Leave/Remain divide among voters starting to change, poll suggests

THE CORONAVIRUS pandemic has seen a dramatic shift in political allegiances, with a return to a more traditional divide of the left and right which had become clouded during the Brexit saga, new polling has suggested.

The virus outbreak is thought to be behind the return to normal party politics four years on from the Brexit referendum, according to a think-tank.

Researchers have claimed that the pandemic is now causing voters to take a dimmer view of previously touted post-Brexit trade partners like the US and China. The research carried out for the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) found Leave/ Remain identities are starting to blur, with voters just as likely to judge the Government on the response to the coronavirus pandemic as on their attitude towards Brexit. Of the “Red Wall defectors” – those who voted Conservative for the first time in the last General Election in traditional Labour strongholds in Yorkshire and elsewhere – some 46 per cent of them were undecided on who they would vote for now.

The data found since the pandemic, 23 per cent of those who voted Conservative in 2019 in those seats were willing to vote for Labour, but Labour also had a large proportion of undecided voters.

The ECFR’s founding director, Mark Leonard, said: “This polling shows the first sign that Covid-19

could end up transforming perceptions of government competence in the way Black Wednesday transformed perceptions of conservative economic management in 1992, and opened the way for a political realignment in which Labour seized the agenda.”