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Speaker 1: two percent. I'm Charlie Pellett and that's a Bloomberg Business
Speaker 1: flash you're listening to taking start with Kathleen Fox on
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Radio. Brexit a vote for the citizens of the
Speaker 1: United Kingdom to decide if they want to stay in
Speaker 1: the European Union or go. Latest polls over the weekend
Speaker 1: showing that all of a sudden, once again, the vote
Speaker 1: to leave the European Union seems to beginning some strength
Speaker 1: or is it? Is it polls or people really changing
Speaker 1: their minds again. Robert Hutton joins us now. He's Bloomberg
Speaker 1: News UK govern and Politics reporter. He's joining us from London. So, Robert,
Speaker 1: what did the latest polls show some of up for us? Well,
Speaker 1: what they show is Leave ahead. We've had three online
Speaker 1: polls this morning, coming after some poles last week which
Speaker 1: also showed Leave ahead, and all of them put Leave
Speaker 1: ahead by margins as much as five percentage points. So
Speaker 1: on the face of it, they say Brittain is about
Speaker 1: to leave a European Union. That's on the face of it.
Speaker 1: But people like you who look very closely at polls,
Speaker 1: and some recent polls that misled us really in terms
Speaker 1: of where a vote was going. Important votes over the
Speaker 1: last couple of years have there's a lot of doubts.
Speaker 1: Give our listeners an example of a recent example of
Speaker 1: the polls being so wrong. But the headline one is
Speaker 1: the general election of last year, when nobody predicted that
Speaker 1: the Conservatives would win a majority, and indeed they went
Speaker 1: on to you could have got very good odds against
Speaker 1: that the day of the election. That more thing that
Speaker 1: took us all by surprise. Another one two years ago,
Speaker 1: less than two years ago, another referendum, this time on
Speaker 1: Scottish independence, and again about two weeks out you had
Speaker 1: a pole at this time just just one pole, that
Speaker 1: put Leave significantly ahead. There was an almighty panic, just
Speaker 1: like today, the pound dropped and then loan hold. Ten
Speaker 1: days or so later there was a ten point lead
Speaker 1: for for staying in the United Kingdom. So there are
Speaker 1: there are reasons to doubt the reliability of poles. And
Speaker 1: we just had a year long inquiry into whether poles
Speaker 1: can be trusted and the answer slightly sadly was not.
Speaker 1: Really these problems are quite difficult to solve and we
Speaker 1: don't know that they're going to be sold for the referendum,
Speaker 1: So these these poles need to be taken with a
Speaker 1: big pinch of salt that they're all we have. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but in your story, your excellent story, Brexit polsters feel
Speaker 1: pressure with uncertainty. Assured points out that there's there are
Speaker 1: important implications of the polls misleading the public, and one
Speaker 1: example you give is that it's very important for the
Speaker 1: Remain in the UK group to get young voters out
Speaker 1: to the polls. Yes, so, um so what did the
Speaker 1: pattern in Britain as in much of the rest of
Speaker 1: the world is that old people vote and young people
Speaker 1: don't vote because young people are fectless. And the assumption
Speaker 1: with on on on good evidence is that in this election,
Speaker 1: old people are more likely to vote to leave the
Speaker 1: EU and young people are more likely to vote to
Speaker 1: stay in the EU. So there there. If you're if
Speaker 1: you're a Remain campaigner, you're desperately trying to trying to
Speaker 1: motivate young people to to go out and vote, which,
Speaker 1: like trying to get teenagers to do anything, is a
Speaker 1: bit of a thankless task. Um, and if you're, if you're.
Speaker 1: The thing that the Leave campaigners have got on their
Speaker 1: side is that there are we we there are a
Speaker 1: few million people in this country who has one person
Speaker 1: said to me would walk across broken glass to vote
Speaker 1: to get Brittain out of the European Union. Now, whether
Speaker 1: that's enough, Um? Is it? Will? I'll tell you in
Speaker 1: three weeks. Yeah, it's it's it's it's upon us, isn't it? Um?
Speaker 1: When you look at uh, the the issues behind is
Speaker 1: certainly Uh. One of the people who are against Brexit,
Speaker 1: and even people who are kind of on the sidelines
Speaker 1: are saying it's it's very difficult to predict with certainty
Speaker 1: what will happen. And in fact, the Bank of England
Speaker 1: has come under some criticism recently, including by a Princeton
Speaker 1: University professor that that saying making these predictions about how
Speaker 1: hard it will hit the UK economy are are wrong
Speaker 1: and kind of incendiary, that they're stepping overstepping abound because
Speaker 1: you don't really know what will happen. Well, you don't know,
Speaker 1: and there's there's there's, there's there's sort of there's two criticisms.
