Well, You Did Ask… E-Book

Michael Ashcroft

• Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

The UK's vote to leave the European Union shocked the world - not to mention many people in Britain. What it revealed about our country is at least as significant for the future of politics as Brexit itself. Drawing on more than two years of intensive research by Lord Ashcroft Polls, Well, You Did Ask… explains how voters came to make the most momentous political decision of our time - how they saw the choice before them, what they made of the campaign, its personalities, claims and counterclaims - and why they ultimately chose to take the UK out of the EU. As the country sets about negotiating a new relationship with Europe, it also offers a colourful and revealing look at what our continental neighbours think about Britain and the British. To think clearly about what the referendum result means, we first need to understand how it came about. The answers are in this book.

Leseprobe

WELL, YOU DID ASK

Why the UK voted to leave the EU

Michael Ashcroft & Kevin Culwick

CONTENTS

Title PageAbout the authorsIntroduction Lord Ashcroft KCMG PCPrologue: A Nation ShrugsI – The Starting PointII – Jeux Sans FrontièresIII – The CampaignIV – What Happened and WhyCopyright

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC is an international businessman, author and philanthropist. He is founder and chairman of the board of Crimestoppers, a member of the board of the Imperial War Museum and a trustee of the Imperial War Museum Foundation, chairman of the Trustees of Ashcroft Technology Academy, chancellor of Anglia Ruskin University and treasurer of the International Democrat Union. From 2005 to 2010 he was deputy chairman of the Conservative Party. His political works include Smell the Coffee: A Wake-Up Call for the Conservative Party; Minority Verdict; Project Blueprint; What Future for Labour?; What Are the Liberal Democrats For?; It’s Not You, It’s Them: Research to Remind Politicians What Matters; Degrees of Separation: Ethnic Minority Voters and the Conservative Party; They’re Thinking What We’re Thinking: Understanding the UKIP Temptation; Small Island: Public Opinion and the Politics of Immigration; Europe on Trial; Cameron’s Caledonian Conundrum; Project Red Dawn: Labour’s Revival (And Survival); Pay Me Forty Quid and I’ll Tell You: The 2015 Election Campaign through the Eyes of the Voters (with Kevin Culwick); The Unexpected Mandate: The 2015 Election, the Parties, the People – and the Future; and Call Me Dave: The Unauthorised Biography of David Cameron (with Isabel Oakeshott). His research is published at LordAshcroftPolls.com.

Kevin Culwick has been the director of Lord Ashcroft Polls since 2010. He was formerly head of opinion research for the Conservative Party, having previously worked in the polling industry and in politics. He is the co-author of Pay Me Forty Quid and I’ll Tell You: The 2015 Election Campaign through the Eyes of the Voters (with Michael Ashcroft).

INTRODUCTION

Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC

I supported Brexit. In an article two days before the referendum, I argued that history has shown the European Union to be not so much an organisation as a process. By deciding to remain, I felt, Britain would not be opting for the status quo but tying itself to a body whose ambitions were very different from our own.

But this book is not about my views. Nor is it an inside account of the campaign and its protagonists.

Instead, we have tried to tell the story of the EU referendum from the point of view of its most important participants, the voters. And it is a remarkable story. A question that was of only passing interest to most people in Britain turned into what David Cameron called “a once in a generation moment to shape the destiny of our country” and, ultimately, perhaps the most momentous political decision of our time.

For many people, this was an uncomfortable journey. As I argued in Pay Me Forty Quid and I’ll Tell You: The 2015 Election Campaign through the Eyes of the Voters, there is a wisdom to the electorate that should not be underestimated. But large numbers of people found it harder to decide between leaving and remaining in the EU than to choose a government at a general election. Picking a group of people who more or less look as though they are up to making big policy decisions is easier, they quickly realised, than making those decisions themselves. Many found they were floating voters, a role to which they were unaccustomed.

I think there are three main reasons why so many found the choice so taxing. The first is that the two options did not come with convenient party labels. Though people grumble about partisan politics, the parties’ competing brands – their familiar character, principles, policies and personalities, and their history in or out of office – help voters make decisions. With their usual party divided, or with politicians they would usually disagree with suspiciously backing the outcome they felt most drawn towards, many felt at sea.

The second reason is that people hoped they would be furnished with a battery of useful facts to guide their thinking, but no such facts arrived, or, at least, none they could rely on. Voters questioned every forecast about the consequences of Brexit, good or bad. But if predictions about the future were inevitably up for debate, so, to their exasperation, were statements about the present, such as how much Britain paid into the EU budget each year. The decision seemed more important than those they made at elections, when they could change their mind after five years, but voters felt much less equipped to make it.

The third reason is that the rival campaigns, by indulging in hyperbole, obscured rather than clarified the issues at stake, making it harder for voters to get to the bottom of what really mattered. Warnings of the catastrophe that would ensue from making the wrong decision (especially from the remain campaign) seemed overblown, and the motives of the main players (especially on the leave side) seemed mixed, at best.

For two and a half years, Lord Ashcroft Polls looked in depth at how British voters saw their country’s relationship with Europe, and how they would approach the question in a referendum. In the weeks leading up to David Cameron’s Brussels renegotiation – an episode which arguably did as much to draw attention to the drawbacks of membership as it did to highlight the UK’s new “special status” – we polled people in the twenty-seven other member states on their attitude to Europe and, crucially, to Britain. In a unique exercise, we visited ten EU capitals to report in more detail what voters throughout the continent made of the UK’s attitude to Europe and what concessions, if any, they were prepared for their leaders to make to keep us on board. For nine weeks leading to polling day, we conducted focus groups in every region of the UK to see what undecided voters were making of the campaign, its personalities, its claims and counterclaims, the barrage of figures (if not exactly facts) and the battalions of experts wheeled out to enlighten them. Finally, on referendum day itself, we surveyed more than twelve thousand people to find out who had voted to stay and who had voted to go, and what had persuaded them.

All of that research is collected here. It reveals a number of important things beyond what people thought about Britain’s relationship with the EU. One is that both the remain and the leave camps were coalitions of voters, not monoliths. Each side attracted people with different backgrounds and priorities. On the leave side, the affluent Global Britain segment of the electorate we identified from our polling had little in common with those in the Nothing to Lose group; among remainers, the paths of the I’m Alright, Jacques and If It Ain’t Broke voters would rarely cross.

Another is that, for many voters, the decision was only tangentially related to Europe at all. At least as powerful were how people saw the world, and their place in it. Some did not want the question put before the country in the first place, and to many the answer came as a surprise or a rude awakening. Many were shocked to find that such huge numbers had such a different outlook on life from their own.

The referendum did not cause divisions; it just laid bare those that already existed. They are as significant for the future of our politics as Brexit itself. But to consider properly what the result means, we first need to understand how it came about.

MAA

July 2016

PROLOGUE: A NATION SHRUGS

“I don’t want to be the sort of person who has views about Europe.”

FOCUS GROUP PARTICIPANT, L, M 2014