the real reason Brexiters hate the idea of a second referendum is that they think they will lose. Nor has parliament been able to force the government to hold a referendum, with the latest vote in parliament being 280 voting in favor of a People’s Vote and 292 against.

However no other option looks like getting over the line anytime soon either. Brexit has become a war of attrition. Brexiters are in no mood to accept May’s deal, and instead some have pinned their hopes on replacing her. Even if they succeed, it is unclear how this changes the parliamentary arithmetic. The Tories also fear a general election for the same reasons Brexiters fear a People’s Vote. Talks between Labour and the government are unlikely to get anywhere because a compromise that didn’t include a People’s Vote would be devastating for Labour, and any compromise by the government would pour oil on the fire of Tory divisions. Finally the new October deadline set by the EU is unlikely to force anyone to change their mind, because there is a belief in the UK that the EU will always allow another extension rather than risk an exit with no deal.

In these circumstances, a People’s Vote (PV) is going to be seen more and more as the only way out. In parliament it is already the option with most votes. It is just possible that the European Elections could change some minds if it was seen as an endorsement for holding a PV. But for this to happen the PV campaign needs to persuade the smaller parties to stop talking about this election as being about Brexit and instead start talking about a People’s Vote.

As far as the media is concerned, the European elections will be about the showing of the pro-No Deal parties. Indeed it could all be about Nigel Farage. His new Brexit party is well organised, well funded (from sources unknown), and is likely to get extensive publicity from the BBC at least. (To see the BBC choosing his “put the fear of god into MPs at Westminster” line as their headline quote illustrates all too well the themes of last week’s article on how the media encourages far right extremism.) The poll above, taken before his party was formally launched, indicates that his Brexit party could easily end up beating the Conservatives and coming second, as UKIP voters switch to his party. This will become the main new story.

That will be painful to watch for Remainers, but ironically it could indirectly help the People’s Vote cause. Moderate Conservative MPs will see the poor showing of their party in the European elections and begin to understand more clearly the bind they are in. For as long as Brexit is an issue, they will be in danger of hemorrhaging votes to pro-No Deal parties, but if they accept No Deal the Conservatives will not be in government for decades. A People’s Vote on May’s deal may be the only chance they have of changing that situation any time soon.