“The journalist Ian Birrell has championed a new Metropolitan Party, which would be urban-based, socially liberal, economically liberal, pro-immigration and not hostile in principle to the EU. If it existed, would you join/not join/don’t know [about joining]?”
The result was:
Join: 8 per cent.
Not Join: 84 per cent.
Don’t Know: 8 per cent.
As I wrote recently, I think that Janan Ganesh of the Financial Times and Matthew Parris of the Times, as well as Ian, would be in sympathy with these ideals for such a party (though I may be wrong, and they’re more capable of speaking for themselves).
It was suggested on Twitter at the time that the ranks of Labour and the Liberal Democrats would be more likely to provide members for a Metropolitan Party than those of the Conservatives. Maybe someone should try to find out.
But at any rate, the Conservatives don’t seem to offer much of a recruiting pool. Perhaps the most likely potential joiners for such a new venture would be people who aren’t currently members of a political party at all.
About 700 Party members responded to the survey. The findings are checked against a control group supplied by YouGov.