• In conclusion these polls indicate that somewhere between 34 and 58 per cent of farmers planned to vote for Brexit, with two polls after the referendum putting the figure that did vote to leave at around 53 per cent.

    To put that into context:

    55 per cent of men voted to leave;
    56 per cent of the ‘rural’ vote was a vote to leave:
    61 per cent of Conservative voters voted leave; and
    the older you were the more likely you were to have voted to leave (60 per cent of those aged 50-64 and 64 per cent of those over 65).
    Given that farmers are predominantly male, rural, Tory voting, and older than 50 (one third are over 65), they appear to have voted to leave in a smaller proportion than others in their demographic.

    https://www.westcountryvoices.co.uk/challenging-the-myth-that-farmers-voted-for-brexit-and-therefore-deserve-whats-coming-to-them/

  • I’m not sure this is a strong argument. Still more than the overall % (ie 53% > 51.9%, although obviously not by much).

    Analogy: 90% of public school old boys enjoy a good caning. Only 85% of old Etonians do, therefore old Etonians are not sadomasochists.

  • This seems a more relevant quote from that article:

    But even if EVERY farmer in the UK had voted the same way in 2016 it wouldn’t have changed the result. There were around 130,000 farmers in the UK in 2016. The difference between Leave and Remain was 1,269,501 votes – 10 times the number of farmers in the UK!

About

Avatar for hugo7 @hugo7 started