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New Statesman
3 days ago
- Politics
- New Statesman
The public doesn't like Brexit. Has anyone told the media?
Illustration by Michael Villegas / Ikon Images Such were the headlines that you'd imagine the EU reset to be the Suez Crisis, Munich Conference and loss of the Thirteen Colonies all rolled into one. 'STARMER'S SURRENDER' howled the Mail in all caps, like a furious text from your dad. 'DONE UP LIKE A KIPPER', agreed the Sun, which knows a good pun about fishing regulations when it sees it. The Telegraph instead used a picture of Starmer greeting Ursula von der Leyen to justify its more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger effort, 'Kiss goodbye to Brexit'. I'm not going to quote the Express. I just don't have the word count. Not everyone was quite so hysterical. The Guardian led with Starmer's claim that the deal 'puts Britain back on the world stage', and left suggestions of surrender from little-known opposition leader Kemi Badenoch to the subheading. The FT even flirted with positivity. But browsing the newsstands that morning, you could be forgiven for thinking that the only person who backed the deal – which would, among other things, make holidaying in Europe a whole lot less annoying – was Keir Starmer. You'd get the same impression from the BBC. One surprising group who might disagree with this rather downbeat assessment were the actual British electorate. According to YouGov, reported a visibly baffled Times, there was backing for the deal, including overwhelming support for the youth mobility scheme. ity scheme that everyone had confidently predicted would be its most controversial element. Another YouGov poll, just days earlier, had found that 66% of the public support, and just 14% oppose, a closer relationship with Europe so long as it didn't involve re-joining the EU, single market or customs union – pretty close to overwhelming support. Over half (53%) were in favour of undoing Brexit altogether. Remember when newspapers cared about the will of the people? How times change. The traditional explanation for why newspapers are so out of touch with their readers was that the press don't merely reflect public opinion but attempt to shape it. Owners and editors have, in every sense, different interests to the general public: it's not as if the range of press opinion in the 20th century reflected the range of public opinion either. There's also the problem that reliance on advertising – an industry inevitably keener on some bits of the public than on others – has pushed papers in certain directions, too. But there's another thing which has kicked in these last few years, which I'm not sure everyone has internalised: the general public and newspaper readers are not the same thing. They never perfectly aligned, of course; but now the group that reads newspapers is a fraction of the public as a whole. How small a fraction is surprisingly hard to pin down. Claimed national newspaper circulation slid by a third, from around 11 million copies a day in the early 1990s to around 7 million by 2020. Exactly what's happened since is hard to know, as a bunch of the main papers have since stopped reporting the figures – but sales of those which still do so have fallen by half. In five years. We can probably assume that those which keep the numbers to themselves don't do so because sales are surging. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe However many people are still buying papers, something we know about them is that they are not a representative slice of the country as a whole. According to a 2024 Ofcom report, just 10% of 16-24 year olds today get their news from newspapers (rising to 24% including online). Even among the 35-44 group, a distinctively generous definition of young, those numbers were just 19% and 32% respectively. Once you hit retirement age, though, things look much rosier for the subscriptions department. Among 65-74 year olds, it's 33% (45% including online); among the over 75s, it's 47% (53%). It's not a big leap to assume that the issues explored and positions taken by newspapers are likely to reflect this ageing readership. This is not to say younger people are not engaged with the news: but they get theirs from relatively new online or social media, sources which are by definition more fragmented. It's harder to tell what they're reading, what they're interested in or what they think. But the agenda of politics, the sense of what the nation cares about, still has to emerge from somewhere – and in the absence of an alternative, it's still set by the newspapers. Broadcast producers scan the front pages every morning. Ministerial teams use them to determine which stories they need a line on. Old fashioned print media is in decline everywhere but in the mind of the nation's political class. The result is that our leaders are getting a very warped sense of what the average voter thinks, reads and cares about. This may, if you squint, explain rather a lot. Not just why ministers are still being exhorted to defend a Brexit the nation no longer supports, but why benefits for older people are treated differently to ones for those of working age or children. Every day, MPs are told that these are the real issues facing the newspaper readers of Britain. The problem is that is not the same thing as 'the voters'. [See more: Robert Jenrick is embarrassing himself] Related
New Statesman
22-04-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
