Nobody can agree on whether Remain or Leave won the Euros
A graph of European election polling data that put Remain-backing parties ahead of Leave parties at the European election has caused controversy online after Labour and the Tories were placed into separate categories.
The Brexit party and UKIP took 31.6% and 3.3% of the national vote with 10 regions fully declared, with the Times grouping them together and giving pro-Brexit parties around 34.9% overall in their chart.
Whereas the Lib Dems took 20.3%, the Greens 12.1%, the SNP gained 3.5%, Change UK took 3.4% and Plaid Cymru got 1% – giving them in the ballpark of 40.3% combined.
While Labour and Conservative both slumped to their worst national election performances in over a century, with 14.1% and 9.1% respectively.
This is how The Times chose to represent the data…
How the Leave and Remain vote split https://t.co/bS986uyPnf pic.twitter.com/WKegwBUcq0
— The Times and The Sunday Times (@thetimes) May 27, 2019
However, although Labour’s position on Brexit remains as ambiguous as ever, a number of people have pointed out that the policy of the Conservative party is to follow through on the results of the EU referendum and, therefore, it would be more accurate to describe UKIP and the Brexit party as the support for a no-deal Brexit.
If the Conservative total was added to the Leave pile then it would make those parties the comfortable winner at the election with in the region of 44% of the vote.
That said, if you decide to class Labour as a Remain party, then it would give the Remain parties a clear majority.
The graph has caused a debate on Twitter…
Hello@thetimes, I have a correction to report. My investigations can exclusively reveal that the Tories were a Leave party, the evidence was in their election slogan, “the only party which can deliver Brexit”. Hope this helps. pic.twitter.com/0ZDzCwaZnR
— Media Guido (@MediaGuido) May 27, 2019
Bizarre that people saying the combined Remain vote share was higher than the combined Leave vote are not including the Tory result on the Leave side. If you do, as you obviously should, then Leave is clearly ahead pic.twitter.com/wKSfbVd411
— Alex Wickham (@alexwickham) May 27, 2019
https://twitter.com/afewgoodfacts/status/1132904425348063232
Something else has entered the mainstream this morning, from the Guardian to The Times.
The Liberal Democrat tradition of abusing graphs. This is nonsense. https://t.co/RrIOYKjStU
— Matt Goodwin (@GoodwinMJ) May 27, 2019
