Brexit vote registration deadline extended after website crash

The British government is introducing emergency legislation to extend the deadline for registering to vote in the EU referendum after a last-minute surge in applications crashed the registration website.

David Cameron told voters to continue registering after the deadline passed at midnight on Tuesday but MPs will have to pass legislation to ensure the deadline extension, until midnight tonight, is protected from legal challenge.

The website crashed when tens of thousands of voters rushed to register before the deadline. The late surge has fuelled speculation that turnout for the referendum will be high, something which is generally viewed as benefiting the Remain side.

The Leave campaign received a boost on Wednesday, however, when the Conservatives' most respected psephologist Rob Hayward said Britain was on course to vote to Brexit.

Lord Hayward, who was one of the few election experts to correctly predict the outcome of last year's general election, said his conversations with voters from key demographic groups suggested that polls were overestimating support for staying in the EU.

Leave preference

“Unless something substantial changes in the remaining days of the Euro referendum campaign . . . the balance of probability is that the nation will vote to Leave,” he said.

“Overwhelmingly, where people deviate from the way the polls would expect that specific individual to vote, they deviate to the Leave side to such a disproportionate extent that I have come to the conclusion that the polls are probably overemphasising the Remain vote.”

Lord Hayward said many Labour voters had not been motivated to vote Remain and many traditional Labour supporters would vote Leave because they are unhappy about immigration.

Other groups, such as those working in banking and finance, were not as enthusiastic in backing Remain as commonly perceived and other likely Remain supporters were not going to vote.

The Remain campaign is worried that Labour voters may view the referendum as a dispute between wings of the Conservative Party.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who has faced criticism for adopting a low profile in the campaign, has agreed to appear on a Sky News forum for young voters a few days before the referendum.

And Labour's shadow health secretary, Heidi Alexander, on Wednesday hit back at the Leave campaign's claim that EU migrants were a burden on the National Health Service.

“Parts of the health system would not function without the contribution of EU migrants. Put simply, you’re more likely to come across a migrant caring for you in a hospital, than in the bed next to you . . . Would hospitals be able to fill staff shortages without immediate access to the pool of qualified staff from other European countries? The truth is we just don’t know,” she said.

Ms Alexander said voters should remember that many of the leading figures in the Leave campaign had long advocated the privatisation or the marketisation of the NHS. And she complained that the referendum campaign has sometimes felt like a beauty contest for the next leader of the Conservative Party.

“I don’t know about you, but I’m fed up of it. Fed up of the mud-slinging and the name-calling. Fed up of the dry debates about sovereignty and the rebate.

“And fed up of being told that people like me, a comprehensive girl from Swindon, are somehow part of an elitist establishment that have been brainwashed by bureaucrats from Brussels.”