Geographies of Brexit and its aftermath: voting in England at the 2016 referendum and the 2017 general election

ABSTRACT

Much has been written since the 2016 Brexit referendum regarding the divides within British society that the vote illustrated – including geographical divides – and their influence on the outcome of the 2017 general election. Focusing on England, this paper explores the extent and significance of those geographical divides at the 2016 referendum, at a variety of spatial scales – concluding that apart from a major difference between parts of inner London and the rest of England these were largely insignificant. Turning to the 2017 general election, analyses show that this return to a predominantly two-party system within England largely involved a replication of the geography of the 2015 general election outcome. A new electoral map of England did not emerge from the divisions that Brexit stimulated: the country is divided along class lines, with London standing out as different from all other regions.

KEYWORDS:

• Brexit
• England
• 2017 election
• geography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Ron Johnston is Professor of Geography at the University of Bristol. A political geographer, he has published widely on elections and voting.

David Manley is Reader in Quantitative Geography at the University of Bristol. He works on neighbourhood effects, spatial segregation and quantitative methods.

Charles Pattie is Professor of Politics at the University of Sheffield. With Ron Johnston, he writes on the electoral geography of the UK and beyond.

Kelvyn Jones is Professor of Human Quantitative Geography at the University of Bristol. His research focuses on the geography of health and on quantitative methods.

ORCID

David Manley http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1864-5141

Notes

1. The authorities giving the largest support for Leave included seven in eastern England (Boston; South Holland; Castle Point; Thurrock; Great Yarmouth; Fenland; and East Lindsey); the other two were in the East Midlands – Bolsover and Mansfield. Of the eleven giving the largest support for Remain all but Oxford were London boroughs.

2. Wales differs less in its political culture – or at least in many parts of the country – from England than do Scotland and Northern Ireland but it also has a devolution settlement through which some at least of its separate political concerns can be pursued and so has been excluded from the analyses here.

3. The correlation (r²) between their vote percentages across the 632 seats in Great Britain between the two general elections was 0.93 for the Conservatives. For Labour it was considerably smaller at 0.77, largely reflecting the SNP's Scottish success, which was largely at Labour's cost – for England and Wales alone, the r² value was also 0.93.

4. Elsewhere, Clarke, Goodwin, and Whiteley (2017b) found no clear significant relationships between voting Leave and several socio-demographic factors, but this was because – as in many studies of British voting behaviour – they also included attitudinal variables that are related to those socio-demographic factors and confound the regression models (see Johnston et al., 2018b). Becker et al. (2017) included a wider range of variables than most other studies – though largely reaching the same general conclusions – but included no geographical variables.

5. An oblimin rotation does not – unlike Varimax rotations – unrealistically require that the factors remain uncorrelated; it gives a better approximation of simple structure (i.e. it maximises each variable's loading on a single factor only) where the factor structures are correlated.

6. Fox and Pearce (2018) suggest there are generational as well as age effects in the pattern of Euroscepticism.

7. Note that the regression coefficient for Factor I is much smaller (and only marginally significant at conventional levels) in Model 2 than in Model 1, indicating collinearity with one or more of the regional variables – undoubtedly the concentration of cosmopolitan populations in Greater London.

8. The conventional measure is whether the upper and lower bounds for each coefficient (i.e. the coefficient +/- 1.96 times its standard error) overlap.

9. This may reflect an Irish influence (Merseyside has close links with Ireland and a large population of Irish ancestry, and the Irish government strongly supported the UK remaining within the EU).

10. For details on the classification, see https://www.ons.gov.uk/methodology/geography/ geographicalproducts/areaclassifications/2011areaclassifications/methodologyandvariables (accessed 22 August 2017).

11. Note that in an early analysis of the results across Great Britain as a whole, Clarke (2016) claims to have identified no ‘London effect’ once seven socio-demographic variables were taken into account. S Clarke, Why did we vote to leave? What an analysis of place can tell us about Brexit. Resolution Foundation Blog, 15 July 2016, available at http://www.resolutionfoundation.org/media/blog/why-did-we-vote-to-leave-what-an-analysis-of-place-can-tell-us-about-brexit/ (accessed 24 August 2017).

12. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-38762034 (accessed 22 August 2017) and the alternative analyses on the Stats Guy Blog (http://www.statsguy.co.uk/?S=brexit – accessed 13 October 2017).

13. Such continuity is the norm for most recent elections in England: the r² value for the correlation of the Conservatives vote shares in 2010 and 2015 was 0.914; for Labour it was 0.928.

14. Tests also found no interaction effect involving those two variables.

15. Some commentators suggested that those incumbent Conservative MPs who voted for Brexit at the referendum might be punished by Tory voters at the 2017 election in constituencies where a majority was for Remain, whereas MPs who voted for Remain might be punished in constituencies with a Leave majority, but tests found no evidence that this happened. See, for example, https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/796060/ General-Election-2017-Remain-Leave-constituency-Brexit-News-ony-Blair-Referendum; S. Sandhu, ‘Every Remain constituency with a pro-Brexit MP’, https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/pro-brexit-mps-represent-remain-constituencies/; and P. Lynch ‘Conservative divisions on Brexit: the general election and beyond’ http://ukandeu.ac.uk/conservative-divisions-on-brexit-the-general-election-and-beyond/ (accessed 13 February 2018)

16. Note, too, that in reporting the results from the 2017 BBC/ITV News/Sky News (which was extremely successful in predicting the outcome) Curtice, Fisher, Kuham, and Mellon (2017) observed that across the 144 sampled polling booths the Conservative benefited more than Labour from the decline in UKIP's support in constituencies that delivered a majority form Brexit in 2016.

17. Labour's success in particular places also reflected the intensity of its mobilisation activities there: Scott and Wills (2017) illustrate this for the period preceding the 2015 general election; the establishment of Momentum before the election of Jeremy Corbyn as party leader in 2015 and its subsequent local campaigning prior to the 2017 election further illustrates this strategy (see http://www.peoplesmomentum.com/ - accessed 14 September 2017). Countering some claims to the contrary, Prosser, Fieldhouse, Green, Mellon, and Evans (2018) have shown that there was no increase in turnout by young voters in 2017, only greater support for the Labour party among those who did vote.

18. See G. Skinner and G. Gottfried, ‘How Britain voted in the 2016 referendum’, https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/how-britain-voted-2016-eu-referendum (accessed 13 February 2018).

19. See, for example, the argument for greater attention to ‘the north’ by the Conservative party in A. Gimson ‘The Conservatives have urgent work in the North of England’ Conservative Home Blog, 24 August 2017, https://www.conservativehome.com/thetorydiary/2017/08/the-conservatives-have-urgent-work-in-the-north-of-england.html?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Thursday%2024th%20August%202017&utm_content=Thursday%2024th%20August%202017+CID_0a4d320571c27f73c4eb405ae65b6052&utm_source=Daily%20Email&utm_term=The%20Conservatives%20have%20urgent%20work%20in%20the%20North%20of%20England (accessed 24 August 2017)