Will Euro results kill off second referendum?

THE NATIONS WAIT… The results of the elections to the European Parliament will be announced tonight, Sunday 26th. For UK voters, who went to the polls last Thursday, it’s been a long wait – but no results are announced until every EU nation has finished voting. With some countries traditionally voting at the weekend, everyone has had to wait until today to learn what we are in for.

Pundits expect the anti-Brexit parties to do well in the UK as voters blame the Tories and Labour for indecision. That may be a very superficial analysis.

Many of the people who voted to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum may indeed be exasperated that we haven’t just walked out and posted the keys back through the letterbox. They may have voted for the charismatic Farage in order to send a message of displeasure to the Government – but, if so, it will be a short term protest. Brexit will be decided by the UK Parliament, not the EU one. Sending Brexiteers to Brussels is not going to speed up the process of leaving – though Farage may be glad of an extension to his EU income.

The press has been banging on about the Tory and Labour votes declining as voters punish them for not sorting out Brexit – to the extent that this constant message may even have encouraged some voters to do precisely that. But Tory and Labour supporters who are fed up with their usual parties would probably just stay at home rather than trudge out to cast a protest vote.

It’s not as if the two main parties need telling that they haven’t sorted Brexit out – they’ve been talking about little else for months. What they need is not a reminder, but a magic wand. Both parties have leavers and remainers representing, and wanting to be true to, leave and remain constituencies. That’s why it’s been impossible, so far, to obtain a parliamentary majority.

The delay in finalising Brexit has come because neither a clean break nor a cosy future can win a parliamentary majority. Theresa May may be the scapegoat, but her departure is not going to make it any easier to get Parliament to assemble a positive majority for one of these two forks in the road – rather than just voting against both of them.

Nor will a protest vote in the Euro elections solve the problem of how to deal with the border between the north of Ireland and the south. The Good Friday agreement requires there to be no border and Brexit requires there to be a border: this will not change because Nigel Farage is back in Brussels.

The Lib Dems and Greens are hoping to do well by capturing the votes of those who have become disillusioned with the Tories and Labour. Maybe there will be a bonus vote for them on this basis: which would be far from promising a breakthrough in domestic politics, particularly a General Election.

The biggest losers tonight may be the Second Referendumers. Those calling for 2Ref often claim they are just supporting democracy. They come up with points such as more voters died since the last referendum than those who have turned 16 or that we didn’t really know what we were voting on last time. All of these points could be used to claim we should re-run a General Election if we disagree with the outcome. Behind them is the hope, in almost every case, that if we have a second referendum, we could win a “remain” vote and overturn the 2016 vote.

If the results show that there really is a surge in support for Brexit, there is a nightmare scenario for the 2Reffers. If there were a second vote, and the support for Brexit parties translated into a second “no” vote, then – with luck – we could go through the whole Brexit debate all over again.

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