Five reasons why it's still worth a punt on Brexit

They think it’s all over…and to judge by the recent spate of pro-Remain polls on the EU Referendum question, it pretty much is now.

No-one wants to say it out aloud; a ruddy-cheeked David Cameron is still huffing and puffing his way round the factories and malls of Great Britain while Boris spins doughtnuts in his campaign hot-rod, but every knows the game is up.

The ‘poll of polls’ shows an 8-point lead for ‘Remain’; the markets are calm, Sterling is on the up and Nigel Farage talks openly about how the Brexiteers will not accept defeat which – as the bookmakers odds of 1-7 attest – is now a racing certainty.

Well, maybe. But here’s five good reasons why it still might be worth having a punt on Brexit – current odds 4-1, since you ask.

1. The polls aren’t nearly as clear-cut as you might think.

Remain have always has an in-built advantage, but as Professor John Curtice, the polling guru from the University of Strathclyde told a meeting at Chatham House this week, a rigorous analysis of the polls shows only “slight evidence” of a tilt towards remain, which has always held a lead. Everyone else is trading the headlines.

Even allowing for that slight tilt, he added, Remain certainly was “not obviously at a tipping point”, attributing much of current shift to a much higher proportion of polls conducted by phone in recent weeks. And for reasons the pollsters haven’t fully explained, even to themselves, phone polls consistently favour ‘remain’.

So, they simply could be wrong and the online polls – which put ‘Leave’ much closer – could in fact be right. It wouldn’t be the first time. And when you then start to factor in “likely voters” the margins come down still further. In short, don’t bet on the polls just yet.

2. It’s all about the turnout.

Most pollsters agree that if everyone could vote via smartphone without getting out of bed on June 23, Britain would indeed vote to ‘remain’ by a fairly comfortable margin; perhaps even as much as 60-40.

But as we all know, the referendum result will be decided by voters who actually do bother to get out of bed and go to the polls, rather sleeping off their hangover from the previous night’s box office Euro 2016 fixture – Italy v Ireland.

Research by the University of Kent’s Matthew Goodwin has shown that a low turnout almost certainly favours a Brexit, since the pro-Leave camp supporters are much more motivated than remainers.

If turn out is 55 per cent or below, and the turnout among ‘Leave’ is five points higher than ‘Remainers’ then – boom - Brexit.

3. There are good reasons to think turnout might be low

As Prof Curtice observed, so far this EU referendum hasn’t "cut through" in the way the Scottish independence referendum did – people just aren’t talking about membership of the European Union in the pubs and parks of England they way did over the future of the British Union.

As a measure of the lack of interest, the polling shows that voters have remained largely unmoved – not by Barack Obama, or Christine Lagarde or the governor of the Bank of England or even, for that matter, the barnstorming Boris. Voters distrust both sides in almost equal measure.

The lack of engagement is could be the result of the "blue-on-blue" nature of the debate, which is to say to most ordinary people this campaign looks like the same old Tory squabble which has been going on for generations – rather than a "once in a generation" decision.

Younger voters and progressive Labour voters favour remain, but their enthusiasm may be supressed by the idea of going out to vote in favour of a Tory prime minster. And the frankly hysterical nature of the campaign – on both sides – is proving a general turn-off to a large number of people.

General Election turnout last year was 66 per cent; local election turnout is often in the mid-30s per cent. It’s not hard to see how the EU referendum turnout could be 55 per cent, and then….well, see point, two, above.

4. The black swans all point to Brexit

Data shows that the British election tends not to switch on to an election campaign until around two weeks before polling day. That is a narrow window in which unforeseen “black swan” events could suddenly paddle into view and upset all the conventional wisdom of an easy win for ‘remain’.

The obvious nightmare for ‘remain’ is a Paris-style terror attack involving jihadists who slipped into Europe during last year’s migrant crisis.

But here are others - a sudden financial shock causing the Eurozone to wobble again, another dire showing from England at the Euro football championships, a migration surge in the Med or a major scandal in Brussels or Westminster that rocks the Cameron-Osborne campaign by further eroding confidence in the political establishment.

It is also a salutary thought for ‘remain’ that it is possible to think of a good number of black swans that could tip the balance suddenly towards Brexit - but virtually impossible to think of one that would suddenly influence the public towards ‘remain’.

The risk, albeit a low risk, is all with the ‘remain’ side.

5. Complacency, sleep-walking to the exit

It is a paradox of the campaign that the further ahead ‘remain’ get in the polls, the more sanguine the markets appear, the more solid the position of Sterling against the Euro, the less likely that ‘remain’ voters – already relatively tepid towards their cause - are to bother to turn out to vote.

Recall that it was a September 7 2014 Sunday Times poll showing Scots 51-49 in favour of independence that suddenly galvanised Gordon Brown and every other politician in Britain to pile up to Edinburgh to offer blandishments and beg the Scots not to vote ‘out’.

Cameron’s "project fear" suddenly felt real as the pound plunged to a 10-month low and the stocks of Scottish-based firms took a battering in the markets. One Deutsche Bank’s foreign exchange specialist warned that an "out" could lead “a destabilising crisis in the whole British banking system”.

And that’s the problem for "remain". If the polls are perceived to remain overwhelmingly in their favour, they just won’t get that judicious jolt of panic needed to prevent Britain to sleep-walking to the exit – or a “Brexident”, as the remain camp would call it.

So if the world awakes on June 24 to the shock news that we’ve voted to leave the European Union 50.8 to 49.2 on the back of a 52 per cent turnout, don’t say you weren’t warned.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/27/five-reasons-why-its-still-worth-a-punt-on-brexit/