Wednesday 23 June 2021

More polling

On this day five years ago we went to the polls and the whole nightmare began. We have been consumed by Brexit ever since and it seems we will continue to be occupied with the fall out for years or even decades to come. The anniversary is an opportunity to review attitudes to Brexit and Sir John Curtice has done exactly that at NatCen, his social research department.  Their latest survey can be found HERE.

As noted in Yougov's polling yesterday, the country is still divided about it and it's hard to see any change coming any time soon.  The gap between remain and leave has widened to 53-47 but strangely, when asked how they would vote in any new referendum, a majority (52%) would vote to stay out. 

It's as if Brexit is recognised as a mistake but people are reluctant to replay the whole thing and just want to forget it.  Unfortunately, this is never going to happen and not just because remainers won't let it happen. The full impact hasn't yet been felt.

But back to the survey.  I was not surprised to read a couple of conclusions of professor Curtice and I think they're worth repeating here, First:

"...throughout the last five years Leave voters have been somewhat less likely than their Remain counterparts to say that they would vote the same way again – though this has been as much because they were more likely to say that they would not vote a second time around as it has been because they were more likely than Remain voters to say they would now vote the opposite way. But this inevitably raises questions about whether the majority secured by Leave in June 2016 has withstood the test of time."

This is a point I have made regularly on this blog - indeed I made it yesterday. There has always been more regret on the leave side and this will make a difference eventually.  Secondly, among people who didn't or couldn't vote in 2016 there is a big preference to remain:

"....there has been a consistent lead for Remain over Leave. True, at 46% Remain, 23% Leave, the gap in our more recent survey is somewhat lower than it has been at any point during the last three years, but there are still question marks over whether the outcome of the 2016 referendum has necessarily reflected the majority view thereafter."

And I would make the wider point that at no time (no time) has support for Brexit ever shown any prospect of increasing beyond what was achieved in June 2016. The Leave campaign just managed to scrape over the line on the 23rd and have been in retreat ever since.  Not as much as I hoped but it was definitely a high water mark.

Looking more deeply into the survey, I note this:


Despite years of expert opinion that Brexit will be bad for the economy there has been very little change in the expectation among leave voters that we will see an improvement in the economy and they will be better off.  They also still expect to see a fall in immigration.  Neither of these things is remotely likely to happen.

Overall, among all voters 25% think we will be better off and 22% don't believe it will make much difference.  Thus, nearly half the electorate have no reason (yet) to think Brexit will have a negative impact on them personally.

Few people think the trade deal negotiated by Lord Frost is a good one:


Professor Curtice again,

"In so far as the mood has changed, it has done so primarily among Leave supporters. For, as Table 17 shows, Remain voters have largely been consistently pessimistic about the economic consequences of Brexit – throughout the last five years around four in five have said that the economy would be worse off, even higher than the 69% who held that view before the referendum. Among Leave voters, in contrast, optimists have always outnumbered pessimists.

"However, the balance between the two narrowed towards the end of 2017, and has never returned to its previous level, primarily because a notable minority continued to say that the economy would be worse off. Even with the conclusion of the free trade agreement with the EU, only around a half of Leave voters (51%) believe that the economy will be better off as a result of leaving the EU, while one in five (20%) believe it will be worse off."

Table 17 shows that in June 2016 only 8% of leave voters thought we would be worse off - now it's 20% - a 150% increase.  The corresponding numbers for remain voters was 69% in 2016 and 83% now.

The tide is certainly beginning to turn and it's hard to see how the government can do anything to stop it.

To finish, a couple of Tweets. David Henig quotes from the government's own impact assessment of joining the Pacific CPTPP. Note the graph goes up to 0.5% of GDP:

It's obvious that joining the CPTPP is a political move which is not going to impact the prospects of workers in this country by very much if at all.  Note the country that has not ratified the CPTPP did best!

And one from Faisal Islam, the BBC's economics editor showing globally Foreign Direct Investment fell 42% but for the UK it was 100%:

These numbers will sooner or later begin to tell, I am convinced of it.

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