Bregret sets in as over half of UK sees Brexit as a mistake

Brexit regret is really starting to sink in as well over half of the people living in the United Kingdom now think leaving the European Union was the wrong choice for the nation according to a new YouGov poll taken between May 17th and 18th.

YouGov asked 2005 people: "In hindsight, do you think Britain was right to leave or wrong to vote to leave the European Union," and an astonishing 56% of respondents said the vote to leave was wrong compared to just 31% who said Brexit was the right decision.

"Since late July 2022, the share of people who regret Brexit in these surveys has consistently been above 50 percent," wrote Statista's Research Department in a recent post breaking down the growing discontent over the Brexit vote.

Support for Brexit has been steadily declining since the Spring of 2021 according to Statista. If you don't remember, Britain left the European Union after the Leave vote won in 2016 with 51.9% of the vote.

However, as of January, it seemed most Britons were in favor of the government holding another vote on rejoining the European Union according to a survey conducted by Savanta that The Independent said showed most voters were "disillusioned with the ‘taking back of control they were promised’."

Over 65% of respondents believed there should be another vote on the subject, with many having opposing views on when that vote should take place. 

Nearly one-quarter or 22% of people wanted a vote to take place immediately while another 24% answered that a new vote should be held within the next five years. 

Only 11% of respondents replied that a new vote should be held within six to ten years with a minor 4% believing that a vote should be held only after twenty years. 

The British Isles' experiment in modern independent governance has proven to be a disaster for its citizens since leaving the European Union in January 2021. 

Brexit has become a banned word of British politics,” wrote The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins in a recent article railing against the decision to leave the EU. 

“Not a day passes without farmers, fishers, manufacturers, care providers, academics or artists complaining of impeded trade and crippled labour supply,” Jenkins continued.

Brexit may have added roughly 6% to the cost of food in Britain and more than 43% of companies now regard the UK as a declining place of investment according to statistics gathered by Jenkins, all of which has been made worse by the lasting effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.  

“Britain is the only major world economy that has failed to return to its pre-Covid growth performance,” Jenkins added, noting that economists “regard Brexit as a prime cause.”

But it isn’t just Covid woes that have led many experts to point out that Brexit was a bad deal. The UK’s own budget responsibility office noted in 2021 that Brexit had a significant impact on reducing the country’s GDP by at least 4% according to The Guardian. 

“In the long term it is the case that Brexit has a bigger impact than the pandemic,” Richard Hughes, Chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility, said in October 2021. 

More than two years on, Brexit has helped push British prices up while tightening the labor market and preventing firms from importing the goods they need to function according to the BBC’s Douglas Fraser. 

“One Scottish retailer recently told me that a German supplier refuses to supply in small quantities because of the paperwork involved,” Fraser wrote in a January 1st article on Brexit’s detrimental effects on the British economy. 

“The Scottish company has to import in larger quantities meaning higher stock levels at higher cost,” Fraser added. 

It is no wonder then why Savanta’s poll found that 56% of respondents believe that leaving the European Union made the British economy worse while 54% said Brexit was the wrong decision altogether.

Nobody really knows. But a new vote on rejoining is unlikely to happen anytime soon since the country is still being led by the pro-Brexit faction of the Conservative Party under Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.