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How the 2017 general election determined the fate of Brexit

In 2016 Britain went to the polls to vote on our future relationship with the EU. But, argue John Curtice and his co-authors in a new book edited by Philip Cowley and Denis Kavanagh, the real Brexit referendum actually happened a year later

Wednesday 12 December 2018 12:43 GMT
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The social geography of the 2017 general election was shaped by attitudes towards Brexit
The social geography of the 2017 general election was shaped by attitudes towards Brexit

If voters agreed with the prime minister that the 2017 general election was about Brexit, then – given that her vision of Britain’s future relationship with the EU was widely regarded as representing a “hard” Brexit (prioritising control of immigration over continued membership of the EU single market) – we might expect her party to have advanced more strongly in places where the previous year a relatively high proportion had voted to leave the EU.

Our analysis suggests this is precisely what happened. The higher the estimated vote for Leave in 2016, the more the Conservative vote increased, while support for the party actually fell back on average in places where Leave failed to secure at least 45 per cent of the vote.

The link between Labour’s performance and the strength of the Leave vote in 2016 is much weaker, a finding that might be thought to reflect the party’s relatively ambiguous position on Brexit.

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