In other words, about two-thirds of those who describe themselves as Asian and three-quarters of those who describe themselves as Black voted to Remain. Why is that brushed off as less significant than the fact that 64% of C2DE voters voted Leave?
Andrew Flood makes some very overlooked points about the actual number of voters, and non-voters:
What was the turnout of C2DE voters?
Voter turnout was around 72%, differing a bit by region. But as we already recognised, voter participation is not equal across classes, far more ABC1s vote than C2Des, arguably because the C2DEs understand that politicians in power only listen to the As. So we can be fairly sure less than 72% of C2DEs voted, the question is how much less. The Ashcroft poll enables us to make a good guess at this. C2DEs are 46% of the UK population but only 33% of the Ashcroft poll, that missing 13% indicates the scale of the higher non-voting rate.
Using that gap a reasonable quick estimate would be that turnout for C2DE was possibly slightly less than 52% of those registered. (Ben Pritchett did some proper maths on this ) But we also need to do a few final subtractions. The first is of people entitled to vote but not registered, that number I haven’t been able to estimate but it’s probably not huge. The second is those not yet of voting age, who I’m going to ignore beyond noting that because the young overwhelmingly voted Remain it’s probably the case that most of these would have been Remain.
The third subtraction is far more politically important: migrants who were not from the former colonies (the Commonwealth and Ireland) and who therefore did not get a vote. In terms of migrants from other areas of the EU that’s over 2 million people excluded from the vote – a shocking figure when you consider the vote was essentially on their future. And migrants not from the Commonwealth or Ireland also number in the hundreds of thousands. Remember less than 1.3 million votes separated Leave from Remain, if the 2.5 million plus migrants had been allowed to vote on their own future Brexit probably would not have happened. It’s an important aside, and the point to make here is that these migrants are overwhelmingly working class and therefore their exclusion from the vote reduces further the proportion of the C2DE working class that actually voted leave.
How many C2DE working class Leave voters were there?
Some very crude maths now. The population of the UK at the time of the last census was 63 million. If 46% were C2DEs this gives about 30 million people, about 23% of whom were below voting age, so about 22 million. From this we need to subtract the C2DE immigrants who can’t vote, let’s guess about 1 million people. Of the 21 million remaining we’ve worked out above that about half voted, so 10.5 million, or 1/3 of the total voters. Out of that the Ashcroft poll suggests 64% voted Leave, that’s 6.7 million people. 6.7 million is also about 39% of the total Leave vote. As the Leave vote totaled 17.4 million we see Leave was also mostly ABC1s even though it captured almost 2/3 of voting C2DEs.
http://www.wsm.ie/c/making-sense-brexit-tide-reaction-racist-vote
On 8 July 2016 at 21:19, James Creegan <turbulo at aol.com> wrote:
>
> This article by Lapavitsas is by far the most thorough and balanced piece I've yet read on Brexit:
>
> https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/07/brexit-eu-uk-referendum-leave-remain-labour-corbyn-immigration-ukip-tory-sovereignty/
>
> Jim
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