Another hidden cost of Brexit has been laid bare – people will be less willing to help the UK in a crisis

We suspected it from the Eurovision Song Contest; now an academic survey has confirmed it: people in other European countries have a negative view of the UK, says John Rentoul

The UK may not get the help it needs from its EU counterparts in the wake of Brexit (Getty Images)

The question began: “Imagine a country suffered some kind of major crisis, and was looking for help from others.” People across Europe were asked how willing their country should be to offer financial help to other countries. The UK came near the bottom of the list, below all EU countries and ahead of only Tunisia and Colombia.

The huge opinion poll was carried out by YouGov in 13 EU countries and the UK, and has just been published. If you find the Eurovision Song Contest voting depressing, look away now: in nine EU countries more people would be “unwilling” to help the UK in a crisis than “willing”. In only four countries is the balance the other way round, so now we know who our friends are: the Danes, the Poles, the Swedes and the Romanians (although note that only half of EU countries were surveyed).

We British, on the other hand, are models of European generosity, being willing, on balance, to help out all 27 EU members, even though we have now left their club. Our renunciation of EU membership must be one of the biggest causes of these findings, which expose the damage to Britain’s reputation from Brexit.

Our fellow Europeans presumably think that if we don’t want to be part of their union, we don’t deserve their help – whereas we, who had our doubts about the union all along, feel less hostility to the peoples who remain part of it.

That said, the survey brought out some of the worst of the self-hating tendency among some Remainers in Britain, along the lines of, “We’re horrible; who can blame them?” As David Remnick of The New Yorker once wrote, England is “the one country where, it is said, the people feel schadenfreude toward themselves”. Leavers, on the other hand, are more likely to adopt the sentiment of the old Millwall chant: “No one likes us, we don’t care.”

Unfortunately, the set of questions asked by YouGov in this survey hasn’t been used before, so we cannot trace different countries’ reputations over time, but I suspect the UK’s negative exceptionalism goes back further than the 2016 referendum. The impressionistic evidence of Eurovision is that the UK’s role in the invasion of Iraq was a turning point.

Two things are probably not relevant to where countries come in the league table. One is wealth: you might think that people would be less willing to help out richer countries, but Germany scores positively on average, and Austria, Ireland and France come near the top.

Nor is our experience of coronavirus likely to be a factor: although it was clear in April, when this survey was carried out, that the UK was suffering one of the worst death tolls in Europe, I doubt that this had a significant effect on perceptions. Italy and Spain, which also suffered badly, come top of the list of countries Europeans are prepared to help.

Another striking finding of the survey is that there is a group of EU countries whose citizens are markedly less keen on helping out not just the UK but a lot of other countries. The Finns, Hungarians, French and Greeks tend to be much less willing to help generally. The highest negative score within Europe (minus 36 points) is recorded by Greeks towards Germany, presumably a legacy of Angela Merkel’s refusal to agree more generous bailout terms a decade ago. (Mind you, the Greeks are pretty much as negative towards us: minus 35 points.)

The survey also asked about a range of seven non-EU countries, apart from the UK, which confirmed that EU attitudes are consistent with the idea of “fortress Europe”. None scored as high as Hungary, the EU member other EU citizens are least likely to want to help. In descending order, they were: Canada, Nigeria, Vietnam, India, Japan, UK, Tunisia and Colombia.

It is not surprising that Britain should find itself out in the cold with the other non-EU members, and we partly brought it on ourselves by leaving, but I don’t agree with the more extreme version of this analysis, which holds that we are a ghastly country of lager louts and the sophisticated continentals are quite right to despise us. The survey finds that the British are more willing to help a wider range of countries than many citizens of the EU, and we should be proud of that.

YouGov surveyed 21,000 people in Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Spain, Sweden, and the UK, between 17 and 29 April 2020. (So the EU members not surveyed were: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Ireland, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal, Slovakia and Slovenia, although questions were asked about them.)