With just over a week to go until Britain’s historic EU referendum, the sense of panic among the Europhile elite is palpable. When David Cameron called the contest, a ‘Remain’ vote looked inevitable, and the pro-Brussels camp led in all the early opinion polls. But as minds are made up, the balance has shifted dramatically in the last couple of weeks. This brief round-up of the latest polls features a few of the ‘Leave’ memes that are helping to sway opinions, and gives the figures that tell us that BREXIT is now really on the cards.
And, despite dire warnings of economic disaster and “the end of European political civilisation” is Brits vote to quit, the Leave campaign’s poll lead is widening by the day.
The “Leave” campaign opened up a 7-point lead over “Remain” ahead of a referendum on membership of the European Union an opinion poll showed late Monday, while the nation’s biggest-selling newspaper, Rupert Murdoch’s Sun, has seen which way the wind is blowing and has today urged readers to vote to quit the bloc.
According to the YouGov poll for The Times, “Leave” held 46 percent support compared with 39 percent support for “Remain.” Undecided voters were 11 percent, while 4 percent won’t vote.
Other polls published on Monday also put “Leave” ahead, while betting odds on Brexit narrowed.
An ORB poll for The Daily Telegraph put support for “Leave” at 49 percent, compared with Remain’s 48 percent, while two ICM polls, one online and one conducted by telephone, found “Out” held 53 percent support compared with 47 percent support for “In,” the Guardian newspaper, which sponsored the telephone poll said.
That compared with a 52-48 percent split in favor of “Out” in ICM polls two weeks ago, the Guardian said. Those polls excluded respondents who answered “don’t know.”
A poll published on Friday which gave “Out” a huge 10 percentage-point lead added to pressure on sterling and pushed the cost of hedging against huge swings in the exchange rate to record highs [GBP/].
ICM said it interviewed 1,000 adults by telephone and 2,001 adults online between June 10 and 13.
Including people who said they did not know how they would vote, the telephone poll showed 50 percent of people backed “Out,” 45 percent supported “In,” and 5 percent were classed as “don’t know”, ICM said.
The online poll showed “Out” leading “In” by 49 percent to 44 percent with 7 percent saying they did not know how to vote.
The figures make grim reading for David Cameron, George Osborne and the Labour party. They follow a fortnight in which immigration became the dominant issue in the referendum campaign, with the publication of official figures showing that net migration had risen to a near-record 333,000 in 2015.
Prof John Curtice of Strathclyde University, who analyses available referendum polling data on his website whattheukthinks.org, noted that after the ICM data, the running average “poll of polls” now stands at 52% for leave and 48% for remain, the first time leave has been in such a strong position.
British nationalists close to the APF have spent several weeks concentrating on flooding the Internet with hard-hitting memes in favour of Brexit. A number of these have already reached more than three million people each, and their reach through a number of social media outlets continues to rise by the day.
All-in-all, what just a month ago looked impossible is now looking more and more probable by the day. What we still cannot of course tell is whether the hysterical panic now gripping the ‘Remain’ campaign will lead to an effective final fight back to scare voters into ‘playing safe’ by voting to stay in the EU, or whether such bullying bluster will actually convince even more electors to ‘stick two fingers up’ at the political elite and switch to ‘Leave’.
The phenomenon of deeply angry voters, betrayed by the elites and left behind by their mania for globalisation, has already changed the political landscape from Germany and France to the USA. It’s starting to looks as though the same thing could happen in Britain on June 23rd.
