Professor John Curtice at NatCen said last week that polling seemed to show there has been little movement in attitudes or polling intention on Brexit. Reuters report it HERE. This was perhaps a factor in Farage calling for a second referendum. But the figures are revealing.
Professor Curtice may not have seen a big change but I think there are signs opinion is starting to move. The polling apparently shows there is a rising expectation that we will be worse off after Brexit with 52% now believing this compared to 46% in February last year. In Scotland it was 58%.
And the poll, carried out in October, also showed 52 percent of Britons now expect a “bad deal” versus 55 percent of Scots. That compares with 37 percent of Britons who thought the same last February.
Finally, in Britain as a whole, 61 percent of those polled thought Brexit had been badly handled by the UK government, up from 41 percent in February. The figure rises to 69 percent in Scotland.
Let's think about this. The number of people who think we will be worse off is rising significantly, as is the number who think we will get a bad deal and those who think the government is handling Brexit badly. But they are all going to vote more or less as they did in 2016.
I am not convinced that people would vote in a second referendum the same way as they did in the first, when they know or strongly suspect we are going to get a bad deal that makes us worse off. This would be a surprise to me. And with a consistent lead among voters of those who think the Brexit vote was WRONG (HERE), I think there are grounds for cautious optimism. Curtice's polling was done in October before the £40 billion divorce bill was known and I suspect attitudes have already changed and will continue to do so in 2018.
We know amongst younger, newer voters there is pro-EU thinking and we also know that many who didn't vote at all in 2016 would vote about 3:1 in favour of remaining. A second referendum is not a foregone conclusion but let's wait to see what happens this year before really pressing for one.
And going against the professor, the Daily Mirror (HERE), a fiercely pro EU newspaper, has a poll by ComRes suggesting if a referendum were held today the result would be 55% remain and 45% leave. I don't necessarily believe this either, whoever pays for the poll usually get the result they want. However, for me the overriding sense is that there is no great move towards a majority embracing Brexit. There are still big divisions but at the margin remainers are slowly getting the evidence to win the argument whenever the next referendum is held.
Finally, Matthew Elliot, the former Leave campaign CEO, says voters don't want a second referendum (HERE) and even claims the very idea of it undermines the government's negotiating strategy. Well, he would say that wouldn't he?
Every con man knows you can only fool the mark once. So, having pulled the con successfully, Elliot knows better than anyone, certainly better than Farage, that it won't work twice. At least not on everyone. There is of course a sizeable section of the population whose mental faculties make them ideal for the sort of people who really can be fooled all of the time. They could have the same con successfully worked on them every day for the rest of their lives.
But he is well aware that plenty of others now realise they were fooled, they were the marks. The men and women who thought the struggling NHS would get another £350 million a week, or that 75 million Turks were packing suitcases in May 2016. Elliot knows he would lose and this is why, unlike Farage, he is against the idea of another vote.
