https://whatukthinks.org/eu/three-years-on-still-divided/Today marks the third anniversary of the EU referendum in which the country voted narrowly (by 52% to 48%) in favour of leaving the EU. Since then, the country has spent much of the last three years debating how the process of leaving has and should be handled, the terms on which we should aim to leave, and even the merits of the original decision itself. The debate has precipitated a general election and resulted in the downfall of a Prime Minister. The one thing that has not happened is Britain making its exit from the EU – thanks to the repeated refusal of the House of Commons to accept the terms of the withdrawal treaty that was negotiated with the EU by the UK government. Instead the country is awaiting the arrival of a new Prime Minister who will be charged with the task of solving in three months a Brexit riddle that Theresa May was unable to solve in three years.
One might imagine that the difficulties that have beset the withdrawal process would have had an impact on support for the principle of remaining or leaving the EU in the first place. But of that there is remarkably little evidence. Our poll of polls of how people would vote in another referendum continues to report that the country is more or less evenly divided between Remain and Leave, much as it was three years ago.
True, as has been the position ever since our poll of polls series began at the beginning of 2018, the balance of support is now tilted in favour of Remain rather than, as in the referendum, in favour of Leave. Indeed, the current average of Remain 52%, Leave 48% is the exact mirror image of what emerged from the ballot boxes in June 2016.
However, this does not mean that there is a discernible, key group of Leave voters who have changed their minds about Brexit. That much becomes clear if, as in the table below, we examine separately the current vote intentions of those who voted Remain in 2016 and those who backed Leave. In both cases over 85% say they would vote exactly the same way as they did in 2016. The sound and fury of the last three years has left the vast majority of voters unmoved. And although 8% of those who backed Leave say that they would now vote Remain, they are counterbalanced by 8% of Remain supporters who indicate that they would now support Leave.
The principal reason why public opinion is now tilted towards Remain is because, as we have noted before, those who did not vote three years ago prefer Remain to Leave by around two to one (if they express a view at all). In part, at least, this reflects the fact that this group of abstainers consists disproportionately of younger voters who in general are more likely to back Remain. However, it also suggests that, far from being certain to produce a majority for Remain, the outcome of a second referendum could turn on the ability or otherwise of the Remain side to mobilise the support of a group of voters who cannot necessarily be relied upon to vote at all.
Meanwhile, we should note that, in so far as there has been any change in recent weeks, it consists of a slight narrowing of the lead for Remain. The latest figures of Remain 52%, Leave 48%, contrast with ones of Remain 54%, Leave 46%, that had hitherto pertained for most of the time since the beginning of this year. Still, this movement could be the product of chance variation or the possibility that more recent polls have been undertaken disproportionately by companies that tend to produce relatively narrow leads for Remain anyway.
However, this seems to be an inadequate explanation. Of the four companies that have polled vote intentions in a second referendum since the beginning of May and who also did so in January this year, three (BMG, Survation and YouGov) have registered clear drops in support for Remain, on average by three points, while only one (Kantar) has not.
The principal explanation for this change appears to be that there has been some ‘hardening’ of the Leave vote in recent weeks. At the beginning of the year we reported that while 89% of those who voted Remain said that they would vote the same way again, the equivalent figure among Leave supporters, 83%, had become somewhat lower. Now the two figures are almost identical. Recent events have, it seems, simply reinforced Leave voters in their original views rather than encouraged them to think again.
Brexited | the worst threads live the longest
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Not my point at all what a ridiculous strawman, my point was there's some massive hypocritcs in here who'd opinions would be taken more seriously if they admitted their hypocrisy or aims.
Labour champions ambitious social reform policies or opposes war and they're against it with arguments that its hurting election chances. Yet on Brexit there's a massive call for action however futile when its far more certain to damage the party.
I'm all for Labour to take positive action to stop brexit if a GE or referendum gets triggered. It's the crying that Labour haven't done so already when I'm pretty damn certain it's understood that all the bleating in the world makes no difference in parliament. No ones stupid enough to think it changes the votes of enough MPs...well I'd hope not
Interesting, tallies more with my personal experience than what I hear on the news. I personally know more people who voted remain who would now vote leave than vice versa.
There are two different Brexit conversations going on
1)The Media One - which is basically the we are having in here. Which talks about the everyday events of Brexit etc.
2)The General Public One - Which has almost got nothing to do with the process of brexit and more based in cultural/social views.
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Because they'd end up losing their traditional base and becoming liberal metropolitan type entities in the process.
If Brexit doesn't happen then the Brexit Party would soon emerge as the party commanding the most public support. So it's pick your poison.
