Wednesday 8 February 2023

The tide keeps on turning

I get alerts whenever the WhatUKthinks series of polls asking in hindsight if leaving the EU was a mistake is updated, and lately the gap has been consistently wide - around 20%. I also tend to have a look at who did the polling and who funded the work. For years, from the very first one in August 2016 nearly all the polls were carried out by YouGov and funded by The Times, occasionally DeltaPoll or Kantar popped one in. These were the years when Brexiteers were battling to prevent a second vote and more recently after Brexit became a fact.

But recently, a couple of new names have popped up. First, in November we start to see Omnisis polls coming through but with an unnamed/unknown funder  Their polls produced pretty much the same results as YouGov, sometimes slightly higher numbers of ‘regretters’ but usually slightly lower.

Then on Sunday, a new pollster appeared, People Polling, funded by none other than GB News. If you don’t know who or what GB News is, you might be surprised to learn that it’s described as a ‘right-leaning’ news TV channel and owned by All Perspectives Ltd, controlled by three main shareholders, all of whom work for Legatum which is owned by Christopher Chandler. 

Legatum is part of the shadowy nexus of think tanks based at 55 Tufton Street in London which includes the IEA, Vote leave, Leave Means Leave, etc . It was very active and involved in Brexit.  Legatum's HQ is around the corner at 11 Charles Street Mayfair. 

The channel's first chairman was Andrew Neil who only managed to last nine shows before quitting to be replaced by former Sky News anchor, Colin Brazier. Other hosts of shows on the channel include Alastair Stewart, Dan Wootton, Nigel Farage, Mark Steyn, Eamonn Holmes, Neil Oliver, Gloria De Piero, Patrick Christys, Mark Longhurst, Camilla Tominey, Michael Portillo and Andrew Pierce. 

Brexiteers all.

It’s as if GB News and the unknown funder of the Omnisis polls either didn’t believe the figures that YouGov was finding and had to check for themselves that Brexit has failed to enthuse its supporters and is now crashing and burning before our eyes.

Anyway, the latest survey by People Polling has a much higher level of don’t knows/prefer not to says at 21% (15% + 6%). When these are removed the totals are 62% to 38% thinking it was a mistake. The same as YouGov. And in-line with YouGov they found every region and every age group except the 65+ think the same. Brexit was indeed a mistake.

However, social group C2 (the skilled manual workers) is still narrowly inclined by 38% to 36% to think the decision was right. All the other social groups think it was wrong.

I just wonder what they intend to do about it. Interesting eh?

As if to show their desperation, Brexit facts4EU (they use the word 'facts' here in the loosest possible sense) put out a tweet:

Brexit Facts4EU claims that the EU has passed 265,490 laws since it began in the mid-1950s - with 240,327 coming since we joined in 1973. They say another 25,163 have been added since we officially left on 31 January 2020.  Laws are being added at the rate of 32.8 every working day - they say.

As you know, the government is planning to wipe away every last vestige of EU Retained law from our statute book, and the Bill designed to do it entered The Lords on Monday. In the debate (excellent BTW) one peer noted that the government's 'dashboard of retained EU law (REUL) had jumped recently from 2,417 to 3,745.

The eagle-eyed among you may have noted a discrepancy between what Brexit facts4EU says and what the government says. Either Brexit facts4EU is wrong or the British government plans to keep 98.5% of EU laws passed since 1973. I leave you to decide.

As I said above the Lords debate on the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill designed to wipe the legislative slate clean, hit the House of Lords on Monday and immediately came under fire.

The prize for the strangest comment in the entire debate must go to the chief culprit Lord Frost, who told the assembled peers that it was “not even clear” what EU legislation had been retained by clause 4 of the original 2018 Withdrawal Act.

For your information, that clause provided legal continuity after exit day for all EU-derived laws that are “recognised and available in domestic law by virtue of section 2(1) of the European Communities Act 1972, and “are enforced, allowed and followed accordingly.” 

There wasn’t a definitive list because there didn’t need to be one. Everything remained as it was.

Frost said (and you can check this below if you don’t believe me) clause 4, “simply enables lawyers to say, ‘Whatever the law was before, it now is afterwards’ and we cannot live with that sort of uncertainty on our statute book’.”


That’s right, the ‘uncertainty’ caused by the legal future being exactly like the legal past is apparently intolerable now. Unpredictable change by whim and diktat of ministers like Frost is the new certainty.  One of the many tragedies of Brexit is the way in which language itself had been bent out of shape.

In the Lords, nobody batted an eyelid.

The best speeches came from Jenny Chapman at 4.45, Lord Fox at 4.34, Lord Judge at 5.12, Lord Heseltine at 6.19 and Lord Young at 6.26 with some great phrases. You can read it all HERE.

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (Jenny Jones) was fascinating for this at the end:

"There will soon be a public debate about our relationship with the European Union, and the Green Party has decided that the relationship should be as close as possible until the political circumstances are right for us to rejoin. I say that as someone who voted for Brexit. What I have seen is destruction by this Government, and they are not delivering on all their promises.

"My feeling is that the only sensible thing now is to cut our losses and rejoin the EU, and I think many others, some inside this building but many outside, will agree with me."

Og course, not all Brexit voters accept that it's all going wrong but I thought a couple of tweets will give you a flavour of where we are in the debate:

John Redwood has turned his ire away from the EU and finally recognised the real issue:

And Long Johnworth, the deluded former head of the British Chambers of Commerce and a man who has appeared on this blog umpteen times, gives a fine demonstration of whistling in the dark:

He will be among the very last to admit Brexit has been a failure.

What does all this tell us? I suppose it really says what was obvious way back in June 2016 if we had been confident in our own case. That Brexit is such a daft idea that it was always bound to fail and that its most fervent advocates would be continuing to defend it long after everyone else had realised it must be reversed.

The tide keeps on turning.

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