Wow!!! General Election on June 8th

[secret.simon]

Just remember that people who support Brexit will be as motivated to vote as people who oppose it.

Turns out, I am wrong on this one.

Leavers are less likely to vote, less interested, less knowledgeable and less satisfied with politics than Remainers.

Now may be the time to make your mark (literally and metaphorically), if you are registered to vote.

[Obie]

Are you sure you fellow leave voters will not run to the polls in drove, to put their Hero Teressa May in. To give her the mandate for hard and reckless brexit that she is demanding.

I am inclined to believe that people like yourself are fired up to go to the polls, to ensure brexit goes through.

[secret.simon]

Are you sure you fellow leave voters will not run to the polls in drove, to put their Hero Teressa May in. To give her the mandate for hard and reckless brexit that she is demanding.

Firstly, I am not neither a Leave nor a Remain voter. Leaving aside the immigration side of things, there are several cogent arguments for Leave, while there is a compelling trade & investment argument for Remain. Like Jeremy Corbyn, I am capable of sitting on the fence taking no side.

Secondly, I echo the sentiments in your post about Leave voters more likely to be motivated to vote in this General Election. But the Hansard Society Audit of Political Engagement argues otherwise. Given that it is a more exhaustive study and not just a feeling, I would give way to their superior knowledge. The image in the earlier post is on Page 16 of the Audit PDF.

Like you, I have no problem with acknowledging my mistake if it can be empirically or independently proven and is not based on a "feeling".

I am inclined to believe that people like yourself are fired up to go to the polls, to ensure brexit goes through.

Oh, I am fired up all right by this snap General Election. But it is more at the thought of the sheer volume of political science study material generated than any second Referendum excitement. Arguments about whether the Fixed Term Parliaments Act worked or did not, how to mend/improve it, about how the referendum would interact with the manifestos of the political parties, discussions about how the referendum interacts with individual constituencies and regions, etc. That is months of interesting discussions and talks in my field.

So, it is not the outcome, but studying the processes and the mechanics of how the processes work that I am fired up about.

As mentioned above, I am neither a Leave nor a Remain voter. That is why I encourage people on both sides to register to vote. I strongly urge both sides to engage in democracy; to vote, to lobby their MP, etc.

But an element of democracy is also for the minority to accept the will of the majority of the people, democratically expressed in a referendum or a General Election. That would have been my response had the referendum been to Remain as well.

[secret.simon]

421 of the 574 electoral districts (constituencies) in England and Wales probably voted to leave.

That number (421) is very close to 2/3 (434) of the total number of MPs of the entire UK (650). So even assuming that Scotland votes entirely SNP (which itself is unlikely) and that NI also votes Remain (the NI Unionist parties are actually pro-Leave), if pro-Leave voters vote Conservative, the UK Parliament will be overwhelmingly Conservative & pro-Leave.

Gina Miller's Anti-Brexit Group Has Cash, Seeks Plan to Spend It.

[Obie]

I am sure you will accept that not all leave voters signed up to Mrs May''s destructive and ideological Brexit? Right.

[secret.simon]

I am sure you will accept that not all leave voters signed up to Mrs May''s destructive and ideological Brexit? Right.

if pro-Leave voters vote Conservative

If...

I am pointing out the direction of travel. The specific road and speed of travel will come out in the manifestos. The local elections next Thursday will also give an indication.

The purpose of that post is to point out how a 52-48 split in the Referendum would create a 2/3 Leave majority in a General Election. Some people on these forums may have been under the impression that if they can get the Bregret vote to align with the Remain vote, they can reverse the referendum. It is nowhere near that easy.

[secret.simon]

A regressive alliance will make stopping the Tories much harder
The article is by Prof. John Curtice, one of the UK's leading psephologists.

Also, for those who trust that the polls will be wrong again, it is worth remembering that when the polls have been wrong in the UK, they have always underestimated the Conservatives share of the vote, because of the "nasty party" label (which ironically was spelt out by the current Prime Minister in 2002) - also called the shy Tory factor.

So, if the polls are wrong, the odds are that the Conservatives will get an even larger majority.

May expected to challenge right of EU citizens to bring family to Britain
Also, from the various new reports that I have read, it seems that the UK has accepted that the EU citizens already in the UK will be given permanent residency, if not direct citizenship (it is possible, but not certain).

However, the EU has upped the ante by taking the position that EU citizens in the UK should continue to exercise EU rights in the UK even after Brexit. Effectively, they will have more rights in the UK (by having both British citizenship AND EU freedom of movement for their family) than other British citizens, both born here and non-EEA citizens who have naturalised.