Inside the Chaotic Map of Doom
Illustration by Michael Villegas / Ikon Images There's nothing that kicks Westminster back into action after recess like a new poll. No, not one forecasting the local elections taking place in just nine days' time, but something looking a little further ahead, to the next general election. More In Common chose the Easter weekend to release a new MRP poll (that's multilevel regression and poststratification – the technique that aims to make predictions on a seat-by-seat basis and has proved more accurate than other polling methods). The results will shock you… maybe. More In Common puts three parties – Labour, the Conservatives and Reform – equal on vote share at 24 per cent. This is in line with what most polls this year have indicated: essentially a three-way tie, with Reform nudging ahead of the Tories and sometimes Labour by a few points. The shock factor is that, translated into seats in England, Scotland and Wales, the MRP model has Reform in first place with 180. Labour the Conservatives are tied on 165 each, with 67 going to the Liberal Democrats, 35 to the SNP, five to Plaid Cymru and four to the Greens – as well as ten independents (one taking Wes Streeting's seat). Cue panic. First, the obligatory disclaimer that any poll four years out from when an election might actually be held is of limited value. You could argue (especially if you're a Labour MP) that there is little point whatsoever in speculating this much now, when all kinds of things – from decent economic growth and a restoration of public services through to global economic collapse, war, or another pandemic – could happen between now and polling day. Equally, knowing this is not about to stop the speculation. So let's continue. A big question with polls like this is how much voter behaviour could be driven by wanting to keep a particular party out. Tactical voting was the key story of the 2024 election, and is how Labour was able to win 63 per cent of seats with 34 per cent of the vote. So how likely is it that, in seats where Reform is tipped to have a fighting chance, supporters of other parties group together to keep them out? According to Rob Ford, politics professor and political commentator (who catchily refers to models like this as 'Chaotic Maps of Doom'), the answer is very. In a Bluesky thread casting a sceptical eye over the MRP poll, he suggests the 'keep Reform out' incentive is being overlooked: that in Reform-Labour contests, for example, Reform's lead would be squeezed by Green and Lib Dem voters. Individuals' preferences for who they don't want to win matter as much as who they do, Ford argues, and 'any MRP conducted now cannot capture them because voters won't start thinking tactically until election is close.' That's one view. But others are available. In this case, the counter-point to Ford was offered by Dylan Difford, a data journalist YouGov, who is sceptical about the impact tactical voting could have in 2029. Not because he doesn't believe it will happen, but because, unlike in the 2024 election, its impact will no longer be asymmetric. ''The spectre of Farage as PM will save us' is overblown,' Difford argues, 'purely because there are enough Tories sympathetic to Farage to largely nullify any LD/Grn tactical voting in Lab vs Reform contests.' In other words, we can and should take the MRP poll seriously, because while tactical voting will happen, the pro-Reform and anti-Reform trends will cancel each other out. This is the essence of a debate we can expect to keep having for the next four years. But here are a couple of things to keep in mind. First, Reform is aware that, the bigger its profile grows, the most risk there is of a counter-movement. One Reform insider told me recently of the party's strategy to make the Labour government (which, they hoped, would be obviously failing) the main dividing line at the next election, as Tory disaster was in 2024. 'If Reform become the issue of the next election, rather than the incumbent government, all bets are off,' they admitted. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Second: where are the Conservatives in all this? Nearer the time, whoever is leader may have a big choice to make. Can the party survive if Reform overtakes them in parliamentary seats? Might there be some potential for informal cooperation with the Lib Dems or even Labour to keep Reform out? The kind of 'national unity' pact seen in some European countries between the two main parties to lock out insurgents seems outlandish – not least given the present chatter about a Tory-Reform deal. But it's hard to see how the Conservatives come back – ever – if they let Reform become the default party on the right. Finally, the results of the model can be summed up in one word: chaos. Looking at More In Common's map projection, there is no way to see a stable government being formed. A minority Reform government? A Labour-Tory grand coalition? A Reform-Conservative merger? It's hard to imagine any of these lasting a month, let alone a parliament. While the MRP poll may have limited use predicting the result of the next election now, it does illuminate the perils of a two-party voting system in an electorate split three, four, five ways. That doesn't give MPs returning to Westminster today much to plan their strategies around. But this Chaotic Map of Doom gives them plenty to think about. This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here [See also: Don't blame the OBR for Britain's economic woes] Related
