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With barely eight weeks to go until Britain is scheduled to leave the EU, calls for a second referendum grow more shrill. It’s not entirely unlikely that there won’t be one. But it is unlikely that a second ballot would achieve what those advocating it want: overturning Brexit altogether.
There are several key obstacles to this. The first is that very few Leavers have changed their minds. In the nearly three years that have passed since the first referendum there has certainly been a slight drift toward Remain. But the scale of this shift is routinely exaggerated by the second referendum herd.
Only last week, the latest poll by Survation had Remain on 55% and Leave on 45%, while the ‘poll of polls’, which calculates an average from all polls, gives the two camps similar figures. Allowing for a margin of error of three points, the argument that the ‘will of the people’ has fundamentally changed should be met with scepticism.
These numbers are also similar to those seen in the final week of the first referendum, with pollsters like YouGov, Populus, ComRes and ORB all putting Remain ahead. Look a bit closer and you also see that very few Leavers display ‘Bregret’; even today, after everything, 90% say that the vote for Brexit was ‘right’. In fact, it is actually people who did not vote in 2016 who now lean heavily toward Remain. So the question the Second Referendum agitators must consider is, will 2016’s non-voters turnout when it matters? And we don’t really know. It still looks like a coin toss.
Those campaigning for a second ballot must also grapple with the inconvenient fact that most people don’t want one. As my colleague Sir John Curtice has pointed out, the popularity of a second referendum is “clearly largely confined to those who wish to reverse Brexit”. Indeed, according to recent polling, most people think that the original result should be respected. Even when pollsters remind them of the gridlock within parliament, only 36% think that a second referendum is a ‘good idea’. Dragging reluctant voters back to the ballot box to have a say on something that they do not really want to have a say on is risky, especially when Leavers will argue that Remain ‘just doesn’t get it’.
And I’m not entirely sure that they do get it. If they did, they would not be issuing economic warnings from the snowy hills of Davos. Some readers might argue that this is a cheap shot – but one key lesson of 2016 is that optics matter. The ideal script for Leavers has always been the one trotted out by distant politicians in faraway places talking only about economics. In recent weeks, Tony Blair, George Osborne and Roland Rudd were perfectly willing to deliver those lines on cue.
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