An observation on our vote

Comments from our election agent.

"Rather disappointing. I’d expected our vote to go up a bit because there’d be a higher turnout (and not to finish so low down the list). However, the election did turn out to be a proxy referendum (won, by the way, despite what most of the media are saying, by Remain) and we lost out in the same way as Labour did for not taking sides in this.

The areas where we did best last time, Oxford and Brighton, are strong Remain areas and the fall in our vote and share there was dramatic. Down from 221 to 83 in Oxford and from 397 to 103 in Brighton. What this suggests is that a large proportion of those prepared to vote for socialism in other circumstances, faced with a referendum on the EU, opted for Remain. This makes some sense as we would hardly expect them to prefer insular English nationalism."

There were 13,648 spoilt votes. I saw the ones at Guildford and a lot of them were deliberate protests about the election being held, so if you like, votes for Brexit."