Brexit: Record low now think UK was right to leave EU

Brexit now considered a mistake by significant majority of the population as UK’s economic fortunes fade

Just 32 per cent of British voters now think the UK was right to leave the EU, a new poll has found.

The figure from pollster YouGov is the lowest on record and the latest continuation of a trend stretching back to last year.

A full 56 per cent now explicitly think Britain was wrong to leave, with the rest saying they don’t know.

The figure comes after “rejoin” took a record 14-point lead in a separate poll by Redfield and Wilton Strategies last month, which asked how people would vote in another EU referendum.

Respected political scientist Professor Sir John Curtice said at the time of that survey’s release that the UK’s worsening economic conditions appeared to be driving increased scepticism about Brexit and that it could deepen further.

Yesterday the governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, said the UK’s economy was performing dramatically worse than the eurozone or US.

And MPs on the Treasury select committee were told Brexit had added six percentage points to food inflation in the UK specifically, against a global backdrop of rising prices.

This week Rishi Sunak also appeared to abandon hopes of signing a promised Brexit trade deal with the US by the next election – a pledge made by his predecessor Boris Johnson.

And former environment secretary George Eustice told the Commons that the deal the UK had managed to sign with Australia was not actually very good. The deal is expected to shrink the UK’s farming sector, according to the government’s own predictions.

But Mr Sunak has in recent weeks repeatedly refused to acknowledge the damage done to trade and the economy by leaving the EU.

Speaking to reporters at the G20 summit in Bali he rejected an opportunity to do so – only saying that all countries had “idiosyncratic” factors.

The latest YouGov survey shows that one in five people who voted Leave, 19 per cent, now believe it was wrong to leave the EU, also the highest figure to date – though 70 per cent still say it was the right decision.

Nine in 10 Remain voters say Britain was wrong to leave.

But despite the strong public opinion shift towards wanting to rejoin the EU, no major political party is actively campaigning to do so.

Labour leader Keir Starmer said again last month that there was no chance of his party taking Britain back into the EU.

“It’s straight no from me. We’re not going back into the EU,” he told LBC radio, adding that he wanted to “make Brexit work”.

Even the Liberal Democrats, who in 2019 said they wanted to rejoin the EU without even putting it to a referendum, have only set out a tentative roadmap for rejoining the bloc’s economic single market.