Three years after Brexit, voters are experiencing a growing sense of "Bregret" over the choice they made
It's just over three years since the UK split from the European Union (EU) in an acrimonious Brexit divorce. But now that the dust has settled we have a new word in the political lexicon describing the growing sense of regret amongst Britons about the exit: 'bregret'.
An Ipsos poll from January found that 45% of Britons believe that Brexit is going less well than expected compared to only 28% in June 2021. John Curtice, Professor of politics in Strathclyde University, joined Philip Boucher-Hayes on RTÉ 1's Today with Claire Byrne to look at the issue. (This piece includes excerpts from the conversation which have been edited for length and clarity - you can hear the discussion in full above).
A number of polls show that if the UK was to have a referendum on rejoining or staying out of the EU, on average 42% would vote to stay out, while 48% would vote to rejoin, says Curtice. This means support for EU membership is higher than anytime it has been since the June 26th referendum.
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Exports to the EU have fallen by 25% in 2022, a million Europeans have left and overall the UK economy has shrunk by comparison with the EU. But "people are not necessarily looking at the GDP statistics or the trade statistics and comparing them with the rest of the European Union etc. But of course what they do experience, is how the UK economy is going," says Curtice.
"The turning point seems to have been when, in the autumn of 2021, the reality of petrol stations being short of petrol inside Great Britain and also shortage of some foodstuffs in the supermarkets, stories also about the difficulty of getting abattoir workers to deal with pigs that were ready for market. That's the point at which public opinion began to switch back in the opposite direction. In a sense, this was the first illustration of how the tightening of the labour market post-Covid inside United Kingdom, together with making it more difficult for EU citizens to come across to the United Kingdom to live and work, was beginning to have an impact."
"Then of course what happened during the summer of last year and into the early autumn -- leaving aside what was happening elsewhere -- the cost of living crisis began to bite hard inside the United Kingdom, the realisation that we were going to have to subsidise oil and gas prices, even Liz Truss had to acknowledge that", he says. "People in the Kingdom were suffering from high inflation, living standards were falling and we're set to fall by a record amount. That is one of the reasons why we have the industrial unrest we have at the moment."
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"On the Brexit side, there are arguments about to what extent Brexit is or is not contributing to the United Kingdom's difficulties and it certainly isn't the only cause. We're all of us suffering from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in the fallout from Covid, but basically it's very difficult to persuade the public that Brexit is delivering economically at a time when the economy is doing so badly."
Another reason why support for Brexit is low, is because political stock in the UK Conservative Party -- the party that delivered Brexit -- is very low, Curtice says. "On average polls suggest that little more than a quarter of people would vote for the Conservatives in a general election now. A lot of it has to do with "Party Gate" and Boris Johnson, it also has to do with Liz Truss."
"There's some evidence in this direction to suggest that perhaps, given those who have delivered Brexit are those who are now not widely regarded as being competent more generally, that may also have helped to undermine support [for Brexit].
"It's not clear that this is causing people to directly change their mind, but it certainly means that what was once an anchor of support from brexiteers, is that leave voters are now widely of the view that Brexit has actually not reduced immigration, if anything that's increased. It's actually the one thing on which leave voters and remain voters agree; Brexit has actually in their view now increased immigration into the United Kingdom." Curtice says we may be seeing a softening on the UK's part on Brexit in light of changing opinion.