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Yes, you're right. There is hypocrisy here, but it's an odd thing to pick out given what side you've come into this debate on. But yes, it is amusing how Corbyn's supporters are only concerned about polling and electability on this one issue. On literally every other issue it apparently doesn't matter that Corbyn polls terribly. And hey, it was obviously a huge issue when Blair abandoned a positive, transformative Labour for a cynical electable one, but again it's fine for Corbyn to play politics on the second biggest issue facing the country.
Which of course is fine, if you don't think Brexit is a big issue or you want Labour to have a slick, charismatic leader whose raison d'être is to win elections anyway possible. But for me and for most people I know who share my politics the attraction of Corbyn was a different vision for the Labour party. I'm struggling to see the hypocrisy in realising that Corbyn's actions on Brexit are completely at odds with why he won the leadership election and what he promised to do in charge of the party.
The issue with Blair was never he abandoned a left transformative politics it's that he never started with one and slowly got worse and worse(None of which had anything to do with electability, as after 97 New Labour were losing voters in big numbers but it didn't bother them at all.)
Genuine question here - What did you think Corbyn would do while in charge of the party.
The Labour Party is
.A mass membership party, biggest centre left party in Europe.
.More democratic although there needs to be more work on this(Mainly the fault of PLP and Union leaders).
.Left wing manifesto that would transform Britian
.A giant activist base
I hear this from centre left/left people but rarely do I get a answer other than Corbyn isn't doing what I want, there for I was lied to.
As I hadn't read it before I thought I would take a look at it - got to page 31 which covered Brexit, international trade etc and didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Presume you are joking.
Your a tory Paul so well done for showing some emotion. I can't ask for more than that.
Shocking from Hunt, how do these people get away with saying these things?
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Whether I voted Tory in the past is neither here nor there, I also voted Labour in 1974. I wouldn't vote Tory now.
You need a plan that's going to work. If the rest of the manifesto is like the first 31 pages..dear oh dear oh dear.
Your issues with the manifesto are ?
Saw on Twitter that company mentioned by Hunt wouldn't actually get wiped out but would just relocated the 350 jobs.
But yeah sort of mad to see the Tory like this at the moment.
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From your posts it seems that you feel you would be a winner so that's a price worth paying regardless of the cost to everyone else?
I think the issue here is that you see no difference between campaigning and the time in between serving as opposition. It's very rare for parties to push radical policies outside of a campaign when actually they have no control about putting anything in place and they're serving those who voted not winning future votes. What they're supposed to do is pressure the government and going all remain and not engaging in the brexit process because we just want to remain isn't that. I know it would help the despair of those who want their side aired more but repeating the SNP, Lib Dem, PV points at PMQ isn't changing anything. These points are already put forward endlessly.
If a GE is triggered and Labour don't go all out remain that's the time for complaint because then they can actually influence a change. In a ref i think they'll form two campaign sides remain/leave and let the split MPs have at it
There are so many. Taking a few of the main points.
He appears to fund his project by making the 5% top earners pay more and make a "few" companies pay more corporation tax. But the other 95% won't pay more.
Haven't read what's been promised later on but this is not going to pay for anything, sounds like Harold Wilson of the 1960s and we all know what happened then.
There is no costing for the impact of Brexit - probably because he thinks they will have the same benefits being outside the EU as being in it.
Obviously they are a Brexit party and not a Remain party as very emphatic on ending freedom of movement, which also means end of freedom of movement of goods, capital etc.
Any remainers voting for Labour either haven't read the manifesto or are under the same illusion as Corbyn thinking little will change.
Support for SME businesses, haha. I ran two in the UK, one I moved out within 6 weeks of Brexit just before I retired and the other one hopefully will be out before the UK leave. Not possible to operate outside the EU.
We had funding so don't know what he's on about there.
Brexit will have the biggest impact on the UK economy since WW2 and it's almost brushed under the carpet so how the hell is Corbyn going to finance anything.
They are many other points. WTO, Tariffs, banking and so on.
It sounds like a 14 year old has been given a project for homework to do a manifesto for the Labour Party but doesn't understand too much of what real life is about.
If I was a disaffected ex-Tory voter desperately wanting someone to vote for, it wouldn't be for Labour.
No, it's up to the people to decide. I think we need another general election.
Every massive change will bring winners and losers though, and politicians should be honest about this and try to help those who lose out as much as possible. I do however think that Britain is not on a good course, and we need radical change to engage productively in a globalised world. If we don't change, I think we will all be poorer for it.
How does this look though?
The national investment bank ?
Struggling To Find Funding
Shortages Of Skills & Short Term policy
Carillon scandal
Might have been great for you under the tories but not for other small business.
Again I don't want to keep bringing it up but you did say on here the reason for young people falling to get on the housing market was - iPhones.
Yeah I can't image the manifesto would have shifted any ex- tory although I don't think anything would in fairness. Partly because 1)The Labour base wouldn't agree with a platform so heavily in favour of business 2)I'm sure your a nice guy but Mike Cherry for example seems like a monster who frustrated that the government isn't forcing a enough disabled people into work.
