The first two posts of a five-post series:
Part 1: It Is All Cameron’s Fault:
Finally, you might ask why did Cameron promise the referendum in his party’s election manifesto? It is simple. Even with the promise of a referendum, Cameron barely overcame the UKIP surge: a 3.8 million vote surge. It was only by peeling off voters from UKIP—through the promise of the in-out referendum—that made him PM. Had he not made this election pledge, any number of marginal Tory seats would have tipped: Labour, Lib-Dem, or UKIP. There was no blunder here by Cameron. It was not the referendum which destroyed Cameron’s ministry; rather, it was the promise of a referendum which made Cameron the Prime Minister in the first instance.
[. . .]
Parties who have been rejected at the polls twice should engage in meaningful introspection, at least, if they expect to be taken seriously in the future. The let’s put all the blame on Cameron position lacks just the sort of gravitas that one hopes to see in serious opposition parties.
and
Part 2: The U.K.’s Bradley/Wilder Effect Is Enough To Swing Elections:
If a society permits those who engage in wilful violence and those that command the police & the revenue office to drive normal political expression underground, then that society will not have normal political expression. One consequence of the lack of normal political expression is that every poll will lack validity.*
(Related: Brexit, Predictions and Trump.)
The Conservatives are still paying for the betrayal of Margaret Thatcher.
Denouncing, punishing or physically threatening voters’ holding “wrong thought” opinions only gets the latter to go dark, but doesn’t influence their opinions in the slightest.
This is several orders of magnitude greater than the ‘Bradley Effect,’ which was simply a matter of people not wanting the social stigma of looking racist.
There is a lot more ‘skin’ in the game of hiding real opinions from elites now. Effectively, the Political and Media Elite “identity issue” political correctness has poisoned the well as far as public opinion polls are concerned.
Only hostile environment polling – that is, polls of secondary opinions, which when properly analyzed, reveal real opinions on other issues – can work now to provide statistically valid results.
And those polls require a lot of well trained interviewers physically asking people to conduct.
Nobody in the media will pay for those.