This has been a weekend of staged political drama in the UK. On Friday, the EU "renegotiation" was announced last minute, and its contents seemed somehow less exciting news than David Cameron's ruffled shirt and up-all-night bloodshot eyes. On Sunday, Boris Johnson dumped the Conservative leader by text before engineering a media scrum outside his home to announce he was campaigning for Brexit. But among the hoopla and posturing, something that might actually affect the way you vote happened, in the sense that you might not vote at all.
Cameron announced the referendum would take place on June 23, a.k.a. the Thursday of Glastonbury—technically, it's the day before the festival starts in earnest, but in recent years, over 90 percent of attendees have been on site by Thursday morning.
Even though this is a national referendum, you still have to vote at the polling booth closest to your address on the electoral roll, which means that the hundreds of thousands of people attending the festival will either have to vote by mail or not at all.
In a narrow vote, could a large number of young left-leaning people at Glastonbury make a difference? One Conservative minister has already had to play down concerns of an Out campaign conspiracy to schedule the referendum at the same time as the festival.
I spoke to Adam Drummond, research manager and head of polling at Opinium, to find out if Glastonbury could have any impact on whether Britain stays in the EU.
VICE: Are people who go to Glastonbury likely to feel one way or the other about Europe?
Adam: Back in the 1980s, Labour was advocating pulling out, and it was seen as a capitalist conspiracy, and there's an element of that that has come back to life under the Corbyn leadership. But in the 1990s, it has generally been people on the right who want to pull out . So, even if you were to assume Glastonbury is full of left-wing people, it's hard to tell. Younger people are much more likely to want to stay in than pull out, and the over-65s especially are really keen to come out. As Glastonbury is a younger crowd, the "In" side is missing out on some voters.
The festival organizers are urging everyone going to sort a postal vote in advance. Could there actually be more voters, in that they might be more organized than they would have been otherwise?
It's very possible. The changes to the way people are registered to vote has changed recently—it's moved from household to individual vote registration—and so there are lots of people who have actually fallen off the electoral roll without knowing it. So if this is actually a prompt to go and re-register, that might actually benefit whichever side they tend to support.
Is there any way in which organizing a vote the same week as a big event like Glastonbury could have been done tactically?
That wouldn't make a lot of sense. There's a real attempt by Cameron and Osborne to appear fair so people on the right of the party wouldn't be able to say it was rigged. There are three different groups that aren't allowed to vote that would be disproportionately likely to vote to stay in—there are 15- to 17-year-olds, EU citizens living in the UK who are allowed to vote in local elections, and there are also British expats living elsewhere in the EU. So there are all sorts of other ways that could have been used to change the electorate and to rig it. It's overkill to say that they are doing it on purpose when it's a proportionately tiny number of people who are going to be at Glastonbury.
Almost 200,000 people will be at Glastonbury on the day of the vote, though.
That's 200,000 people of what we'd expect to be about 30 million votes, so it's not likely to make a massive difference one way or another. The lowest turnout age group is 18–24 year olds, and the older you are, the more likely you are to go out and vote. We're expecting this to be around the same as the general election turnout—60 to 65 percent—so if Glastonbury is predominantly full of younger people, it won't have much impact. It also depends on how close it is. One poll is saying there's a 15-point lead in favor of staying in, in which case it wouldn't have any sort of effect whatsoever because 200,000 people all voting one way isn't going to affect that, but if you look at the online poll, it's a dead heat. Obviously, if it's a much closer race, it will have much more of an impact.
People are also commenting that it's the weekend of the Euro group stages, so England could be in/out of Europe in two ways.
I don't think it would have anything more than a really marginal effect. Although it is possible to imagine an only slightly far-fetched scenario in which the race is on an absolute knife-edge and England is knocked out after some sort of controversial 'hand of God' moment by another major European team, causing that news to dominate in the media during the days before the vote, and Out wins something like 50.1 percent.
Can we trust the polls after the 2015 general election fiasco?
Nobody can quite explain why that was, but one thing we've had to correct is that there were too many overenthusiastic young people saying they are going to vote Labour when actually their demographic group didn't turn out at as high a level as the polls said they would. In terms of relying on polls, use it as a data point and use a range of sources.
What do you think it's going to be? In or Out?
At the moment, I think it's 50/50. It could go either way. Before this week, if Boris had come out in favor of staying in, I would have said it's 45/55 to stay in, but at the moment, it's quite up in the air. The way that the Tories are splitting is interesting. Rather than having most MPs coming out in favor, you've actually got quite a large chunk of MPs saying they want to come out, and you've got a well-known figurehead in Boris Johnson. But if there were a gun to my head, I would say stay in.
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