UK moves closer to Brexit as The Sun backs ‘Leave’ vote

Bloomberg

Britain appeared to be on course to leave the EU, with four polls from three companies putting the ‘Leave’ campaign ahead of ‘Remain.’ The pound and European stocks plunged on Tuesday with just nine days of campaigning left before the June 23 referendum. After a series of new polls on Monday put “Leave” ahead, the day’s final blow came when the Sun, Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper, backed a so-called Brexit on its front page.
“Outside the EU we can become richer, safer and free at long last to forge our own destiny — as America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and many other great democracies already do,” the newspaper said.
“If we stay, Britain will be engulfed in a few short years by this relentlessly expanding ¬German-dominated federal state.”
The Stoxx Europe 600 Index was down 1 percent.
The NumberCruncherPolitics estimate of the probability of a Brexit surged to 32.6 percent from 23.7 percent. Its creator, Matt Singh, wrote that “we have ample evidence that the move is real.” Oddschecker’s survey of bookmakers’ implied probabilities rose to 42.5 percent on Tuesday morning from 33.5 percent a day earlier.
Until this week, the focus of the “Remain” campaign, with Prime Minister David Cameron at the helm, has been to warn of the economic consequences of a Brexit. With evidence that his message is failing to cut through, Cameron has turned to the opposition Labour Party to save him. On Monday, his predecessor as PM, Gordon Brown, made an impassioned plea to Labour voters not to turn their backs on the EU. On Tuesday, the party’s current leader, Jeremy Corbyn, will have his turn.
“Today I am issuing a call to the whole Labour movement to persuade people to back ‘Remain’ to protect jobs and rights at work,” Corbyn will say at an event in London, according to his office. “We have just nine days to go to convince Labour supporters to vote ‘Remain.”
His message may not have been helped by an intervention from Ed Balls, Labour’s former Treasury spokesman, who criticized the way the EU currently handles immigration while also calling for people to vote “Remain.”
“We need to press Europe to restore proper borders, and put new controls on economic migration,” Balls wrote in the Daily Mirror newspaper. “But if we leave the EU now, we can’t make those changes happen, and we’ll face the worst of all worlds — stay in the single market and be forced to accept free movement of people like Switzerland and Norway; or leave the single market and see jobs, investment and our public services hammered.”
The Vote Leave campaign aimed for economic reassurance, promising that spending on all the things the EU currently funds such as university research and farm subsidies, as well as cutting tax on fuel and increasing spending on the National Health Service. “We’re going to take back control of the money we send to the EU,” Employment Minister Priti Patel told the BBC. “The government of the day will have options and choices as to how to spend that money.”
For the Labour “Remain” campaign, former Home Secretary Alan Johnson, described this as “fantasy economics.” “That money won’t exist,” he told the BBC. “It only takes a 0.6 percent movement in our wealth to eradicate the £8 billion ($11.3 billion) that is sent to Europe.”
Markets, Polls
Market reaction to the polling may help “Remain” if it backs up the government’s message that a Brexit would be economically harmful.
Polling expert John Curtice, a politics professor at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, said in a Bloomberg TV interview that while it “looks as though the numbers have moved on average a bit towards ‘Leave,” the movement is not a large one and often in referendums voters move back to the status quo in the final days of the campaign.
The first polls of Monday evening came from ICM, which published both phone and online surveys showing “Leave” opening up a 5 percentage-point lead over “Remain.” A telephone poll of 1,000 people conducted June 10-13 found “Leave” at 50 percent and “Remain” at 45 percent. An online poll of 2,001 adults conducted over the same dates put “Leave” at 49 percent and “Remain” at 44 percent. Phone polls had previously tended to show better results for “Remain.”
Then came a YouGov Plc online survey showing “Leave” at 46 percent with “Remain” at 39 percent, and an ORB poll putting “Leave” at 49 percent and “Remain” at 48 percent among those certain to vote.
In a crumb of comfort to “Remain,” ORB gave it a 49 percent to 44 percent lead among all voters.