A decade after Britain voted to leave the European Union, a new poll of 10,000 people suggests that 55% would now vote to rejoin, with just 32% saying they would stay out. The findings come as a Metro ‘scorecard’ across 10 key promises gives Brexit a decidedly mixed report – and analysts estimate the damage runs to hundreds of billions of pounds a year.
The referendum campaign was “a dialogue of the deaf”, as one commentator put it this week, fought on different agendas: Remainers talked economics, Leavers sovereignty and immigration. “Brexit was an act of gross economic vandalism,” wrote JG Fox in UnHerd. “Many Leavers understood that at the time. Most were indifferent.”
“55% of Britons would now rejoin EU, a poll finds, as Brexit scorecard shows trade and economy underperforming.”
The scorecard, published on the anniversary, marks the promise of cheaper food at just 2/10, noting that while Covid, war and inflation played a role, “new trade barriers have added a number of costs”. The wider economy scores 4/10 – Britain avoided an immediate recession, but Bloomberg Economics estimates Brexit costs the country “anywhere up to £200bn a year”. Trade likewise gets 4/10: new deals have not offset extra friction with Britain’s biggest partner. The now-infamous £350m-a-week bus claim hangs over the assessment.
The question of control, central to the Leave campaign’s “Take Back Control” slogan, is more nuanced. “Ten years on,” Fox notes, “we are in a better position to decide how much control we have really gained, and how much it has been worth to us.” He argues that in a world of huge nations, smaller countries gain more collective power inside blocs like the EU. “Britain’s own ability to exercise ‘control’ over its own fate is inevitably more limited outside the EU,” he writes, pointing to a centuries-long strategic imperative for Britain to engage with Europe – from Elizabeth I’s interventions against Spanish hegemony to the balancing of power.
With a majority now saying they would rejoin, the political reality remains distant. The poll, commissioned by Metro, suggests a decisive shift in public opinion, but no mechanism for reversal is on the table. Whether Britain will ever again choose to pool sovereignty in Brussels – or accept the economic price of going it alone – is the question the next decade may answer.