My unscientific survey finds most favour Brexit

Which way Will Canterbury Vote? Harry Bell is not the only member of the Kentish Gazette team to frequent pubs and bars in Canterbury. So do I.

Not only because of the friendly experience but to capture the pulse of the community.

Recently I decided to embark upon a totally unscientific survey of how people will vote in the EU referendum.

In different bars I eavesdropped and talked with men and women, young and old, and people of different occupations.

Not scientific but enough to give me a ‘feel’ of local thinking.

National polls suggest that voting for . remain and leave is roughly neck and neck. This is not what I found.

Instead, leave has at least a 10% gain, but what is interesting is that leave supporters are less likely to openly state their views.

It is a bit like the last election when the opinion polls said the result would be too close to call.

They underestimated the reluctance of voters to publicly state they would vote Tory. There is almost a feeling of shame to declare you will vote Tory or to vote leave. There are probably complex reasons for this.

What I also found is that Europe has become the scapegoat for all that is wrong in Britain.

At general elections, the party that is in government gets the blame.

In this referendum it is Europe. Red tape, bureaucracy, housing shortages, hospital waiting lists, you name it and it is all Europe’s fault.

I found a major divide in voting intentions was between the young and old.

Young people are keenly in favour of Europe while the older are not.

The young are permanently online, Facebook, texting and interconnected with global networks of friends. The world is their stage.

To be British or even European is to be parochial and old fashioned.

The old are still attached to ideas of community and how they think of Canterbury as in the past.

A golden age when we were all mates, helping each other in our local friendship and neighbourhood groups.

Fortunately there is still some of this around.

But the biggest divide in voting intentions is between affluent and lower income citizens.

The affluents are in favour because of the economic arguments the remain camp put forward. They are persuaded that Brexit will lead to uncertainty and lower economic growth.

But this argument carries little weight with those in less-paid jobs.

Shop assistants, care workers, workers in the building trades, cleaners, security guards.

They don’t care about the economics. What they do care about is immigration and in their eyes membership of the EU is tied to this.

They see immigration, and therefore Europe, as the cause for the pressures on the NHS and for housing shortages.

There is no recognition that without EU migration there would be acute staff shortages in the NHS, horticulture in east Kent would almost come to a halt and most restaurants and shops in Canterbury would become economically unviable.

What they do see is a housing market where their children have little hope of future independent accommodation, a labour market where there are zero hour contracts and wage levels are depressed.

Whatever the reasons for these, the men and women I spoke to attribute the blame to immigration and to Europe.

But, of course, they are not going to say this to opinion pollsters.

So what’s my prediction of the results of the referendum for voting behaviour in Canterbury? On the basis of my totally unscientific tapping of opinion it is a majority for Brexit. But I will go further than this. My guess is that nationally the leave campaign will win.

As for my own opinion on the future of Europe? It’s time has passed and it will break up except as an economic global trading zone.

There is not enough cultural or political affinity between the 28 countries for it to survive. Perhaps not even sufficient economic common ground. Time to move on?