Jeremy Corbyn’s plans to rig a second EU referendum

The Prime Minister has written a letter urging Jeremy Corbyn to reconsider his Brexit policy and his plans to fiddle Labour’s second Brexit referendum.

New analysis shows that Jeremy Corbyn’s plan to extend the franchise would give two million EU nationals the vote, making it much harder for leave to win a second referendum. 

The Labour Manifesto commits to giving the vote to ‘all UK residents’, which would mean extending the franchise to all voting age EU nationals with residency in the UK. This would add an extra 2 million people to the UK franchise.  

Academic research suggests that 90% of these new voters would very likely back remain - applying this to the likely turnout in a second referendum means that leave could need to win nearly 500,000 more votes than it did in 2016 if it is to win again. 

Excluding spoiled ballots

The letter reads:

Dear Mr Corbyn

This election was called because our gridlocked Parliament was unable to deliver the promise that MPs of all parties made -- to respect the referendum. You and your party voted to block Brexit repeatedly. 

Your policy is to cancel the result of the last referendum and to hold another one. You have made clear that you oppose an Australian-style points system and you will not only continue ‘free movement’ with the EU but your policy is extend it to the entire world.

Even worse, your manifesto sets out plans to fiddle your second referendum on Brexit. You want to give two million EU nationals the vote in your referendum.  This is a sly attempt to undermine the result of the 2016 referendum, and is profoundly undemocratic.  No true democrat, even the most ardent supporter of Remain, could support your attempt to undermine the result of a democratically expressed vote.

I urge you in the strongest possible terms to reconsider this policy before the election on Thursday. Cancelling the result of the 2016 referendum is dangerous enough. Your approach has already done serious harm to trust in democratic politics and cancelling the result of the previous referendum before it has even been implemented will do more damage.

But your policy of giving millions of foreign citizens the vote in order to overturn the referendum would create incredible bitterness that might take decades to repair. Imagine how people will feel if the biggest democratic exercise in our history is overturned because you gave two million EU citizens the power to reverse Brexit.  It would alienate millions who already feel disenfranchised and ignored by our political system.

We already face a real crisis of trust in our politics. It’s hard to imagine a policy that would do more to worsen this crisis than your plan. 

Very few voters are aware of your policy. I fear that if people vote to give you and Nicola Sturgeon control on Friday 13th and you do what you have said in your manifesto, it will create the worst crisis in democratic politics in over a century. 

Please reconsider before the election next Thursday.

Best wishes

Boris Johnson

ENDS 

Notes to Editors

Jeremy Corbyn has stated in his manifesto that, under a Labour Government, EU nationals will get the vote

• Jeremy Corbyn’s 2019 election manifesto states that ‘We will oversee the largest extension of the franchise in generations... giving full voting rights to all UK residents’ (Labour Party Manifesto 2019, accessed 21 November 2019, link). This means giving the vote to all foreign nationals.

• At conference The Labour Party adopted an official policy to allow all foreign nationals resident in the UK to vote in general elections, regardless of citizenship status (Labour Party, CAC Report 5, p.10, 25 September 2019, link). The motion passed at the 2019 Labour conference contains a promise to 'extend equal rights to vote to all UK residents'. Currently only British, Irish and Commonwealth citizens are eligible to vote in general elections and referendums (HM Government, link). 

• Following this, and in the run up to the passage of the Early General Election Bill, Jeremy Corybn made clear that the Labour Party would vote for a motion that extended the franchise to EU nationals (Metro, October 2019, link). Such a measure would have a significant impact on future UK general elections or a second referendum on EU membership.

• For this research, we assume that the franchise is only extended to EU nationals for the EU referendum, rather than also foreign nationals from outside the EU. This is for the following reasons:

• According to the ONS, there are 1,911,976 EU nationals (excluding EU Commonwealth countries and Irish citizens) on the electoral register in England and Wales as of 1 December 2018 (ONS, September 2019, link). According to the NRS there are 132,800 EU nationals eligible to vote in Scotland at the same time (NRS, March 2019, link), and it can be estimated that there are 33,156 EU nationals on the electoral register in Northern Ireland (ONS, March 2019, link). That makes a total of 2,077,932 EU nationals: a huge number who would have a decisive impact in any vote. 

• To give an indicative example of the impact that this would have, we can apply this number to the 2016 EU referendum result. There is very limited polling on EU nationals’s view on Brexit, but we have assumed 92% of the 2 million EU nationals will vote to remain. This is based on academic surveys of EU nationals which suggests that 8% exhibit behaviours that suggest that they want to ‘break away’ from their national communities (Ranta & Nancheva, September 2018, link). NB that this may be a generous proportion - the study shows that even this group express concerns about Brexit. 

Analysis of impact on the referendum vote

We have included two tables calculating the impact of the extension of the franchise. Table 1 is used indicatively to show the impact of current EU nationals voting in the 2016 referendum. Table 2 updates the number of registered voters to 2020 (assuming 72.2% turnout) and assumes that the leave vote wins 50% +1 vote of the original franchise (the minimum for a majority), allowing us to then highlight the swing impact of the EU vote.

Table 1: 2016 Referendum result, adjusted to include current EU nationals voting - showing that ‘Leave’ wouldn’t have won the 2016 referendum

Excluding spoiled ballots

• Table 2 sets out the ‘2020 total votes on 2016 franchise’. This is based on taking the 45,775,758 total UK Parliamentary electors as of 1 December 2018 (the latest figures) and then applying a 72.2% turnout to get an estimated turnout of 33,029,407 (ONS, link; Electoral Commission, link). This is an appropriate figure to use as the Parliamentary franchise was the basis of the 2016 referendum franchise (s2, European Union Referendum Act 2015, link). The Remain and Leave results are 50% of that figure, minus and plus one respectively. 

• The EU voters result is based on taking the figures in the table above, and applying a 72.2% turnout as well. 

Table 2: Projected vote figures for 2020 second referendum

Excluding spoiled ballots

• This table shows that, in order to win a second referendum, the Leave campaign would need a minimum of 17,894,084 votes, or 54% of the 2020 UK franchise of 33,029,406 in order to win - or nearly 500,000 on top of what the ‘Leave’ campaign won in 2016.