Thread by @jburnmurdoch

NEW: @greenmiranda & @tomhannen have a brilliant video on how Brexit has warped British politics out of shape ft.com/video/bc7ef2b4…

In it, @ProfJaneGreen discusses the shifting tectonics, aided by charts showing the changing electoral landscape.

It’s chart thread time:

@greenmiranda @tomhannen @ProfJaneGreen 1/9 Here are the two axes where we usually situate people & parties
• Economic axis from Left (pro redistribution) to Right (anti redist, pro business)
• Cultural axis from top (authoritarian, tough on crime, traditional British values) to bottom (liberal, individual freedoms)

@greenmiranda @tomhannen @ProfJaneGreen 2/9 Here’s where Leave and Remain voters are clustered, per BES data. There’s a lot of common ground on economics, but they’re split culturally.

Remainers skew very liberal, Leavers authoritarian.

NB those Leavers in the upper-left: socially conservative, economically left-wing

@greenmiranda @tomhannen @ProfJaneGreen 3/9 And now here are two traditional major parties, Labour and the Conservatives:

A fair amount more cultural (vertical) overlap, but current Labour supporters skew to the economic left, Conservatives to the right.

@greenmiranda @tomhannen @ProfJaneGreen 4/9 I’ve now added Lib Dems & Brexit party.

LDs occupy a similar space to Labour on cultural axis, but are less left-wing on the economy.

Brexit party backers have plenty of overlap with Tories and some with Labour, but also stretch into that Auth-Left space where we saw Leave.

@greenmiranda @tomhannen @ProfJaneGreen 5/9 Here are Leave and Remain overlaid on those four parties.

The Leave cluster is almost a perfect match for Brexit party, and Remain are almost a clone of the Lib Dems.

i.e the Brexit identities map neatly onto the two smaller parties, but are misaligned with Lab and Con.

@greenmiranda @tomhannen @ProfJaneGreen 6/9 And there’s one group we’ve not mentioned yet: non-voters.

For all the talk of there being a gap for a new centrist party, non-voters fit neatly into the exact same space occupied by Leave voters and Brexit party supporters: the Authoritarian Left.

@greenmiranda @tomhannen @ProfJaneGreen 7/9 Let’s now take the two sides of Brexit one at a time.

Here’s Leave:

Much bigger overlap between Cons and both BXP-supporters and non-voters than there is for Lab.

Tories want to get as many of these people (BXP + non-voting) as poss to see them as the authoritarian choice.

@greenmiranda @tomhannen @ProfJaneGreen 8/9 Labour could try to win the Auth-Left on the basis of being the left-wing choice, too, but the cultural overlap between these people and Labour is very slim.

With cultural divides growing in salience, they feel more at home with Cons on culture than Lab on economics.

@greenmiranda @tomhannen @ProfJaneGreen 9/9 And then on the Remain side, voters furthest to the left will go Labour, but this chunk of centre-left voters have values that are just as much at home with the Lib Dems as with Labour.

Where will they go?

We’ll find out between now and the morning of December 13th!

@greenmiranda @tomhannen @ProfJaneGreen But in the mean time, @greenmiranda & @tomhannen’s video is an excellent guide to how each of the parties is navigating this new electoral map, plus you get to see these charts on a finely manicured lawn 💅 ft.com/video/bc7ef2b4…

@greenmiranda @tomhannen @ProfJaneGreen Oh, and a bonus chart:

If The Independent Group were aiming to be a centrist party, they certainly achieved that.