I largely have little issue with most of his policy. Politically I am very much in step with those who put him in place and you can go back to when he was elected to see a few years of me defending him on here. I have issues with his past which I think makes him vulnerable to right wing attack lines and think his explanations for things such as anti-Semitism often aren't good enough.
The points you list are why I'm so frustrated with his leadership on Brexit. Labour are almost uniquely placed to make a pro-Europe/anti-austerity argument, but the strategy has been confused, contradictory and deliberately unclear. Whether it would ultimately have made a difference or not, this issue is so big that it (along with climate change) that I cannot give them a pass.
Ian Dunt explains modern Britain to the Yanks.
A lot of sense in the article, but a few things to take issue with. Firstly, the idea that Britain has always acted rationally and that Brexit is some kind of unprecedented aberration. Is Brexit any less stupid or destructive than the virtual political/elite consensus which decided blindly following the US into Iraq was a wise choice? I'd actually argue the opposite. I can much better understand someone wanting to leave the EU than I can wanting to invade Iraq in the aftermath of 9/11. This is just one example. Secondly, this point and the kind of language he uses
is a key factor why the Remain campaign lost, and why it continues to be such a miserable and uninspiring one. The Remain message to people who voted Leave is usually condensed into 'omg, how fecking stupid are you? Let's have another vote but this time don't be an idiot and vote for what we are telling you is better'. Yeah, because that's going to resonate. The unfortunate reality, and it's what the Remain campaigners need to quickly learn and act upon, is that however contemptible it is, slapping a big sign on a red bus declaring that you can fund the NHS with money sent to the EU is going to appeal to people. It's the job of Remainers to formulate a more compelling argument that counteracts this. At the present, it still remains 'you're failing to accept objective reality', as Dunt puts it. It's going to win no one over, and it's going to do nothing to impede Farage and his fellow self-serving elites.
What's wrong with it?
No offense, but I’m beyond sick of this idea that people need to be marketed to in order to make them avoid stupid destructive behaviour. I shouldn’t need to sell you the merits of standing on solid ground to talk you out of jumping off a cliff.
No deal is probably going to happen now, and it’ll likely do Britain a lot of good. People need reminding that politics has consequences.
If you want to stop someone jumping off a cliff, telling them that the act will likely kill them is probably not the wisest way to go about it. Perhaps, engaging with and trying to understand why they are prepared to jump off a cliff in the first place and then formulating an argument on that basis might achieve something. It's this attitude that anyone who voted for Brexit is stupid which is a big problem. After suffering from a decade of austerity, maybe it's easy to lose faith in commentators who talk of 'objective reality' and easy to be attracted to ideas that play on emotion rather than rationality.
It's also very callous to wish for no deal just to teach poor people a lesson. The rich elites which have engineered Brexit will weather whatever consequences it brings. People at the bottom of the heap have known for a long time that politics has consequences, often to the detriment of their own welfare.
Who is going to invest in a National Investment Bank? Whose money will it be.
Finding finance and funding is usually down to how well the company is run, whether it's a viable business and to have the right people in charge of finances.
Carillon scandal was terribly handled by the government (as were many things).
When I was employing people, their colour, their sex, their nationality their disabilities mattered not one iota, the only criteria were whether they could do the job, (and were not an obnoxious character)
I'm all in favour of anything that benefit's people's lives whether it's skills improvement or NHS improvement , better transport infrastructure but......
Someone, somewhere has got to pay for it - trying to get money out of the rich and tax avoiding multinationals, ok fine, but you know they'll move out of the UK as they did in the past. Not going to work, unfortunately the other 95% are going to have to stump up as well.
The money that's going to be lost to the economy due to Brexit is not accounted for, the loss of people's jobs, closures of companies, loss of manufacturing,currency crash, tariffs, increased prices and so on is not in Labour's calculation, why ?.. because they think things will just carry on as before because Labour will do some impossible deal with the EU.
For Corbyn to have a chance of implementing any of his policies, he has to stop Brexit dead.
Re iPhones, I said back in my time, we had nothing else to spend money on even if we wanted to, unless getting pissed down the pub counts.
What would this argument look ? And how you do that with the already mentioned people the People Vote ? Plus the history of the EU and austerity. Now of course the EU didn't cause austerity in the UK taking the pro-Europe/anti-austerity line, you could end up with half of the Remain campaign going on tv saying austerity was fine and the other half defending a political union who spent the last decade doing austerity.
Although having said that I think a Pro-Europe/anti-austerity is better than Remain & Reform from 2016.
I agree with you on the climate change stuff although the party released new policy today(Haven't got around to looking at it yet).
