The recent European Election has generated a great number of claims and counter claims about who won. Nearly everyone agrees that it wasn’t an election in the normal sense, but rather a proxy referendum. You should thus be able to add up all the votes for Brexit parties and all the ones for Remain and come away with a reasonable idea of where the country sits. Except it isn’t quite as simple as that.

Labour, for example, is notionally pro-Brexit. However, I don’t know a single Labour voter who supports that position. They all want to Remain. That said, I live in South West London and most Labour voters I know are very much of the metropolitan elite. The Tories are probably easier to gauge – most people who voted Conservative were probably pro-Brexit, albeit a soft one. The nationalist parties are more difficult to judge – an SNP supporter’s desire for an independent Scotland may trump any views on the EU. And finally the Green Party remains an enigma to me. It has always been somewhat anti-EU. Their 2010 manifesto states: “We are critical of many of the objectives built in to the EU treaties, of the EU institutions and how they work, and of many particular EU policies”. However, the Greens now claim to wish to remain on terms which simply don’t exist. If you are pro-Green policies (protectionism, aggressive control of carbon emissions etc), you are probably anti most EU policies. But that said, most Green voters I know are pro-remain.

So looking at the EU votes I’m going to apply the following weights (If a party’s weighting is 100% that means that all of their voters were Pro Brexit. If they are 0% they were all pro-Remain)

• Brexit Party – 100% Brexit
• UKIP – 100% Brexit
• Lib Dems – 0% Brexit
• Labour – 30% Brexit
• Conservatives – 80% Brexit
• SNP- 20% Brexit
• Plaid Cymru – 30% Brexit
• Change UK – 0% Brexit
• DUP – 100% Brexit
• Sinn Fein – 30% Brexit
• Alliance – 0% Brexit
• Green – 20% Brexit

I realise these are open to endless debate, but they seem about right to me (obviously). Applying these weightings gives the following referendum result:

			Brexit	Remain
Brexit Party	100%	5,248,533	5248533	0
UKIP	100%	554,463	554463	0
Lib Dems	0%	3,367,284	0	3,367,284
Labour	30%	2,347,255	704176.5	1,643,079
Conservatives	80%	1,512,147	1209717.6	302,429
SNP	20%	594,553	118910.6	475,642
Plaid Cymru	30%	163,928	49178.4	114,750
Change UK	0%	571,846	0	571,846
DUP	100%	124,991	124991	0
Sinn Fein	30%	126,951	38085.3	88,866
Alliance	0%	105,928	0	105,928
Green	20%	2,023,380	404676	1,618,704
		16,741,259	8,452,731	8,288,528
			50.5%	49.5%

So, a very narrow victory for Brexit. But it still shows the country is split pretty much 50:50.

People are then using this poll to extrapolate to a general election. I think that is wrong – votes in EU elections rarely translate to similar results in others. However, the recent local elections were proper elections and it is generally agreed that they were a total disaster for the Tories, a moderate disaster for Labour and a triumph for the Lib Dems. I think the latter point is fair – the Lib Dems are crawling back into the fray. But the results seem to tell a different story to the Tory disaster. Look at the votes cast:

Conservatives	2985959	31.40%
Labour	2531907	26.63%
Lib Dems	1602042	16.85%
Green	878485	9.24%
UKIP	430455	4.53%
Other	1080328	11.36%
	9509176

It’s hardly the Armageddon described by most commentators. Obviously, these don’t include London, and Labour usually does better in London but I’m not going to add to my other guesses by trying to predict the votes for London. My feeling in the local elections is that the Lib Dems stole votes pretty much equally from Labour and Conservative and the Greens pinched them from Labour. I think in a general election the Lib Dem vote will hold up but the Green will revert back to Labour. Clearly, the Brexit Party will take votes from UKIP, but probably fewer than people expect from the Tories, especially if a hard Brexiteer becomes leader.

Thus, I am going to make two bold predictions:

• If there is another referendum it will be a narrow victory for Brexit (again)
• If there is a general election the Conservatives will achieve an absolute majority

You read it here first folks. Unless I’m completely wrong, in which case I’ll delete the post.

*For the purpose of judging the bias of this article, my own views are: I am a reluctant remainer and I voted for the Lib Dems in the most recent General, Local and EU elections