Polling expert: The Tories are in choppy electoral water. They are mortal
Boris Johnson’s failure, despite his many promises, to get Brexit done could lead to his downfall, according to Professor Sir John Curtice.
The leading polling expert believes the local government election results showed voters, particularly in Northern Ireland, fear increasingly negative consequences of leaving the EU.
He said the Northern Ireland Protocol – which governs the post-brexit movement of goods between the Republic and the north – had fragmented the vote in Northern Ireland as Sinn Fein are tipped to become the biggest party.
Curtice, of Strathclyde University, said: “These results confirm that the Conservative party is in electorally choppy waters. They are mortal, they are not invulnerable.
“Just in case anybody thinks Brexit is done, it isn’t done. Northern Ireland is still not sorted. It was Northern Ireland that undid Theresa May.
“Boris Johnson tried to solve it by agreeing to the Northern Ireland protocol and it is still not managing to resolve the issue. Sinn Fein’s vote is up very narrowly but the reason we have Sinn Fein first in Northern Ireland is because of the fragmentation of the unionist vote.
“And that fragmentation is very much to do with the Northern Ireland protocol, which is the legacy of Brexit.”
Unionists in Northern Ireland are opposed to the protocol, the part of the Brexit withdrawal agreement which avoids a hard border on the island of Ireland by placing a customs and regulatory border in the Irish Sea.
They claim it damages Northern Ireland’s economic and constitutional position within the United Kingdom. Curtice added: “What we have seen is the fragmentation of the Unionist community engendered by the divisions within the community over Brexit and then over the Northern Ireland protocol.
“It is clear that the DUP will not nominate a deputy first minister in the circumstances and they will only swallow that bitter pill if the Northern Ireland protocol is radically altered by the prime minister.
“If he tries to do that he then runs the risk of starting a row with the European Union and he might end up with trade between Great Britain and the European Union being disrupted.
“So we are still in this situation of looking at how do we deliver Brexit in a way that is acceptable to Northern Ireland. Five years on, we still do not have the answer to that. I think that is the real message of these elections.”
In Scotland, he said, the progress of the Greens, who more than doubled their councillors to 35, was one of the most significant developments revealed in the results. He said the Greens had “tweaked the tail” of Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP by splitting the proindependence vote. He said: “It’s noticeable that where the Greens did particularly well, they did so at the expense of the SNP.
“They certainly caused the SNP some grief in Glasgow. It raised the risk to the SNP that they’ve enhanced the Greens’ credibility with the coalition agreement.
“It’s clear that as Nicola Sturgeon tries to make the case for independence and holding a referendum, she is going to have to listen to Patrick Harvie a bit more than she was previously inclined to do.”