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Eight years after the Brexit vote, Keir Starmer is looking to strengthen ties with the continent — without rejoining the EU, of course. Meanwhile, Britons seemingly aren’t feeling the benefits of forging a divergent path from Brussels. New polling from YouGov shows that over half the population believes “the negatives of Brexit have outweighed the positives”, while just 17% believe the reverse.
While respondents become more boosterish about Brexit the older they are, none of the age groups surveyed, from 18-24 to 65+, think that leaving the EU has been a net positive. The North of England is the most Brexit-friendly region measured, but even then only 20% of Northerners think the positives outweigh the negatives, compared to 48% who believe the opposite.
Looking at respondents by politics, it shouldn’t be surprising that three-quarters of both Lib Dem and Labour voters think that Brexit has broadly been a bad thing. More striking, however, is that only 34% of Conservatives and 39% of Reform UK voters judge Brexit to have been successful. Is Starmer right that Britain won’t rejoin the EU in his lifetime?
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SubscribeWhat has happened to Unheard? Piss poor political analysis is rapidly becoming the norm. Those who voted to leave the EU did not expect that there would be no will on the part of the democratically elected government to make it a success.
Polling on Brexit is largely just a proxy for how the country is doing economically. Whilst there are those who are ideologically wedded to their position on Brexit, I suspect that if the economy was performing well the majority would have said Brexit working, just as they now say it’s failing, despite having no idea about how it is actually effecting the economy.
Who do you think played the EU better, Britain or Hungary?