How David Cameron’s Plan To Screw Labour Cost Him The EU Referendum

[Denzil_DC]

In the last days before the EU referendum David Cameron and his team of Remain campaigners were still frantically trying to get young people’s attention. 18-34 year olds, the polls had said, were Britain’s great unharvested crop of Remainers. And everyone agreed that if enough of them turned out on June 23rd, it was in the bag.

...

Yesterday, hidden within the cache of information dumped on the government website before ministers went to recess, was a clue as to what went wrong: a written statement by Gary Streeter, a spokesperson for the Speaker’s Committee on the Electoral Commission, which showed a full nine percentage point drop between 10th June 2014 and 1st December 2015 in the number of 18-19 year olds registered to vote.

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The change {a motion to change the responsibility for signing up to vote from households to individuals} had been due for December 2016 - plenty of time for voters accidentally left off the new list to get their act together and re-register. But Cameron had wanted to rush it through more than a year early. The reason? Those likely to be accidentally left off the new list were Labour voters.

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Cameron did it to screw Labour in this year’s elections - those of London’s mayor, the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh National Assembly - but also to skew an upcoming constituency boundary reform vastly in his favour. This redrawing of boundaries is to be based on a snapshot of the electorate from December 2015, thus - as least as far as yesterday’s figures indicate - permanently disenfranchising many thousands of Britain’s young, whether they re-register now or not.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/how-david-cameron-plan-to-screw-labour-cost-him-the-eu-referendum_uk_5790bae5e4b0e3583c789316?edition=uk&utm_hp_ref=uk&utm_hp_ref=uk

More revelations from the massive end-of-sitting document dump: another take on what went wrong with the Brexit referendum, and another example of the Tories sacrificing the country's interests for electoral gain and party politics.

[Ken Burch]

1. This PROVES the Leave victory wasn't Corbyn's fault.

It wasn't possible for Remain to win if that many young voters were dropped off of the electoral register.

Nothing Corbyn could have said on the hustings could have overcome Cameron's trickery on this.

[Denzil_DC]

2. Related:

Brexit: For every one student who voted Leave, six voted Remain, new analysis finds

The extent to which the country’s students were against Brexit in the EU referendum has been revealed in startling new analysis which has shown that, for every one who voted Leave, almost six voted Remain.

Despite worries about youth turnout and confusion over student voter registration, research agency YouthSight found 87 per cent of eligible students at UK universities voted in the referendum. This was a higher rate of turnout than the general population of which, according to the Electoral Commission, 72 per cent showed up to vote amongst the overall confirmed electorate.

Overall, 85 per cent of students who voted in the referendum chose Remain, meaning almost one million out of the UK’s 1.4 million full-time undergraduates voted to stay in the union. This is a higher proportion than originally anticipated in pre-referendum research by YouthSight for Universities UK (UUK) which reported 78 per cent of eligible students with “strong intention” to vote intended to vote Remain.

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Of the students who voted to Leave, 17 per cent reported that, in light of the events of the past month since the result was announced, they would change their vote if they could. Three per cent of student Remainers also reported they would change their vote if they could. If these levels of voter regret are similar among the general population, were another vote to be held now, Leave would receive 44.51 per cent of the vote, and Remain 55.46 per cent.

http://www.independent.co.uk/student/news/brexit-eu-referendum-uk-student-vote-leave-remain-european-union-youthsight-analysis-a7154626.html