How Your Hometown Is Voting in the EU Referendum, and Why

Tomorrow is a very big day, even in the grand scheme of very big days. People across the UK are heading to the polls to cross one of two boxes, and once all those crosses have been counted we'll finally know if the Remain camp are going to be toasting their win with glasses of pink Cava, or if Leave will be calling in the Frosty Jack's and Gordon's gin and celebrating with some British Booze for British Folks.

Until then, we'll all continue to argue a lot. Scroll through your Facebook feed and you'll know the EU Referendum has become incredibly polarising; vote Leave and you're a fucking scumbag racist, vote Remain and you're a liberal idiot with no agency. There are polls and studies and reports to tell you what the rest of the UK is thinking, but social media has a way of blinkering all that slightly.

So what I thought I'd do is conduct a study myself, using the social listening tool Brandwatch. I analysed over 350,000 tweets between March and May that used the four official campaign hashtags: #StrongerIn; #UKinEU; #VoteLeave; and #LeaveEU, filtering so that only tweets with a positive sentiment were included. I then divided these up by county, worked out the number of mentions per 100,000 people and created this map visualising the results:

England – especially the east – appears to be the most eurosceptic area, with Wales, Scotland and metropolitan areas the most Europhilic. You can see more detail on the demographics of each group here.

It's hard to remember this when you're seven tweets deep into a personal epiphany, but Twitter isn't everything. Nevertheless, my study does seem to chime with other data – for instance, a study released by YouGov, which was compiled from around 80,552 responses conducted in a nationwide survey between February of 2015 and February of 2016. The map shows the Euroscepticism of each UK council, from green for "IN" to red for "OUT".

Take a look and you'll see the trends are very similar: England is bathed in red, with just a few green blobs in major cities, while Wales and Scotland are pretty much a sea of green. Whereas the top ten most Eurosceptic councils are all in England, five of the least Eurosceptic councils are in either Wales or England, with the other five all in London. Additionally, most of the more Euro-friendly councils in England appear to be in metropolitan areas such as Bristol, Brighton, Leeds and Sheffield.

Both my own research and the YouGov study clearly shows that Wales and Scotland lean more towards "In" than "Out". So why is this?

In Wales' case, it may have a lot to do with EU funding. Containing one of the poorest rural parts of the EU, Wales receives a large amount of funding through the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development. Jill Evans, Plaid Cymru MEP for Wales, said: "Our agricultural sector, which produces extremely high-quality produce, simply could not survive without the EU. Around 80 percent of farms would not be viable without its support."

But it doesn't stop with agriculture. The £4 billion that Wales has received from Europe since 2000 has been spent on all kinds of cultural projects, from building outdoor swimming pools to developing university campuses.

"We are also seeing something of a creative boom in Wales at the moment, with major investment into the arts and media," Evans continued. "Much of the money that supports these projects comes from the European Union, to encourage creativity, innovation and new ideas."

In Scotland there's a similar concern about agriculture; Remain activists say one in three Scottish farms could face bankruptcy in the event of Brexit, arguing that Westminster wouldn't continue to fund Scottish agriculture to the same extent.

Distrust of Westminster is the main force behind Scotland's support of the EU. Thirty percent of the population voted to leave the UK in the 2014 Scottish Referendum, and many of those who voted to stay are upset that the increased powers promised to Holyrood have not materialised. For them, a vote to leave means a vote for more powers in Westminster, which is seen only as a bad thing.

In England, the general trend is that cities tend to be less Eurosceptic than rural areas, which goes against one of the main arguments for the Out campaign – that "Britain's full" and there's no more space. If people really felt this way about immigration, surely we'd see more metropolitan areas leaning towards Out?

Jean Lambert, Green Party MEP for London, believes that diversity has only been beneficial. "London is a welcoming city with a diverse, international workforce," she said. "Its connectedness to other parts of the world – in Europe and beyond – has helped make it the innovative, exciting, creative and friendly city it is."

If more culturally integrated parts of England lean toward being more pro-EU, then could the remoteness of a region lead to more Euroscepticism?

My research shows that the east of England is one of the most Eurosceptic areas of England. Richard Howitt, Labour MEP for the area, explained the difficulties he's faced while campaigning for Remain: "There is a problem with peripherality in the area," he said. "Places like Great Yarmouth and Clacton are at the end of the train lines, a long way from major cities, and the people living there feel cut off from the rest of the country. There's definitely strong UKIP support in these coastal towns."

The east also experiences the third highest rate of immigration in the country. UKIP and the Leave campaign argue that this has put huge wage pressures on the area, as the number of people looking for work outstrips the number of available jobs.

More remote areas also tend to be poorer and less educated – two factors that YouGov polls have shown to drastically increase Euroscepticism.

Things seem to be on a knife-edge, and neither of these studies may accurately predict the final result. There have been ferocious campaigns on either side, but they appear to have made little impact – a second map, below, looking at mentions between the 13th of May and the 13th of June shows roughly the same sentiment across the country.

What's for sure is that if we vote for Brexit and it turns out that the Scottish and Welsh vote is very different to that in England, separatist parties like Plaid Cymru and the SNP will argue this gives them a clear mandate to separate from the rest of the UK.

We can only speculate at this point, but a vote for Leave on the 23rd could be a vote for breaking up not one but two unions. Whether you think that's a good or bad thing is a decision entirely for you.

@nickchef88

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