What’s really behind the rise of ‘Regrexit’?

One in three Conservative voters now believes that Brexit has created more problems than it has solved, according to an Opinium poll for Best for Britain.

Best for Britain was founded to try to stop us leaving the EU, and it has now morphed into an internationalist campaign for a closer relationship with the EU; so its purpose in commissioning the research is obvious.

However, Opinium is a reputable and impartial polling company, and its findings are in line with all the other polling on the subject. The majority view of the British public (excluding “don’t knows”) is that the decision to leave the EU was the wrong one; that Brexit has gone badly – and that we should rejoin at once.

Opinion poll findings have to be interpreted carefully. The last one on rejoining, for example, is probably a poor guide to what would actually happen if there were another referendum.

Polls that ask how people would vote in such a referendum find a lower level of support for Rejoin if the question reminds the respondents that rejoining would mean being part of free movement of people throughout the EU, contributing to the EU budget and accepting the jurisdiction of the Court of Justice of the EU. (And that is without mentioning the euro, because people can argue forever and a day about whether adopting the euro is a “requirement” of EU membership, or whether Britain could just pretend to be intending to join it, as Sweden does.)

But what is not in doubt is Best for Britain’s finding that most people (57 per cent) think that Brexit has created more problems than it has solved. From quite soon after the referendum, which was now nearly seven years ago, people thought the government was handling Brexit badly. That is hardly surprising. With a few stand-out exceptions such as the vaccines programme, the British people think their government handles most things badly.

Over time, though, that has curdled into a view that Brexit has been bad for the country. But this can mean different things to different people. For at least 48 per cent of voters to start with, leaving the EU was not as good as remaining in it. For others, Brexit was a good idea, executed badly.

These believers that Brexit was bungled also divide into different camps. Some are the “revolution devours its own children” radicals of the Brexiteer movement who complain that the UK has not been turned into a low-tax, low-regulation offshore undercutter, a Hong Kong off the coast of the mainland empire. I don’t think there are many takers for this view among normal people.

I suspect there is a much larger group of Leave voters who would have preferred – now that it comes to it – to have a closer trading relationship with the EU, as long as we could end free movement and stay out of the political superstructure of a federal Europe.

That was the deal that Theresa May negotiated, and it was an astonishingly good deal too. Labour MPs should have voted for it, but too many of them had their heads turned by the siren calls of groups such as Best for Britain, which led them to believe that Brexit could be stopped altogether.

So I think the best way to interpret polls suggesting that most British people are suffering from “Regrexit” is this: most people think Brexit has been handled badly; they would have preferred a softer Brexit; and if it were simple and painless to reverse Brexit, there might even be a majority for that now. But it wouldn’t be simple or painless, and a lot of voters might have second thoughts about how green the grass really is on the other side of the fence, and whether being outside the EU single market for two years (since January 2021) is really long enough to be sure.

That is before we consider it from the EU’s point of view: its leaders would love to have us back, because it would be such an admission that they were right all along to warn us that life would be no picnic outside. But would they really want to go through all those negotiations over terms of re-entry with a partner who they think is always going to be a reluctant and disruptive member of the club?

Which is why my view is that Britain will be driven by economic self-interest to a closer relationship with the EU market, whichever party wins the next election and whatever they say before it. Yet I still think rejoining is a long, long way off – as does Best of Britain, which is campaigning for a closer relationship rather than an immediate application to renew the UK’s membership.