Brexit and the changing geography of conservative party support in England, 2015–2019

The past decade has seen uncharacteristically high levels of political instability in Britain. There have been four elections and six Prime Ministers since 2015. In the June 2016 Brexit referendum, the triumph of the “exit” option was widely interpreted as a populist revolt against elites in London and Brussels that benefited the Conservative Party. Many commentators saw it as a political shock that triggered a realignment process in British party politics in which working class and older voters abandoned the Labour Party in favour of the Conservatives. In turn, these changes were related to a shifting geography of Conservative electoral support, with the party making inroads into the north, and in particular in the traditional “red wall” constituencies that have long supported Labour. The first two post-Brexit elections in 2017 and 2019 provide an opportunity for us to evaluate the ability of a new methodology to add insight into spatially differentiated unfolding realignment processes. In this article, we utilize recently-developed Multiscale Geographically Weighted Regression (MGWR) techniques to measure the extent to which the socio-economic and cultural bases of Conservative support was shifting in line with the expectations of existing literature claiming to document a political realignment triggered by the Brexit vote. Our MGWR analysis suggests that the impact on the level of Conservative support from older age voters, high agricultural employment, and the presence of EU migrants was strongly differentiated over English regions. Looking at evidence of several indicators drawn from the literature on the putative Conservative realignment in the 2017–2019 period, we show evidence of some consolidation of realignment processes in 2019, particularly in the Midlands and the North. The 2024 election saw the re-fragmentation of the UK electorate (especially with the rise of Farage’s Reform UK party absorbing some of the Conservative gains in the 2017-19 period) and it remains to be seen if the Conservatives can remobilize “Leave” voters in future elections. We are grateful to this journal’s reviewers for their careful reading and constructive commentary on our original submission.