Speaker 1: One one a fairer than the other. It is. The
Speaker 1: Treasury has issued some incredibly specific reports about what would
Speaker 1: happen in the short term and the long term if
Speaker 1: Britain left the EU with very precise numbers. Now they
Speaker 1: can't produce precise numbers and really nobody, nobody knows what's
Speaker 1: going to happen in the future. That these forecasts are
Speaker 1: necessarily unreliable. That said, I can say that if I
Speaker 1: eat take every day for a year, I will probably
Speaker 1: be fatter at the end of it than if I
Speaker 1: don't take cake every day for a year. And that
Speaker 1: kind of what the Treasury would say in their own
Speaker 1: defense is that that kind of forecasting of if we
Speaker 1: do this, if we leave the EU, they would say,
Speaker 1: we are more likely to lose inward investment. It's going
Speaker 1: to create a lot of uncertainty for businesses that are
Speaker 1: already putting off spending decisions. Some multinational companies have said
Speaker 1: they'd move people into the EU. So from that point
Speaker 1: of view, can say all of that would probably slow
Speaker 1: the economy, and to some extent even the Leave campaign
Speaker 1: has acknowledged that they would. It can't get away from
Speaker 1: fact that there would be short term uncertainty when you
Speaker 1: don't know what it would look like, so there would
Speaker 1: be short have certain leave. The campaigners will say, well,
Speaker 1: in the long term, you know, being tied to the
Speaker 1: U is not a good thing to be tied to.
Speaker 1: This is a ship that's sinking. That's that's the leave argument. Well,
Speaker 1: one of the more compelling arguments seems to me is
Speaker 1: what this would do to the City of London, potentially
Speaker 1: the financial district that is so important to the UK,
Speaker 1: to Europe, really to the world that that uh with
Speaker 1: a Brexit vote could definitely mean that the city is
Speaker 1: no longer the center and certain companies would leave. In fact,
Speaker 1: I think I saw an estimate that what thirty four
Speaker 1: thousand or thirty eight thousand jobs at least would be
Speaker 1: at risk. I've seen higher estimates from that. But Jamie
Speaker 1: had Jamie di'm in here last week saying, um, if
Speaker 1: if Britain votes to leave, he's telling his staff, you know,
Speaker 1: do what you do, what you want. But if Britain
Speaker 1: votes leave, you should know that we would be moving
Speaker 1: people into the European Union from here now. And there's
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of Euro denominated trades that currently take
Speaker 1: place through the City of London, and the very interesting
Speaker 1: question as to whether that could continue if Britain were outside,
Speaker 1: not just outside the European Single Currency as it is
Speaker 1: at the moment, but actually outside the European Union. There's
Speaker 1: a strong argument it wouldn't. I did. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: here one person said to me last week, he said, well, look,
Speaker 1: the thing about the thing about the city is American
Speaker 1: bankers want to live in London and their wives want
Speaker 1: to live in Nonder, their husbands want to live in London.
Speaker 1: They want to bring their children up in London. They
Speaker 1: don't want to live in Frankfurt, they don't want to
Speaker 1: live in Europe. They would find a way, they said,
Speaker 1: they would find a way somehow to continue doing these
Speaker 1: things from from London. But again that's uncertainty. We can
Speaker 1: suspect that. We don't know that, and that is the
Speaker 1: remain big argument is it's a terrible, terrible risk you're
Speaker 1: thinking of taking. So what does this mean? I mean,
Speaker 1: this seems to be so crucial for David Cameron. Oh yes, goodness, yes,
Speaker 1: I mean. The funny thing about this debate is, in
Speaker 1: a way is that it's consistently looking at polling the
Speaker 1: British people are not very exercised about European Union membership,
Speaker 1: but a very small number of people are extremely concerned
Speaker 1: about it, and all of them are Conservative members of Parliament,
Speaker 1: and they forced Cameron in the last Parliament to promise
Speaker 1: this referendum, and effectively, in the end Cameron sort of said, okay, look,
Speaker 1: you can have the referendum and I will show you
Speaker 1: that nobody in the country cares about this thing that
Speaker 1: you think is the most important thing in the world.
Speaker 1: And he has effectively enlisted the entire British public to
Speaker 1: prove a point to his party. And the great danger
Speaker 1: is that he won't do that. If Britain votes sixty
Speaker 1: forty to stay in, then he can really turn around
Speaker 1: and tell him to get lost. But if it's very
Speaker 1: close or return to the Britain votes to leave, Cameron
Speaker 1: Cameron will have been proved wrong. If Britain votes to leave,
Speaker 1: David Cameron, who does not want Britain to leave the
Speaker 1: European Union, will effectively have suffered the biggest foreign policy
Speaker 1: defeat for a prime minister, arguably since the SUS War
Speaker 1: sus Crisis, which you may not be a big deal
Speaker 1: in America, but that's generally the sort of a benchmark
Speaker 1: for total foreign policy disasters in British politics. Well, that
Speaker 1: is that about sums it up, Robert Hutton. If you're
Speaker 1: a betting man, how do you how do you bet
Speaker 1: the vocals on I would still bet with Remain, but
Speaker 1: I'm I'm getting increasingly doubtful about that. Well, we're gonna
Speaker 1: look forward to talking to you again soon. There's the
Speaker 1: floss that we get. I think the more exciting there's
Speaker 1: a vote on Brexit, on the UK leaving European Union
Speaker 1: or staying more excited gets. Robert Hutton is the UK
Speaker 1: Government and politics reporter at Bloomberg News in London. Programming
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