What a night! Thanks to Mark for his excellent coverage overnight.
The results surpassed my wildest expectations. And the media can just stop with this “triumph for the Brexit Party” narrative. They are effectively a repackaged UKIP which, in 2014, got 27.5% of the vote. They’ve only gained 4.1% on top of that to end up with 31.6%. UKIP’s 3.3% on top of that gives unequivocal Leave 34.9%. The combined total of Liberal Democrats, Greens, Change UK, Plaid Cymru and SNP who are all committed to Remain is 40.4%.
You can’t really say with confidence what the Conservative and Labour votes mean. I suspect much of the Labour vote did so with gritted teeth so you could probably add another 10% to Remain which would take the total for Remain to over 50%.
So, enough with this Brexit Party victory narrative.
But enough of that for now. Let’s meet our new MEPs.
As of now, we have 14 new ones – 15 in total so far. And they are a diverse bunch – a majority (8) women and two BAME candidates elected.
We hope that the Fabulous Fifteen will become the Sensational Sixteen at about 11 am this morning once the Western Isles has finished counting. Two are Newbies who have joined the party since 2015 and one more joined in 2014.
Making up my LIb Dem MEPs Twitter list was pretty satisfying.
So who are our new MEPs? Here are extracts from their biographies on the party website and a few more notes. I will update this later if, as projected, we win in Scotland but do not want to tempt fate.
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