I’ve been following this poll for years now.
https://whatukthinks.org/eu/questions/in-highsight-do-you-think-britain-was-right-or-wrong-to-vote-to-leave-the-eu/
I just checked the latest result (14th July) and it’s jumped quite significantly, to the highest ever percentage for “wrong” (53%). The percentage for “right” is now the lowest ever (35%).
The shift in public opinion is becoming really obvious now. We will surely get a second referendum at some point. It’s probably too early and risky for Starmer to attempt this (assuming he becomes our PM at the next election), but if this polling trend continues – which seems inevitable given the demographics at play – then it might be possible in the election cycle after that.
So the UK could plausibly rejoin the EU in the 2030s. Although the question will be whether they’ll accept us back, of course.
P.S. If anybody wants to share that graph elsewhere, I made a screenshot:
26 comments
I genuinely believe that anyone still saying right is just too stubborn to admit their mistake, because the only people who have benefitted from it are in the 0.1%, and they don’t participate in polls.
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As much as I hate the whole Brexit thing – it is not really something that can just be reversed. Not saying we shouldn’t try to re-join, but if we were to do so, it would look very different to how it was when we left (and not in a good way)…
With *foresight* I thought it was wrong.
Every single metric says leaving the EU was a bad decision.
With these nutters in charge pushing for the most harmful version of BREXIT, it won’t even be mitigated, it’ll just get worse.
>We will surely get a second referendum at some point.
My guess is 25-30 years and then someone in the EU vetoes accession even if we want to come back.
Indian here, why did you leave the European Union instead of just not following certain orders? They’re not gonna send an army down and make you comply. It seems a lot of the reason you left was an anti immigrant sentiment.
Poland has done the same thing, they refused to accept immigrants, refused to follow certain orders regarding judicial independence, I don’t think it is a very big issue. So why not just refuse to coperate in some aspects while still staying in the EU.
Without being inside the EU, the future of “”””England”””” seems to be just an American Proxy, and fast forwards Northern Irish Independence, along with stoking Scottish Nationalism.
Felt it was wrong then, feel it is madness to support it now.
It’s changed my liberal country into “something else”
There’ll be no referendum.
At best – and this is still unlikely – we’d move to a model more like Norway.
But, stop living in the past. That vote happened. Brexit happened. It’s like the people still whining about decisions Thatcher made. It’s over.
Labour have no interest in reversing Brexit. They weren’t ever against it. No political party represented remainers.
The only thing you should focus on now is the future of Britain outside the EU and its relationship with the EU and the rest of the world given that set of circumstances.
A poll saying whatever percentage of people supposedly thinking that coming out of the sea and walking on the land was a bad idea isn’t going to change anything. Evolution happened. Here we are. Brexit happened. Here we are.
I’d suggest, as I always do – that if you want to change or improve your life given a set of circumstances then, by orders of magnitude, doing things other than voting are what matter. Read a book. Learn a skill.
The only lives significantly affected by voting are politicians. They love that you sit there everyday foaming at the mouth about tories and brexit and politics. They want you believe they are the most important people in the world.
Vote if you feel the need, but don’t sit there expecting that your life will vastly improve (or get worse) based on a vote. Or that the government are the solution to your problems. Certainly not over the medium and long term.
It was obviously a stupid decision at the time and is now but I’ve resigned myself to the fact it has happened and there’s no political will to change that.
This is tricky as it depends from what angle you look at things.
Brexit was clearly a disaster for the economy and Britain’s world standing. It has increased inflation even more and has contributed significantly to lower living standards throughout the UK.
However, if seen from the context of climate change it has helped protect us from climate migration in the 100s of millions that will occur later this decade. However, whilst Brexit promised to make the UK more self sufficient it hasn’t achieved this and has only demonstrated our weaknesses in this area.
I campaigned against Brexit, but given the existential climate risks we face in the next decade I’m now on the fence.
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It was a mistake, of course it was. On a UK-wide and economy-wide reference, of course it was a net negative.
However any suggestion of going back is just pissing into the wind. We’re not going to go for it, and you’d be very mistaken to rely on Remain support, or the view of it being negative in hindsight, to judge a view of rejoining since the terms of rejoining will not be the same as what we had, and for a lot of people that is not something they’d be supportive of.
Rejoin seems a way off, but there will be a point where the Tories will start alienating people by banging on about “getting Brexit done”…and that will be a good thing.
