Brexit: Who voted Leave? The old, less educated and Christians

Boris Johnson urged his colleagues to ‘learn the lessons of the referendum campaign’.

Never in modern Britain has so much depended on so few with so little clue about what to do.

It is hard to believe just how deeply bewildered are Britain’s political leaders, both Conservative and Labour, by the consequences of the Brexit referendum and how completely they lack clear strategies for the road ahead.

David Cameron called the referendum with no strategy for dealing with a Leave decision, then admitted during the campaign that no civil servants were working to prepare such a plan.

He now has washed his hands of it all by announcing his resignation, leaving it to the next prime minister to decide on trifles such as whether to hold an election or perhaps a second referendum, whether and when to begin formal exit talks with Brussels, and just what Britain should seek in those negotiations.

Michael Gove’s remarkable impersonation of Frank Underwood from House of Cards has seen him undermine his close friend Cameron, then ambush his ally Boris Johnson to emerge as a surprise contender for 10 Downing Street, but it will be 10 weeks before we know who is in charge.

With the Labour Party even more paralysed than the Tories, Westminster’s strategists are busily analysing two key constituencies in each party: the few hundred MPs who nominate each party’s leadership candidates, and the few hundred thousand “grassroots” party members who can then choose the leaders.

But the new PM and opposition leader — if Jeremy Corbyn can be dislodged — will be unable to respond at all sensibly if they cannot decipher the motivations of the most important constituency of all: the 33.5 million people who voted in the EU referendum.

The question, then, is: “What just happened?” When Johnson announced his withdrawal from the leadership race he urged his colleagues to “learn the lessons of the referendum campaign”, offering his conclusion that the vote to Leave was a protest against economic inequality and a cry for renewed sovereignty.

Many Remain voters disagreed, claiming the Leave victory was based on a fear of the outside world, relying on the votes of people who were older, lower paid, less educated, less politically informed than most, and therefore susceptible to the promises of Leave campaigners and most tabloid newspapers that quitting the EU would somehow repair Britain’s hollowed-out public services by slashing immigration.

According to the Remain camp the old, the sour and the gullible had robbed outward-looking younger generations of opportunities to live, work and study abroad, opportunities that those bitter old voters were never going to use. (A higher turnout among younger voters would have helped the Remain camp.)

Brexit supporters quickly dismissed all that as elitist sour grapes.

So what do we know about the 17.4 million people who voted to Leave and what hints can we discern about their motivations?

The YouGov online polling house has surveyed 5455 voters and weighted their demographics to match the voting results, while another polling operation run by Conservative donor Michael Ashcroft went further by asking 12,269 voters on polling day about not just their personal details but also their attitudes. One clear conclusion is that it was indeed older voters who gave the Leave campaign its 51.9 per cent majority. YouGov found that 71 per cent of the 18 to 24-year-olds who voted chose Remain, compared with 54 per cent of those aged 25 to 49, 40 per cent of 50 to 64-year-olds and just 36 per cent of those over 65.

Ashcroft had similar findings, putting Remain support at 73 per cent among the under-25s and 40 per cent among the over-65s, adding that most voters with young children (under 11) wanted to Remain.

The greatest generation gap was among women: 80 per cent of those under 25 voted Remain compared with a mere 34 per cent of over-65s.

Both surveys found an equally clear schism in education levels. Those who left school before their A Levels, the top high school qualification, voted 70 per cent for Leave, according to YouGov, compared with just 32 per cent among those with degrees. Ashcroft found a huge 81 per cent of voters still in full-time education wanted to Remain.

Britain’s 132 university vice-chancellors had come out 132-0 in favour of Remain, arguing that EU membership helped research collaboration and academic mobility, and allowed Britain to receive a net gain of £1 billion ($1.78bn) in EU research funding. Education levels are related to income, employment and “social grade” — the survey’s way of measuring class — and all of those factors shed a similar light on the Leave vote.

YouGov found support for Leave was 62 per cent among those with household incomes under £20,000 but just 35 per cent among those earning three time that or more. The upper-middle class, classified as “higher managerial, administrative or professional”, gave Remain support of 61 per cent (YouGov) and 57 per cent (Ashcroft).

In contrast, Leave was backed by almost two-thirds of those considered “working class and non-workers”, meaning skilled manual workers through to those with lower grade jobs, pensioners or welfare dependants.

Ashcroft found most workers voted Remain while most of those not working voted Leave. Two traditionally Labour-leaning groups, retirees on pensions and people in public housing, defied Labour’s pro-EU message to vote Leave by margins of two to one.

Fifty-eight per cent of voters who backed the Conservatives at last year’s election and 37 per cent of those who supported Labour backed Leave, according to Ashcroft. YouGov found similar results.

Green supporters were the most pro-EU political camp. YouGov put their Remain support at 80 per cent and Ashcroft at 75 per cent. The Ashcroft researchers found a cloud of pessimism hanging over Leave voters, who were much likelier than Remainers to believe life in Britain was worse than it was 30 years ago, and that it was likely to get even worse.

One of the greatest frustrations of EU supporters is that Leave campaigners seem to have got away with blatant falsehoods, such as repeatedly claiming there was a £350 million weekly flow of British payments to the EU that could be redirected to the struggling National Health Service, while insisting that the same money could also somehow be used to replace current EU payments to farmers, universities and others.

Within hours of their victory, Leave campaigners began ­admit­ting that those numbers had never added up and conceded that they could not guarantee after all that immigration would be slashed outside the EU.

Were Leave voters as well-informed as they might have been? Some voters admitted to researchers that they paid little or no attention to political issues and most of them voted for Leave (63 per cent YouGov, 58 per cent Ashcroft). Those who said they paid a lot of attention to such debates backed Remain 55 to 45 (YouGov) or were split 50-50 (Ashcroft).

John Jewell, a media academic at Cardiff University who has studied the popular press and its coverage of refugees, says there were no exit polls on media consumption but the demographics of Leave voters were similar in many respects to those of readers of the Daily Mail, The Sun and The Daily Express. The Express in particular had produced “fraudulent and incendiary front pages” on immigration, he says, and it celebrated the Leave result with a headline claiming victory for itself and what it called “the world’s most successful newspaper crusade”.

Immigration was a potent factor in the campaign. When asked about their motivations, few Leave supporters (just 6 per cent) said they were driven mainly by a belief that leaving the EU was the best strategy for lifting Britain’s economy, trade or investment. Instead, 49 per cent said their biggest reason for voting Leave was “the principle that decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK”. Another 33 per cent nominated “regaining control over immigration and (British) borders”.

While much attention has ­focused on the fact voters in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Gib­raltar were much more pro-EU than the rest of the nation, Ashcroft’s team identified a strong current of white English nationalism among Leave voters.

Voters identifying themselves as “English, not British” were four times likelier to vote Leave than Remain. English voters who thought of themselves as “British, not English” voted the other way, 60-40 in favour of Remain, while those who considered themselves equally British and English were split almost evenly.

Fifty-three per cent of white voters and 58 per cent of Christians backed Leave while 67 per cent of Asians, 73 per cent of blacks and 70 per cent of Muslims preferred Remain.

People were much likelier to vote Leave if they had negative views of social liberalism, feminism, the green movement, globalisation and the internet, Ashcroft found. Most clearly of all, 81 per cent of people who thought multiculturalism was “a force for ill” voted Leave, as did 80 per cent of those who thought that way about immigration.

The pensioners, low-income earners and public housing residents who voted strongly for Leave rely more heavily than other voters on public services and seem to have accepted the message from many Leave campaigners that their access to health, housing and other services was threatened by immigration rather than other factors such as austerity and spending cuts.