2016-05-31

Socionomics Alert: Shock Brexit Poll, UKIP Playbook Stolen

Until this weekend, Brexit polling had seen a persistent gap between phone and online polls. The gap is particularly odd because while younger voters skew Remain and older voters Leave, the online polls skew Leave and the phone polls Remain. In the U.S., older voters tend to respond to phone surveys more than younger voters; at least one pollster claimed the opposite was true in the UK, but I'm skeptical. In any event, taking the data as a whole it appeared the Remain side was in the lead because phone polls showed consistently large leads for Remain, while online polls sometimes showed small leads for Leave.

Now a dual poll from ICM has closed the polling gap in favor of Leave, as both the online and phone polls conducted over the weekend are in harmony.

Guardian: UK voters leaning towards Brexit, Guardian poll reveals
Public opinion has shifted towards the UK leaving the EU, two Guardian/ICM polls suggest as the referendum campaign picks up pace – with voters split 52% -48% in favour of Brexit, whether surveyed online or by phone.
I believe the vote rests in the hands of Tory voters, as this polling registered 53 percent support for Conservative and UKIP.
The Guardian data also shows:
Among skilled manual workers, known by pollsters as C2s, support for Brexit is running as high as 62%. Scotland is for remain, while voters in England and Wales would back Brexit.
Shades of Trump support in the U.S.

As the chart at the bottom shows, one polling data point does not change the trend that appears to favor Remain. The latest development in the campaign redounds to the benefit of Leave though: the UKIP playbook has been stolen. UKIP's raison d'être was a referendum on EU membership, but the party quickly shifted their rhetoric to immigration once they saw its impact. The party won a surprising victory in local elections as a result, and the current referendum on EU membership is itself one of the results. Now it seems the Leave camp is also turning to the immigration issue:

Daily Mail: Pound slumps after shock poll reveals a SEVEN point surge for Brexit as Leave campaign turns its fire on immigration
Last Thursday, official migration statistics revealed the numbers of people coming to Britain from inside the EU had matched the all time high of 184,000 and Brexit campaigners have warned the figures demonstrate the lack of control Britain has over its borders.

...Up to half a million refugees and their relatives could move to Britain after 2020 because of EU rules on the free movement of people, a major new report claimed today.

While Germany, Greece and Italy have borne the brunt of the refugee crisis arriving at Europe's borders, those granted asylum could settle in the UK in the coming years after they have acquired EU citizenship.

A report by Migration Watch, which campaigns for tighter border controls, said an analysis of EU figures show that hundreds of thousands of people could take this route into the UK.
Immigration restriction is the most popular orphan policy in the West. It was taken up by UKIP to a shock victory in local elections, it was taken up by Trump for a shock victory in the GOP primary. Merkel's decision to open the floodgates to migrants and open the door to Turkey was the exact wrong policy for the moment. In addition to pushing the German electorate to the right (This One Chart Explains the Next 10 Years of Political Change) she may have set the EU on its final course to dissolution. Consider her deal with Turkey, to swap "Syrian" migrants for Turkish ones. The German government is trying to contain the damage now.

DW: Turkey visa liberalization 'not a done deal'
"If the conditions for the introduction of visa liberalization (for Turkish citizens)
are not met, there will be no visa liberalization," Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere told the Funke Mediengruppe newspaper chain in an interview published Saturday.

"One must not allow public threats to leave an impression when it comes to politics," de Maiziere said. "At least you must not lend credence to them by displaying too much concern."

Brussels has promised Turkish citizens visa-free travel into Europe in return for stopping the flow of illegal migrants to the bloc. And while Europe is desperate for the deal to work, it also insists Ankara meet 72 criteria, including narrowing the scope of its broad anti-terrorism laws to meet European standards.
Here is Turkey's president over the weekend: Turkey's Erdogan warns Muslims against birth control
"We will multiply our descendants," said Mr Erdogan, who became president in August 2014 after serving as prime minister for 12 years.

His AK Party has its roots in Islamism and many of its supporters are conservative Muslims.
Beyond the direct issue of rising migration, Germany's policy moves have also revived fear of German dominance. If blocking a dominant power remains British strategy, it can be achieved more easily from the outside today.
London Review of Books: Scenario for a Wonderful Tomorrow
What about Europe? And why dwell so long on the refugee crisis when I’m supposed to be discussing a book on the euro crisis? The answer is that Merkel’s immigration policy offers an object lesson in what other countries can expect from Germany acting European. Just as the United States sees the world as an extended playing field for its domestic political economy, Germany has come to consider the European Union as an extension of itself, where what is right for Germany is by definition right for all others. There is nothing particularly immoral about this; indeed Germans think it is supremely moral, as they identify their control of Europe with a post-nationalism understood as anti-nationalism, which in turn is understood as the quintessential lesson of German history. Very much like the US, German elites project what they collectively regard as self-evident, natural and reasonable onto their outside world, and are puzzled that anyone could possibly fail to see things the way they do. Perhaps the dissenters suffer from cognitive deficits and require education by Schäuble in the Eurogroup classroom?

One problem with hegemonic self-righteousness is that it prevents the self-righteous from seeing that what they consider morally self-evident is informed by self-interest. The self-interest of German export industries, for example, underlies Germany’s identification of the ‘European idea’ with the single European currency. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the national interest that is mistakenly seen as identical to the interest of all reasonable human beings, in Europe and beyond, is necessarily shaped by the political interest of the government and its dominant social bloc in preserving their power. This puts peripheral countries at the mercy of the national power games and the moral and semantic ethnocentrisms of countries at the centre, which are hard to decipher for outsiders – especially with a postmodern leader like Merkel who, free from substantive commitments and constitutional constraints, has perfected the art of staying in power by means of unpredictable changes of course.

2015: Immigration: The Key Political Issue
2014: UKIP Scores Big Win in Local Elections; Shockwaves Will Hit Europe and the U.S.
H/T Sailer: The Growing Menace Posed by Lawless, Anti-democratic Autocracy in Central Europe

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