Leaving the EU is a tragic mistake that will haunt generations of British people for decades.
Even at the level of my children being unable to enjoy the privilege and opportunities I had through freedom of movement it’s an utter tragedy.
This is not the same as asking people if the UK should apply to rejoin though.
> The shift in public opinion is becoming really obvious now. We will surely get a second referendum at some point.
One problem is that pro-EU voters tend to be unhelpfully concentrated in urban centres, while pro-Brexit voters are more widely distributed, which makes it easier to win an election by uniting the pro-Brexit vote than the pro-EU vote.
The other problem is that the British media is heavily biased towards the pro-Brexit side, and there are more single issue pro-Brexit voters than pro-EU voters.
Finally it would be hard for a future Labour (it would have to be Labour) government to offer a second EU referendum but still rebut SNP demands for a second (or third, fourth, fifth etc.) Scottish independence referendum.
All of which makes it quite difficult to envisage, even if there is a large majority for rejoining.
Although I agree there were benefits to remaining in the EU, we were right to leave the EU because its what everyone democratically voted for. I find calls for a second referendum hilarious tbh, it literally undermines democracy completely.
My view now is while there are cons to leaving, there are also many benefits. The shortage of labour we now see in the UK has forced wages up considerably, prior to leaving wages have been stagnant for over a decade. People were ultimately fed up and we needed some change. It is difficult to tell the full effect of brexit given so much has happened in parralell to us leaving the EU (Covid, war in ukraine, historic inflation). Most people are struggling and brexit is something they can easily blame even though most of the issues being faced in the UK are being faced everywhere lol.
I voted for remain. Now I’m not sure if leaving was as bad a decision as I was led to believe. I genuinely thought the country would go to shit immediately after the vote, as so much hyperbole was flying around implying as much.
What i did notice was the competitive advantage i had regarding employment. Suddenly employers were offering better wages and an increase in incentives and seemed to be fighting over skilled workers.
Any negatives about brexit have been clouded by Covid and the resulting inflation that followed. It’s very hard to say for certain how badly brexit has affected things in this country for the average person. It’s almost impossible to find non biased sources of information in an easily digestible format for me to make an informed opinion.
All I know for certain is the sky didn’t fall in and my wages have increased. I’d probably still vote remain given the information I had at the time, namely brexit was ill defined in terms of the path we would take once out of the EU and i didn’t trust the Tories to steer us through such a monumental undertaking.
there is no “right” and no “wrong” there are just (and not so just!) consequences that we all have to suck up whichever way we voted
we all know about cambridge analytica getting Leavers to come out and vote and the disaffected who just want *something* to change
never in my wildest dreams did i think England would end up such a nationalist patriotic flag-waving isolationist state with even the UK hanging in the balance!
Does it matter? You can’t change the past so move on and make the best of it you can. This is 100% permanent as the EU will never allow Britain to rejoin.
I doubt our economy would pass the criteria for joining now anyway.
Right or wrong, my job is to deliver Brexit benefits and I get made a decent amount for it. So I guess it’s right we left? Without it, I wouldn’t have a job.
And here we have it, the deep state movement to jeopardise and lead an insurrection against what the British People wanted and voted for. Every right we have has been hard fought for, none more so than the right to be free of Brussels, but we must defend it every day. As for Starmer, hopefully he’ll be too busy answering to justice for his role in enabling Savile in his abuse and abduction of Maddie and countless others to be the primary deep state actor.
Brexiters are literally a dying breed.
Approximately 600,000 people die each year. ~84% of them are 65 or older, about 500,000, per year, or 3m since the referendum.
There was a turnout of 90% in the 65+ age range = 2.7m people who voted have died.
According to YouGov, 64% of the 65+ age range voted for Brexit, which is 1.72m people who voted for Brexit have died.
The Leave vote won by 1.27m votes.
So just accounting for the deaths and not the people who have changed their mind, there are more Remain voters still alive than Leave voters.
Wrong. I was 16 in 2016 and thought it’d be a good thing, I actually convinced my parents to cote leave – wahey for me I guess. Now though, my family think it could be a good thing to go back in, and I do too – the guff about an “undemocratic” EU was a load of shite. Even more so when you realise that the UK could’ve enacted immigration restrictions on EU nationals and this was built into the system.