As a lecturer who, for his sins, gets to teach sampling and statistics I remain interested in the narrowness of the referendum vote. What is particularly interesting is that set of people who are undecided – as if often the case these fickle individuals can swing results. This led me to look back over a long set of data for the referendum to see if I could detect swings. The first chart is fairly self explanatory – the undecideds mostly swung toward leave.
Serendipity stuck its nose in, as it so often does, and the following chart also popped up, in that way Google throws up things vaguely linked to what you search at times.
This immediately caught my attention. There was a clear spike in attitudes on immigration that began to harden just as the referendum campaign kicked off last year. Again I looked for longer data.
It would seem that post-financial crash people were, understandably, mostly concerned with the economy and this matches a desire to leave the EU shown in the first chart (as people sort to blame existing structures for a failure to protect them?). By 2015 though views on the economy had mellowed just as the economy had begun to normalise and support for the EU grew. There were no new shocks to the economy in 2015, no new immigration data or shifts in the UK. All that happened in 2015/16 was a campaign by the Brexit group and its follows in the mass media that immigration was the ‘problem’ and leaving the EU was the solution. So there you have it. While a rump of the leave supporters probably would hold that view come what may they were pushed over the finish line by a tide of anti-immigrant racism. Whilst that is not a PC thing to say it is evident in the data. It’s not austerity or the economy but successful propaganda that appealed to some people’s deep seated mistrust of foreigners that seems to have won out.
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