In a post a
week before the elections for the European Parliament, I suggested that there
is a problem when politicians argue for us to use an election to ‘send a
message’, firstly because the end result is a conglomerate of a whole lot of
individual decisions taken for a variety of reasons, and secondly because they
are likely to either misunderstand or else wilfully misinterpret the message
once it’s been sent. Reactions to the EU
vote show the misinterpretation at work.
Nathan Gill for
Nigel Farage PLC said in the aftermath that his company’s electoral victory was
a "very strong message from Wales -
we want our Brexit and we want it now", apparently based on the fact
that his company received 32.5% of the vote.
One third of the vote doesn’t look like a clear message to me. Adam Price,
for Plaid, went the other way, declaring that the results show that "Wales is a Remain nation". I’m not exactly convinced by that one either.
It’s certainly ‘true’ that the parties
explicitly committed to ‘remain’ (Plaid, Lib Dems, Green, Change UK) won 42.4%
of the vote in Wales, whilst those explicitly committed to leaving at any price
(Nigel Farage PLC and UKIP) had a combined total of only 35.8%, but that
ignores the two ‘traditional’ parties, Conservative and Labour. The Tories should surely be counted in the
pro-Brexit camp, taking that total to 42.3%, making it more or less even
between the two sides of the debate. The
big question is over where Labour’s votes should be counted in this particular
equation. On the basis of their formal
policy (which is that they will secure a fantasy deal with the EU27 and then
support Brexit on those revised terms), they should surely be counted on the
Brexit side of the equation, giving the pro-Brexit forces in Wales a very clear
lead by 57.6%: 43.4% - a wider margin than achieved in the 2016 referendum.
Carwyn Jones
seems to think that we should ignore Labour’s actual policy and treat it as a ‘remain’
party, according to a tweet he issued ahead of the results, saying that “Remain parties will comfortably out-poll
the Brexit Party in Wales tonight, but the Brexit Party will come first in the
vote tallies. This is why I said we should have put forward a united slate,
just like the Brexit Party”. Deciding
who’s right seems to depend on who is interpreting the message and what they
want to believe. That brings us back to
the problem of sending and interpreting messages.
We know that many Labour voters deserted
that party – leavers supporting Nigel Farage PLC and remainers supporting
Plaid, the Lib Dems and the Greens. So,
who was left? Were they leavers,
remainers, or simply lifelong Labour loyalists who will vote for the party
regardless of its policies? The main
conclusions that I draw are that trying to discern views on a single issue when
people vote for all sorts of reasons is fraught with difficulty, and that an
electoral system which allows a company to claim victory and 50% of the seats
with just under one third of the vote is badly broken. As for Brexit itself, the result resolves
nothing.
Posts
2 comments:
Excuse me, the result confirms everything.
The BREXIT Party won hands down in England. The SNP won hands down in Scotland. And nobody really won in Wales because we are all too poorly educated to know what we were voting for. Or against.
But, as you rightly say, plus ça change.
To say that someone "won hands down" (in both England and Scotland) with between 30 and 40% of the vote illustrates the problem with calling it a 'victory' at all, and to argue that a similar result in Wales shows something entirely different serves merely to demonstrate your own prejudices. If you star from an utter conviction that the problem with Wales is that we are all too poorly educated to know anything, then it is hardly surprising that everything you see confirms that 'knowledge'. But you really shouldn't expect to be taken seriously.
Post a Comment