Writing for the European Council on Foreign Relations, YouGov’s Peter Kellner highlights an important polling finding:
In July this year, YouGov asked this question: ‘Imagine the British government under David Cameron renegotiated our relationship with Europe and said that Britain’s interests were now protected, and David Cameron recommended that Britain remain a member of the European Union on the new terms. How would you then vote in a referendum on the issue?’…
42% say they would vote to stay in, while 34% would vote to leave.
Tory voters swing right round, from 58-29% for leaving the EU when we ask the conventional in-out referendum question [without Cameron’s endorsement for a ‘yes’ vote], to 55-34% for staying in, if that is what the Prime Minister recommends.
The degree to which Conservative voters can sway a referendum result if they get a strong steer from their party’s leadership mirrors the experience of the AV referendum campaign. When Cameron started campaigning strongly for a no vote in that referendum, Conservative supporters switched in large numbers and the overall figures moved sharply as a result.
* Mark Pack is Party President and is the editor of Liberal Democrat Newswire.
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11 Comments
Yes, it sounds like a good ruse for pro Europeans. However, what if the 1922 Committee, get awfully frustrated by Cameron’s inability to see the (UKIP), writing on the wall, and decide to do an in/out referendum of their own in relation to David Cameron staying in Number 10?
Your theory assumes that Cameron will make it all the way to 2015. Can that be assumed?
Good article by Peter Kellner, i linked it on another thread here a couple of days ago.
I more or less fit the definition of the “pragmatic nationalist”, although I tend to sympathise with “both” of the given positions to any question and remain that oddest of beasts according to Yougov: an optimistic EUroskeptic.
“There is also a clear, though lesser, correlation between how we view the EU and whether we think Britain has grown better or worse in the past 30-40 years. By three-to-one, pro-EU respondents think Britain has improved, while by five-to-three, those who regard the EU as a failure think Britain has got worse. The correlation is 0.3. A similar figure applies when we compare expectations for the future, and whether or not our children’s generation will be better off than ours: Those who are pro-EU divide evenly between optimists and pessimists, while those who are anti-EU are overwhelmingly pessimistic.”
Still, the given definition of a pragmatic nationalist appears to fit me very well:
“Pragmatic nationalists (PNs): 23%. Like the WNs, PNs tend to have a traditional view of Britain, but tend to be less pessimistic about the way Britain is heading. They are divided about the merits of overseas aid, but tend to think Britain does need to co-operate with global institutions. Were Britain a castle, they would lower the drawbridge more often than the WNs, to allow more contact with the outside world. They are divided on whether the EU has been successful, but tend not to have strong feelings either way.
PNs also divide evenly between Labour and Conservative. The share of Liberal Democrats is in line with the national average; but only 3% would vote UKIP. Otherwise, their demographic profile is similar to that of Britain as a whole.”
Finally, the main conclusion is 100% spot on:
“Secondly, if the WN column can be reduced to, say, 35% or less in a referendum campaign, then the PNs will become the swing group. Their votes will decide whether Britain leaves the EU or stays in.”
Persuade me that UK can continue to be a sovereign nation-state within the EU and i’ll vote to stay, otherwise I’ll vote to leave.
The EU has a price as well as a value, let us hope the former does not exceed the latter.
Liberals and Social Democrats have long held a pro-european stance. This sort of debate going on in England shows exactly why Scotland’s place in the EU can only be guaranteed through Scottish independence. Only with a yes vote in 2014 will Scotland’s membership of the EU remain in Scottish hands.
Isn’t there another lesson here for the Liberal Democrats? Of the three categories of opinion listed in Peter Kellner’s article, the ‘Progressive Internationalists’ are most closely aligned with Liberal Democrat opinion. Indeed, no other party speaks for such people. Anyone looking for our core vote, please note.
Two problem Simon:
1. In an adversarial FPTP system 25% of the electorate is not enough, the lib-dem’s must also be appealing to adjacent political sectors (in this case the “Pragmatic nationalists”).
2. By a ratio of nearly 4:1 “Progressive internationalists” seem quite happy to vote for Labour, as a political sector it may form a core vote, but is it a lib-dem core vote?
@jedibeeftrix – To answer your two points:
1) Don’t knock 25%! It would be a healthy core vote, equivalent in size to that of the Tory and Labour parties. And a core vote is a base, not a limit. A core vote strategy entails consolidating the core then using that as a base to build out and appeal to others.
2) Yes, more ‘progressive internationalists’ currently say they would vote Labour. That’s partly a reflection of the fact that Labour is currently doing much better in the polls generally than the Liberal Democrats. But also, the Liberal Democrats haven’t done much lately to appeal to ‘progressive internationalists’; indeed, in recent elections (and particularly in Euro elections), the party has deliberately played down its internationalism in a perverse attempt to appeal to the sort of voters least likely to vote Liberal Democrat. If the Liberal Democrtats want to win over ‘progressive internationalists’, they must give such people good reasons to vote instead of worrying about not causing offence.
“And a core vote is a base, not a limit.”
If the intention is to reach beyond the narrow confines of the Progressive internationalists then i am delighted.
I disagree with the conclusions drawn in this piece. Reading Kellner’s polling research:
This analysis suggests two big implications.
“First, Worried Nationalists comprise by far the biggest single group. In a referendum on whether to leave the EU, Worried Nationalists give the anti-EU lobby a head start. Although they could be outvoted if virtually all the Pragmatic Nationalists lined up against them with the Progressive Internationalists, I find it hard in practice to see how the British would vote to stay in the EU unless a fair number of nationalists could be lured from the “worried” to the “pragmatic” column.”
Anyone who thinks a referendum on membership of the EU can be won at present by the “IN” campaign has stars in their eyes. Forget it, the issue is simply too poisoned for any sort of rational debate.
perhaps, but what is the logical conclusion o his poisoned debate?
This is a complete misrepresentation of the position. The turn around in Tory opinion in favour of staying only comes after a re-negotiation that would give us a status barely distinguishable from that of Norway (though not in Schengen). If MP thinks this would be a pro European win the LD’s have clearly finally forfeited their remaining credentials as resistants to the rise of euroscepticism.
John, this would be a problem-european win, because no representative democracy will be able to take Britain into the euro-core in the next decade, and the alternative is to remain an essentially sovereign state within the common market.
This will of necessity require disengaging from competences that will become supranational within the core, for the alternative would be responsibility without power.