04 January 2019

UK in a Changing Europe: Conservative Party members do not support May’s Brexit compromise

Mrs May has failed not only to convince the country and quite probably Parliament that her Brexit deal is a good one, she has also failed to convince the party faithful. If anything grassroots Tories are even less impressed than Tory MPs.

This ESRC-sponsored Party Members Project, run out of Queen Mary University of London and Sussex University, has just surveyed 1215 ordinary Conservative Party members, together with a representative sample of 1675 voters.  It appears that those members are in no mood for compromise.

It would be fair to say that the Tory grassroots are, if not obsessed, then consumed by Brexit. We asked all voters to list the three most important issues facing the country, and 60% of them ranked Brexit number one. That figure rises to 68% among Tory voters and a whopping 75% among Tory members.  And they haven’t changed their minds on the merits of leaving the EU. Some 79% of Conservative Party members think voters made the right decision in the 2016 referendum – and that includes a quarter (26%) of the (23%) minority of them who voted Remain two-and-a-half years ago; 97% of those who themselves voted Leave maintain the country made the right call.

No surprise there, perhaps: after all, two thirds (68%) of voters who currently support the Conservatives think the same. But what is really striking is how little support there is at the Tory grassroots for Mrs May’s deal.

Generally, Conservative Party members, like most voters of whatever ilk, think the government has made a mess of negotiating Brexit. Among voters as a whole, some 71% feel as much.  That drops to 56% among those currently intending to vote Conservative. But it actually rises again when we look at members: 68% of the Tory rank and file think the government is doing badly at negotiating the country’s exit from the EU – a proportion that rises to 78% of those Tory members who voted Leave in 2016.

And that dissatisfaction extends to the Withdrawal Agreement itself. We would expect Conservative partisans to be more supportive of the deal than the electorate as a whole, some 49% of whom say they oppose Mrs May’s deal, with only 23% saying they support it. Among those intending to vote Conservative, that is indeed the case: some 46% say they support her deal with 38% opposing it.

Incredibly, however, among actual members of the Conservative Party, opposition to the deal negotiated by their own leader outweighs support for it by a margin of 59% to 38%. Furthermore, more of them (53%) think May’s deal does not respect the result of the referendum than think it does (42%), and if we take only those members who voted Leave back in 2016 some 67% think May’s deal fails to respect the result.

Moreover, the Tory rank and file, it seems, are convinced that No Deal is better than May’s Deal. We asked ordinary members of the Conservative Party, as well as voters, what their first preference would be in a three-way referendum where the options were (a) remaining in the EU, (b) leaving with the proposed deal, or (c) leaving without a deal. Among voters as a whole, some 42% of them plump for Remain, with 13% going for the PM’s deal, 25% for No Deal, and the rest saying they wouldn’t vote, didn’t know or refusing to answer.

The respective figures for Tory voters, however, are very different: 23% Remain; 27% Deal; and 43% No Deal.  Among Tory members, support for No Deal is even higher: 57% of them say that leaving without a deal would be their first preference compared to just 23% whose first preference was to leave on the basis of the current deal and only 15% saying it was to remain.

Mrs May can perhaps clutch at the straw provided by the response of Tory members to being asked for their second preference: some 40% said it was leaving with the proposed deal. That said, some 33% said they would not cast a second preference. This strong dislike of the PM’s deal also emerged when we asked about binary referendum choices.

Faced with having to choose between Remain and Mrs May’s proposed deal, some 20% of Tory members (like 11% of current Tory voters) said they wouldn’t vote and 18% (and 25% of Tory voters) said they’d vote Remain. Still, that leaves 57% of Tory members (and 56% of current Tory voters) who, faced with the choice between Remain and May’s deal, would vote for the latter.

Tory members’ dislike for the PM’s deal, however, really comes out when we asked about a referendum in which the choice came down to her deal or No Deal. Only 29% of Tory members would vote for Mrs May’s deal, compared to 64% who would vote to leave without a deal. [...]

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