Nigel Farage’s Brexit party has hit a new polling high, reaching a predicted 35 per cent of the public vote just five weeks after the party was launched and six days before Britain votes in the European Union Parliament elections.
While the figures reported by major pollster YouGov remain comparatively static to their last figures published last week, the newly minted Brexit Party has managed to rise one point from an already historic 34 to 35 per cent, while the Conservatives have dropped one.
Now languishing in single digits at nine per cent, the party which presently rules the country under Prime Minister Theresa May is set to have its worst result in a national poll at any time in its nearly two-century history.
European Union elections in the United Kingdom assign seats regionally on a 19th-century Belgian system designed to allocate representation to smaller parties more fairly. A map of projected results created by Election Maps UK puts the Brexit party in first place in every English and Welsh region except London, and even coming second in Scotland.
Despite the continued good news for the Brexit party, pollster results tend to be taken with a pinch of salt in the United Kingdom, as the United States, especially after the failure of pollsters to predict the 2016 Brexit referendum result. Even on the day of the poll, YouGov — the author of today’s poll — called it for remain.
The pollster correctly called the last European Union election in 2014, however, correctly polling the win for UKIP — then led by Nigel Farage, as the Brexit Party is now — to within half a per cent in an eve of the vote count.
Nigel Farage himself noted the occasional failure of pollsters when speaking to Breitbart News last month, and warned that results for right-wing parties and causes can often show as lower than actual because conservatives can be reluctant to speak to pollsters, something known in Britain as the ‘Shy Tory Factor‘. He said:
“We may be doing better than we even know, but I’ve got to be slightly cautious… one of the reasons that Trump was behind and Brexit was behind is that people can be shy telling pollsters what they actually think.
“But I actually think it is more serious than that. I think there have been deliberate attempts by polling companies to skew, by using different measures, weighting, etc, to send a message to potential Trump and Brexit voters that: ‘look, you’re going to lose, so why bother?’… we are up against nepotism, we’re up against corruption, big business money, and the globalists who want to destroy our nation states.”
The United Kingdom was not meant to take part in this European Parliament election, having voted to leave the European Union almost three years ago. While the British government had set a March 29th 2019 departure date, this was subsequently pushed back — twice — after Theresa May found herself unable to push through the soft, “Brexit in name only” treaty change with the European Union she wanted.
The new departure date has been set back to October 31st of this year, but having already been delayed twice, there is no guarantee that it won’t be again if the Remainer-dominated British political class remains unsatisfied with the withdrawal.
The Brexit Party, meanwhile, has campaigned for the European votes to get a mandate for a full, so-called hard Brexit — a withdrawal which would release the country from EU institutions and laws.
While this option remains popular with the British people and a party advocating it is set to top a nationwide election next week, it is a nightmare situation for Civil Servants and politicians at Westminster who are predominantly working to deliver the softest Brexit possible — or no Brexit at all.
Oliver JJ Lane is the editor of Breitbart London — Follow him on Twitter and Facebook