Record number of Brits regret Brexit – poll
The majority of British people now believe that leaving the European Union was the wrong decision, a poll by analytics firm YouGov has revealed. According to the survey, one in five of those who voted for Brexit in the 2016 referendum, is no longer a Brexiteer.
The poll, conducted on November 9-10 and published on Thursday, found that almost two years since Britain left the EU on 31 December 2020, support for Brexit is at a “record low.” Only 32% of the British public now say it was right to vote Leave, while 56% said it was the wrong decision, YouGov said.
During the 2016 referendum, almost 52% of the electorate voted for Brexit.
Up until the 2017 general election, polls confirmed the plebiscite’s result; that the majority of the public supported the departure from the EU. But, according to YouGov, since 2017, public opinion, with minor exceptions, has “swung in the other direction,” with the latest results showing the gap “at its largest yet.”
Among the Leave voters, “an all-time high” of 19% believe that exiting the EU was wrong for Britain. Support for Brexit in this group of respondents is at “a record low” of 70% now, according to the survey of 1,708 respondents.
While many European nations are now struggling with a cost-of-living and energy crisis, exacerbated by Western sanctions on Moscow and a sharp decrease in Russian energy supplies, the UK will suffer more than others due to Brexit, Swati Dhingra, an external member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee, explained on Wednesday.
“The simple way of thinking about what Brexit has done to the economy is that in the period after the referendum, there was the biggest depreciation that any of the world’s four major economies have seen overnight,” Dhingra explained at a parliamentary hearing.
She revealed that Brexit has added 6% to UK food prices, and has cost British workers approximately 2.6% of their wages in real terms. The departure from the EU, according to Dhingra, has also led to reductions in business investments and in trade numbers.