.He completely misses out the build up of anti eu feeling in the UK, the impact of austerity, the rightwing shift in uk politics during the new labour days(There is no mention of the BNP get 1 million votes in the 2009 eu elections). It's as if Brexit happened out of nowhere for him.
.The no wars because of the EU seems a bizarre argument. Firstly there's a ton of other more important factors - the impact of WW2, end of the cold war etc. The EU has been in many forms and there's been wars in Europe(Northern Ireland for example)
.He ignores the negative impact of the EU economic policy on countries in particular the ones in the south of Europe. No mention of Greece and the austerity that was forced onto its people didn't happened. To Dunt EU economic policy means everyone has freedom.
.He wrong to say Pro EU people are internationalists by nicely providing us a good example by not mentioning once the countless number of dead brown africans in the mediterranean sea. They are European nationalists.
Funny enough it's people like Dunt who over the last three years have failed to analysis and question recent political events that have turned brexit into a culture war debate. But I bet he feels smug knowing what the detail of the NL backstop are.
'The Tories are shite, the EU pour more money in to areas like South Wales, the North East Cornwall etc... than central government, if you vote to Leave because you're unhappy with the status quo then it's probably going to get worse. Vote Remain; vote Labour'.
The problem with Labour's strategy throughout has been a failure to differentiate themselves from the Tories. They got into bed with them during the referendum campaign and since then it's always felt like they might disagree with the detail, but the broad strokes have almost always been the same. Leavers think that Labour are trying to BINO and Remainers don't like that the option has been a soft Brexit. If you're paying attention then obviously you know there are differences, but it's far too confusing an approach to land outside of our politically interested enclaves.
I don't think that the Remain campaign (in its original guise on in its Peoples Vote form) are irredeemably terrible for what they are (not to say I think they're good, but given some of the people involved it could be worse), but they've almost always been talking to the same people and struggle to reach beyond them. In comparison, Leave recognised that you didn't need to have a coherent message. You could have Vote Leave saying one thing, Leave.eu saying another and Labour Leave saying a third and all three groups reached different people for different reasons.
Had Labour gone at it from that angle I think they'd have had far more impact. In fact, I think it's the only option that isn't terrible for them. The problem with where we are now is that by going cross party in 2016 and then advocating for a soft Brexit/Remain angle in 2019 populists groups can (and have) easily play it as Labour having become a complacent, establishment party who run roughshod over the views of people they were supposed to represent and don't care about them or how they vote.
That's not to say that the EU has been a perfect institution or that there aren't legitimate criticisms that you've highlighted, but (for the same reason that the Lexit arguments are flawed) they pale in comparison to what we all knew Brexit would unleash.
I have my idea about what we as a society could do to make Britain better for everyone but it would take too long to write.
With regards Brexit though I think if done well the opportunities outweigh the costs. There is no guarantee it will be done well though, so there is a massive risk and there will certainly be losers.
Yep. Spot on.
If they're willing to jump of the cliff because they want to self destruct, then no telling them it will kill them would be stupid. If however like with Brexit, they're willing to jump off the cliff because they think a giant cloud is going to sweep them away to some utopia, then yes they need to be reminded that gravity is a bitch.
Really? Because I come from a poor as feck area, and the people I talk to there who are all 'rar rar Brexit' are talking absolute and total shite. They refuse to accept any of the obvious negatives, and just repeat bullshit UKIP talking points, regardless of what evidence they're shown, what lies are proven to be lies and insist that their 'common sense' tells them it will all work magnificently. Plenty of others just believe Brexit and politics in general have nothing to do with them and either didn't vote or else just voted what their mates talked about the most. Now they just want to 'get on with it' because they're literally just bored of hearing about it, and don't think it matters.
Look at working people in the 70/80's and before and they genuinely understood how much politics mattered to their lives. Now, we see mass disengagement, a refusal to listen to experts and an endless treatment of politics like a reality TV show, which is why we have Boris on the cusp of no 10. I don't see this changing without a sharp shock. Why would it, when the slow deliberate deterioration of our public services hasn't changed much?
Can we stop treating poor people like fecking children please? Being poor supposedly now means you need someone to carefully pamper to your ignorance and gently sell you on the idea that the rich might possibly not have your best interests at heart after all?
Yes indeed, "the poor will always be with us"... who said that?
good shout... might also be worthwhile not totally generalizing and demonizing "the rich" as well though at the same time?
Won't someone please think of the rich?
Some sense of proportion would suffice. Anyone on here that owns a house and earns 50k plus is pretty much slung into the same category as a Victorian cotton mill owner.
I don't think anyone who has a go at 'the rich' is talking about people earning £50,000 (lets call them 'the comfortably off'), very few people have a problem with people earning that sort of money as long as they've worked hard for it and have the self-awareness to realise that most people will never earn that kind of money and that it's a nice position to be in.