This week in Brexitland, August 17, 2023

Why a new poll on another EU referendum tells a compelling story about Brexit’s demise - and why we’ll have to be patient, nonetheless

There is some new YouGov polling on Brexit out this week, and like all polling on Brexit, it makes brutal reading for those still committed to the project that took Britain out of the European Union. When polling is done well, it tells a story. The tale this poll tells is one that Brexiters are choosing to ignore at their own political peril, for the moment at least.

62% of voters believe that Brexit has been a failure so far. 72% of people think the government’s handling of Brexit has been bad. This latter number is one that cuts across the Remain-Leave divide; the Remainers hate Brexit, so of course they will think the government is handling it poorly, while a growing number of Leavers think the reason Brexit hasn’t been a success is because of the way the government is dealing with it. I said this back in 2020: the Tories are under serious risk of being hated by Remainers for having taken us out of the EU, and by Leavers for “doing Brexit badly” when it blows up in their faces. In other words, hated by everyone (which isn’t that far off what the national polls are indicating at present).

On the question of whether there should be another referendum on the European question, this is where the answers get much more interesting. Asked if there should be another EU referendum in 2023, 26% said yes, 59% said no. There is clearly little appetite to immediately re-live the trauma of a national referendum on a still divisive issue, that much is apparent. Asked if there should be one in five years, 39% say yes, 44% say no - a lot more people would be fine with a referendum five years from now, but not a plurality of voters. It still feels “too soon” for many.

Then we get to whether we should have a referendum in 10 years’ time on rejoining the EU. 46% yes, 36% no, a clear majority. I’m going to couple this with the number from the same sample which tells us that 49% of voters do not believe that Brexit is done yet, whatever that means to each and every individual.

As I say, these numbers tell us a clear story. People want a break from the divisions of Brexit and don’t want to re-open those wounds at the moment. A lot of them also want to give Brexit a fair chance. So much was promised in 2016 and so little delivered to date, that it’s difficult for a lot of people to believe that this is it, what we’re living through now, this is the other side of Brexit. That’s why so many people believe it isn’t “done” - this can’t possibly be Brexit, can it?

The Brexiters tell people that Ukraine and Covid hasn’t given Brexit room to fly yet. The people have mostly responded with, “All right then, we’ll give you ten years tops and if hasn’t got clearly better because of Brexit by then, we want another say on the matter.”

This is what shortsighted Brexiter strategy fails to consider; both that people expect Brexit promises to be delivered at some point, and that simply making more Brexit promises that they know won’t ever pay off is going to make the chances of Britain rejoining the EU even greater. Take the rubbish they’ve peddled about CPTPP. They know it isn’t going to add £12 trillion to the British economy, but they’re still stuck in short-term thinking mode. Promise some big stuff is on its way to keep people from re-thinking the whole Brexit idea even further and then pray a miracle happens sometime in the near future. All they are doing is making the bank of Brexit disappointment and failure bigger and bigger.

I was against a second referendum happening between 2016 and 2019 for several reasons, but one was that I felt that after 2016, we unfortunately had to leave the EU, even with all of the pain that would entail. People had to see what Brexit was like for themselves. It’s a sort of national demon that has to be experienced first-hand and then flushed out of the system. I didn’t think there was any shortcut away from that.

I’m more convinced of this than ever. The polling tells us that a lot of people still hold out hope for Brexit to live up to its billing - but their patience is a very long way from infinite. In fact, they’ve told us that it will last about ten years or so. And the smarter Brexiters know these two things: 1). another referendum will be difficult to avoid forever given the polling and 2). if there is another vote on the subject, the chances are that not only will rejoin win, it will almost certainly win by a huge margin, putting the issue to bed for a very long time, if not forever. I don’t see how they get round these issues either given the thing standing in their way is the simple fact that Brexit was, unfortunately for them, an extremely terrible idea.

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Thanks everyone and I’ll see you all again next week for the worst of Brexit.