[ouflak1]

Effectively, they will have more rights in the UK (by having both British citizenship AND EU freedom of movement for their family) than other British citizens, both born here and non-EEA citizens who have naturalised.

Nobody knows what kind of 'rights' EU citizens will have after Brexit at this time. But a simple solution to that potential quandry, almost trivially simple really, would be to allow those of us who are currently EU citizens to somehow retain, or otherwise acquire EU citizenship while still being strictly UK citizens (or dual with non-EU nationality). It should be a low-cost route with little bureaucratic overhead involved.

This is all speculative though as I'm not sure what 'rights' a dual EU/UK citizen would have in the UK that a non-EEA citizen/UK citizen wouldn't also inherently have even if the government acquiesced to the EU's demand on this point.

[secret.simon]

I'm not sure what 'rights' a dual EU/UK citizen would have in the UK that a non-EEA citizen/UK citizen wouldn't also inherently have even if the government acquiesced to the EU's demand on this point.

Broadly, it seems that both sides, the UK and the EU, are agreed that the EEA citizens already resident in the UK will get permanent residency and there will possible (my opinion) that there may even be an accelerated route to British citizenship for these EEA citizens.

The EU's negotiation stance appears to now be that such UK/EEA dual citizens should retain (it seems, for their lifetime) a right to family reunion as it is currently under EU law (low fees, no need to prove subsisting relationship, automatic acquisition of PR rather than by application, etc), rather than under the much tougher UK Immigration Rules, even after Brexit and that this arrangement would continue to be governed by the ECJ/CJEU.

In that sense, these dual UK/EEA citizens will have more rights than British citizens born in the UK or non-EEA citizens who naturalise, even after Brexit.

Also see Vinny's post.

[secret.simon]

Probably a sigh of relief from some that the Conservative vote share in today's local elections was at 38% (as opposed to the polls showing ~45%) and only 11% ahead of Labour(as opposed to the 17-20% showing in the polls). That gives the Tories a majority of just 48, as opposed to the 100+ of the polls.

But that will still mean five years of Theresa May, now with a mandate for Brexit as will be spelt out in the manifesto. And she will have been elected as Prime Minister (so can't call her an unelected PM either).

Also see Lib Dems shouldn't count on Remain votes - the data looks bleak.

Just as some Leavers have learnt, one needs to be careful of what one wishes for. Your wish may actually come true.

[secret.simon]

Welcome to a (realistic/negative, depending on your point of view) roundup of another week's developments in politics, especially as regards the General Election.

A quick reminder to everybody that if I leave you feeling downbeat and depressed, and if you have the right to vote, please register to vote before May 22nd. As we have learnt from the Referendum, not voting is tantamount to agreeing with the majority verdict, even if it is something you detest.

And turn up to vote. Frank Luntz, an American pollster, has predicted, on today's Political Thinking on BBC Radio 4, that this election would see one of the lowest turnouts, if not the lowest ever, in UK electoral history. That means that your vote will have a bigger impact than usual in a General Election.

If you like it, you should have put a cross against it (with apologies to Beyoncé).

Why it may be too late to reverse Brexit

Lord Ashcroft, who has reinvented himself as a pollster, has published the results of an opinion poll that is wider (40,000 participants spread out geographically across the country vs the more usual polls of only 1000-2000 people) than usual opinion polls and hence less likely to be inaccurate. The results likely do not make pleasant reading for anybody who is anti-Tory.

Another poll by him suggests that the Lib-Dems may regret positioning themselves exclusively as the party for Remainers. It suggests that as many as 40% of Remainers accept Brexit as the outcome of the Referendum and are willing to go along with it.

Another poll (which I can't locate, but I believe that it was by the Economist) also suggested that "Pragmatic Remainers", who voted for Remain not out of ideological bias but on practical grounds, are likely to now vote for the party that is likely to get the best Brexit vote for the UK (most likely the Conservatives).

Remainers may also not have factored in the quintessentially British concept of fair play, part of which is that the loser accepts the results of the contest, even though it went against them. Although there is always a period of anger, grief and disappointment on losing, the loser is expected to accept the results for the greater good. Some of the persistent loud noises on the Remain side are seen as 'sore losers' and that itself makes that side unpopular.

This is not helped by the hostile noises coming out of the EU. Quite apart from the leaked details of the May-Juncker private dinner appearing in a German newspaper in extraordinary detail, the EU seems to already be working on the basis that the UK has left.

My opinion is that the EU still hoped that the UK would reverse its decision (as all other EU countries had done after a referendum that the EU disagreed with) until the Article 50 letter was actually sent. The letter was such a visible/obvious sign that the decision was going to be implemented that they are going through their own anger, grief and disappointment cycle. Hopefully in another six to nine months, they will have worked their way to acceptance of the decision with equanimity.

