If you think Brexit is going very well then you’re in a small minority
I find this polling very striking both in the abstract and the trend with just 7% of Leavers thinking Brexiters is going very well. When we were members of the EU the media and others blamed plenty of the country’s ills on our membership of the Nobel peace prize winning organisation, now that we have left the EU Brexiteers will have get use to the inverse of that, most of the country’s ills will be blamed on Brexit. I would have thought the pandemic would have mitigated some of the damage of Brexit in the eyes of the voters and meant fewer people thought Brexit was going badly/very badly.
Given the plethora of Leavers at the top of the government this may lead to problems for the Prime Minister downwards, especially if we see this level of polling at the time of the next general election. The electorate are a fickle bunch, they backed membership of the ERM up until the moment Black Wednesday happened. The voters overwhelmingly backed Labour’s spending plans and in 2006 voters told Ipsos MORI that Gordon Brown was the most successful post war Chancellor then came the Great Financial Crisis and Gordon Brown’s reputation for abolishing boom and bust was destroyed. The Great Brexit Leap Forward may be an orphan by the time of the next general election.
My view is that thinking Brexit is going (very) badly is not synonymous with rejoining however some may do so which may cause problems for Sir Keir Starmer. If we see this kind of persistent polling over the next few years then Starmer would face pressure to make Rejoin a manifesto commitment which may scare off the voters he needs to win back, this would be another Brexit paradox that has confounded many. Slogans such as ‘Make Brexit Work’ might need some work.
Continuously poor Brexit polling like this represents risks for both the government and the opposition.
TSE