Most voters say Brexit has gone badly, new poll finds
42 per cent of people who voted Leave in 2016 had a negative view of how Brexit had turned out so far
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Your support makes all the difference.More than six in 10 voters believe Brexit has gone badly or worse than expected, a new poll has found a year after the UK left the EU.
The Opinium survey for The Observer also found that 42 per cent of people who voted Leave in 2016 had a negative view of how Brexit has turned out.
The survey comes a week after Brexit minister Lord Frost resigned from Boris Johnson’s government amid disagreements in its “direction”.
Foreign secretary Liz Truss has now taken over post-Brexit negotiations.
Some 26 per cent of people who voted to leave the EU said it had gone worse than expected – 16 per cent of Leave voters expected it to go badly and said they had been proved right.
The Observer said that 86 per cent of people who voted to stay in the EU said it had turned out badly or worse than expected, while 14 per cent of all voters said the process went better than anticipated.
Opinium surveyed 1,904 adults in the UK between 21 and 23 of December.
Adam Drummond of Opinium said the most prominent finding was that Leave voters were now more hesitant about the virtues of Brexit than previously.
“For most of the Brexit process any time you’d ask a question that could be boiled down to ‘is Brexit good or bad?’ you’d have all of the Remainers saying ‘bad’ and all of the Leavers saying ‘good’ and these would cancel each other out,” he said.
“Now what we’re seeing is a significant minority of Leavers saying that things are going badly or at least worse than they expected. While 59 per cent of Remain voters said, ‘I expected it to go badly and think it has’, only 17 per cent of Leave voters said, ‘I expected it to go well and think it has’.”
The UK has seen significant disruption at the hand of Brexit this year, with shortages of HGV drivers, manual labourers and care workers. The government was forced to offer 5,500 visas to poultry to tackle shortages while a similar scheme was introduced to bring in more HGV drivers to tackle the petrol crisis.
A recent poll also found that Remain would win a second Brexit referendum by a narrow margin if the vote were held today. Five years to the day since the 2016 referendum took place, a Savanta ComRes survey found 51 per cent of respondents would now vote to remain, whereas 49 per cent would vote leave, based on interviews conducted last week.
The polling also showed that very few people had shifted positions since the 2016 referendum. Only 6 per cent of Remainers said they would now vote Leave, and 7 per cent of Leavers would now change their vote to Remain.
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