Another opinion expressed by others on these forums and other places is that old people dying would lead to a Remain majority by 2019. And yet, there is cause not to be too sanguine about such an expectation. A recent Yougov poll across Europe for the German TUI foundation suggests that 80% of EU (including UK) youngsters consider the EU as a trading bloc, not as one based on shared culture or values. Only just over half see democracy as the best form of governance, thus suggesting that youth is not a safeguard from populism. And 44% of UK youth are Leavers. Even young UK Remainers are more Euro-sceptic than those of other EU countries.

In other news

Why British citizens living in the EU will be affected much more negatively by Brexit than EEA citizens living in UK.

There was an interesting debate on Twitter about heritage & culture vs contribution when it comes to UK immigration. Alternatively, should immigration to the UK be defined in terms of shared history or geographic proximity? Given that both sides of the argument are here on these forums, I would encourage contributions to that thread on Twitter.

A related debate, not on immigration but multiculturalism, is taking place in that liberal bastion, Germany.
‘We Are Not Burqa’: What Does German Culture Even Mean?

Switzerland to limit Romanian, Bulgarian workers - The Swiss are not a part of the EU, but have a set of bilateral treaties with the EU that allow it to operate as if (quasi) EU. But those treaties have provisions for the Swiss to temporarily block immigration from some countries for periods of time. This was essentially the emergency brake that David Cameron had tried to get out of the EU, but failed. It has been suggested that the Swiss model may be an alternative to full Brexit.

It is possible that Austria's government will fall soon, possibly triggering an early election. That is of course the country where the far-right got 46% of the presidential vote less than six months ago. They lost that election, and are unlikely to form a government because the other parties consider them a pariah. But 46% of the vote does mean that they set a lot of the tone for the public debate.

On a lighter note, for those of you who want to understand your own political views, have a go at the quiz on 8 values. To nobody's surprise, I was a centrist, being between 40% & 60%, in all four categories. Indeed, in two categories, I was 52-48, making me an embodiment of the UK.

[secret.simon]

The FT seems to agree with my assessment in the post above, that the anti-Remain vote is than 52%. It estimates it at 68%.

A reminder from the Institute for Government that elections in the other EU 27 member states will also affect Brexit negotiations.

[secret.simon]

The Conservative manifesto is out.

As expected it has kept the "tens of thousands" language with regards to immigration and has explicitly stated that the UK would leave both the Single Market and the Customs Union. In this country, if a party wins a majority in the House of Commons, its manifesto is seen as having the mandate to be implemented. There may be some "crossing the ts' and dotting the is' ", but the broad thrust of the manifesto is expected to be delivered by the government.

The Salisbury-Addison convention means that the Lords would not stand in the way of any proposal that was "foreshadowed" in the manifesto of the party that wins an election. That is why the Lords could make a fuss about Brexit so far (as there was no explicit manifesto commitment for a Brexit in any party manifesto-except UKIP-in 2015). But now if the Tories win a majority with a manifesto stating an exit of the Single Market and Customs Union, the Lords may grumble, but are highly unlikely to stand in such an exit.

Ian Dunt has read an alternative meaning into the manifesto, relying on what has not been written in that document. It may give solace to some people, but I think it is an improbable reading of the document.

[mkhan2525]

They will also be increasing the minimum income theshold to make it even harder for British citizens to sponsor a foreign spouse.

We will, therefore, continue to bear down on immigration from outside the European Union. We will increase the earnings thresholds for people wishing to sponsor migrants for family visas. We will toughen the visa requirements for students, to make sure that we maintain high standards. We will expect students to leave the country at the end of their course, unless they meet new, higher requirements that allow them to work in Britain after their studies have concluded. Overseas students will remain in the immigration statistics – in line with international definitions – and within scope of the government’s policy to reduce annual net migration.

[secret.simon]

Also see thread on financial threshold/minimum earnings threshold.

[vinny]

Immigration law and policy after the election: unfortunately, the Conservative manifesto tells us what is coming

[secret.simon]

Immigration target – reality check

The first two comments at the bottom of the page are also worth reading.

[secret.simon]

I think it is fair to say that Brexit is dead. At the very least, hard Brexit is very dead.

[rooibos]

I think it is fair to say that Brexit is dead. At the very least, hard Brexit is very dead.

Au contraire, I think this is pushing towards a no deal. The radical right wing of the Tory party has now taken over the party and will hold the PM hostage. In fact the EU negotiators are reported to be very nervous.

[Obie]

It will simply lead to the demise of the tories if they left without a deal.

Firstly the DUP may not accept that. Their electorate will likely punish them.

The big boys like Davis has already come to the realisation that single market will be a consideration.