"The arms that you wield now are not such as your forefathers wielded; but they are infinitely more effective, and infinitely more irresistable" ~ Cymru Fydd leaflet, 1890

Monday 26 May 2014

EU Election Results 2014

By now everyone should know that Wales has decided to send an English immigrant that hates immigrants and a Tory that lives in England to represent Wales in the EU. As well as those two we've also chosen one Labour and one Plaid Cymru. Wales, as a region of England, only has four MEPs. If Wales were an independent state then it's likely we'd have around 12 based on the fact we have roughly the same population as Lithuania.

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Firstly, a big thanks to Pembroke Council for publishing the complete results on their website which has allowed me to table them. And then it's a simple process* of highlighting the party with the most number of votes (green) and the party with the least (red) per council area. The most were a mix of Labour, UKIP, Plaid and Tory. The party with the least number of votes, in every single council area in Wales was the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

With the data above we can create a map of Wales depicting which council areas returned which political party. By doing so you get the following result.

EU map of Wales by council area - Share via twitter | facebook
As you can see above Wales is predominantly split into three areas. Plaid hold Y Fro, Labour take the valleys with the border counties and predominantly Anglicised areas going UKIP/Tory.

From here we can do some other interesting things, namely divide the parties into pro-EU and anti-EU and see how that looks as a map. Of course I should preface this as saying it's non scientific but it'll be interesting. I have divided the parties as follows.

Pro-EU. Plaid, Labour, Lib Dem, Green.
Anti-EU. All the others.

In this unscientific poll the majority of Wales is pro-EU. Share via twitter | facebook
So I added up each council area by the criteria listed above and it gave the above results. Every council area followed the pattern of UKIP / Tory = anti-EU and Labour / Plaid = pro-EU with the exception of Torfaen and Newport. Torfaen voted anti-EU by just 118 votes whilst Newport was by over 3000. Of those areas that voted strongest against the two Tory areas had the highest margin whilst the four highest pro-EU areas were split between Labour and Plaid. Here's the full results.

Full tables of pro-EU party votes vs anti-EU party votes. Share via twitter | facebook
At this point some of you will be scratching your heads and thinking that you've seen that second map before somewhere. If you are then it does indeed look very similar to the 1997 devolution map. With those areas voting yes in green and those voting no in red. There is only one area that is different and that is Cardiff, in 1997 Cardiff voted against devolution by 55.6% to 44.4%. In the Euro election Cardiff voted in favour of pro-EU parties by a margin of 55.7% to 44.3%. I know, I know, we are comparing two different things but the results overall are so similar that it would be crazy not to compare them further.

I shall update the page as and when I create new sexy charts, maps or whatever else I can think of.

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*Simple process is adding a max and min functions for each column and then using a conditional format to make the cell that equals the max turn green and the cell that equals the min turn red.

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