Peter Kellner, of YouGov, writes a political Substack blog and has been examining how public opinion has shifted since the 2016 referendum. Kellner has attempted to calculate how a vote to rejoin the EU might unfold, considering changing demographics, disillusionment setting in, and younger voters joining the electorate, among other factors. I had a go at this years ago in 2017 and worked out that the 600,000 people, the majority Brexit supporters, die every year and a similar number become eligible to vote, who are mainly pro-EU. I thought that by 2021, even without a single voter changing their mind, we would be 50:50 and thereafter the majority for rejoining would just keep growing.
All that was largely true. But as we are all well aware by now, many voters have changed their opinion, and the whole thing has accelerated far more quickly than I imagined eight years ago.
Kellner now thinks a vote to rejoin would get a majority of 8.1 million!! This is more than six times higher than the leave campaign achieved in 2016. It sounds a lot, doesn’t it?
Here are the numbers:
Bear in mind that 19.8 million is 62.8% while 11.7 million is 37.2%. These are at the higher end of the most recent polls, so not completely out of kilter, but other pollsters would probably argue the actual result would be closer but still very decisive. The figures may be optimistic, but they are well beyond sampling error.
I'm particularly fascinated by the 1.1 million who opted to remain in 2016 but would vote Leave in any future referendum. What is going on there? What benefits of Brexit have they seen? I really can't imagine any. Obviously, some do, apparently.
Kellner refers to the recent NBER report, which he calculates to be costing the exchequer £80-100 billion a year in lost revenues. Someone else has done the same. Roger Bootle from Capital Economics has an opinion piece in The Telegraph. It looks like something between extreme straw-clutching and a study in dashed hopes: Brexit has cost Britain, but it will pay off in the long run.
Needless to say, he doesn't accept the NBER numbers:
"The authors of the NBER study are sophisticated economists who are not part of the UK Remainer Establishment. They and their analysis deserve our respect. But this doesn’t make them right.
"The difficulty of making a Brexit assessment lies with establishing a counter-factual – that is to say, what would have happened without said event.
"Their method is to construct a counter-factual from the performance of 33 supposedly comparable countries. This group is used to forecast what would have happened to the UK economy without Brexit. The difference between this forecast performance and the UK’s actual performance is taken to represent the cost of Brexit."
Err... no. The doppelganger that the NBER constructs and uses is just one of five different methods they used to come to the figure of a 6-8% loss of GDP, so far. Plus they have drawn on a huge amount of separate, independent work by other economists. Nobody thinks Brexit has been good for the UK, they only differ in their assessment of the amount of damage.
This probably explains the headline. He now concedes Brexit has 'cost' Britain. This is a slightly different tune to the one he was playing in 2017 when he was "mega optimistic." The City was going to do well; nobody would decamp to Frankfurt or Paris, there would be no flight of capital, and the fall in the pound's value would "boost exports." He was wrong on every count.
Bootle always thinks the OBR’s dire forecasts are wrong, although they’re about half as bad as the NBER's and the big economic hit peaking ten years later. He tries to argue in one short newspaper article that the expert study by the NBER, which took years and involved hundreds, if not thousands, of independent economists, is somehow wrong, while he will eventually be proven right. This is in the face of voters' everyday experience of trading issues, rising costs, increased taxes, falling living standards and crumbling public services. It isn't going to cut the mustard.
Bootle is the jerry builder eyeing the extension he's working on, leaning at a crazy angle as the foundations sink, and trying to convince you it will soon right itself and all will be well. Or the wild-eyed optimist claiming that the Titanic will soon be arriving in New York harbour to a fanfare. They begin to sound unhinged.
Another factor which men like Bootle failed to foresee is the Ukraine war and Trump’s attitude to NATO. The US has published a new National Security Strategy that looks as though it was drafted in The Kremlin.
From the BBC:
"Russia has welcomed US President Donald Trump's new National Security Strategy, calling it 'largely consistent' with Moscow's vision. The 33-page document, unveiled by the US administration this week, suggests Europe is facing 'civilisational erasure' and does not cast Russia as a threat to the US."
The Western Alliance that has kept the peace in Europe for 80 years has gone and will never return. Europe must defend itself. Trump and whoever comes next cannot be trusted again, ever.
The recent breakdown of talks over UK participation in the EU's €150 billion Security Action for Europe loans-for-weapons program reveals another damaging cost of Brexit. We will now lose out on billions of pounds of valuable and essential weapons exports.
Brexit was a curse, and we are all paying a very high price.
