North and South, take 2
People still fail to realise there are more people in the South than in the North
Zoe Williams has written about the political geography of the Brexit result. She repeats a point previously made by Danny Dorling, and which I’ve criticised here. She writes:
“In fact, most leave voters were in the south: the south-east, south-west — indeed the entire south apart from London voted leave… Yet southerners voted in greater numbers; their votes were decisive”.
I’ve already pointed out, in my comment on Danny Dorling’s piece in the BMJ, that the claim “most leave voters were in the South” is entirely a result of there being more voters in the South.
To show just how uninformative this claim is, allow me to indulge in a thought experiment. Let’s hold the number of people voting Leave in the North constant, at 4,325,965 people, and slowly change the proportion of people in the South who voted to Leave.
Just under 12 million people in the South voted (all figures from the Electoral Commission). 48.2% of them voted to Leave, compared to 55.8% in the North. 48 percent of 12 million gets you five and three quarter million, which a lot more than the people voting Leave in the North.
Let’s now change the proportion voting Leave in the South from just over 48% to 45%. We end up with 5.4 million.
What if it just 40% voted Leave? 4.8 million. Still more than the North.
We can keep going down. We can go as low as 36.5%. Put slightly differently, even if 63.5% of people in the South had voted to Remain, there would still be more Leave voters in the South than in the North, just because there are lots of people in the South.
You can play around with this — you can include the East of England in the South, in which case you can reach an even lower number. Or you can exclude London from the South — but now you’re just hunting for a pattern.
So the claim that “most leave voters were in the South” remains true but uninformative. What about the claim that southerners’ votes were decisive?
This claim seems false to me. If you exclude votes from the areas I’ve included in the South, then you’re left with 11,659,834 votes for Leave, compared to 9,982,985 votes for Remain. Leave wins whether or not you include the South.
It might be true that southerners’ votes might be decisive in the sense that the result would have been different had southerners voted differently — but this is true for very many arbitrary groups with more voters than the margin of victory.
I’ve got no desire to address the other issues raised in the piece: I really just want to address the misleading use of election results. I think the "othering" of the north (a) exists and (b) is harmful. Would that the House of Commons were moving to Richmond (Yorks) rather than Richmond House. But I think this independently of the referendum result, and misleading statistics aren't going to make me believe it more fervently.
