Collateral damage takes a toll on social support for Brexit three years later

MADRID, 29 Ene. (EUROPA PRESS) -

On January 31, 2020, at 11:00 p.m. (local London time), the United Kingdom ended almost four decades of European integration. Brexit opened a path unknown to both the United Kingdom and the EU, marked by a succession of obstacles that have not been fully resolved and that have been noted in less social support for the notorious divorce.

Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the main face of the Brexit campaign and a Downing Street tenant at key moments in the negotiations, promised the country would be freer to adopt its own laws and forge new alliances.

However, political messages aside, the reality is different. In October 2021, the Office for Budgetary Responsibility, an independent body of the British Government, estimated that Brexit would place a burden on the United Kingdom equivalent to 4 percent of GDP.

There are no new estimates on the table, but reports from the British Chamber of Commerce have confirmed that the trade agreement signed with the EU has not yet served more than three-quarters of companies, now faced with more red tape and even lack of of manpower.

The pound has also lost value - it began to lose it even before Brexit, in anticipation of what would come - and inflation closed 2022 above 9 percent, in a particularly difficult year where the collateral damage derived from it came to be added of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

At street level, part of those who voted in June 2016 to separate from the European Union -they were the majority with 52 percent- have begun to wonder if they did the right thing. 31 percent of the population continue to defend Brexit, but 55 percent believe that the country was wrong.

Analyst Lukas Paleckis, a researcher at the YouGov survey firm, points out in statements to Europa Press that this remorse did not come immediately and has been on the rise, something that multiple polls carried out in recent months attest to.

Paleckis explains that until the end of 2021 the proportion of 'Brexiters' who regretted their vote did not reach 10 percent. "In the last twelve months, we have seen this number increase and in our latest poll it stands at 19 percent," he says, which is equivalent to almost one in five voters.

Regarding the possible turning points, he admits that it is "difficult" to point out where everything began to go wrong at the level of social support, but a specific study on the reasons that have led part of the Brexit supporters to now renounce their position in 2016 show that 25 percent of them believe that "things have gotten worse."

19 percent cite the rising cost of living and 11 percent feel cheated. Remaining in the annals of political propaganda are the £350m that Johnson promised the UK would save a week outside the EU, despite the fact that there is no basis for this.

Brexit has also served during these years to highlight the divergences by territory. In Scotland, 62 percent of voters advocated remaining within the EU, a central argument for the separatists to have once again called for the holding of a secession referendum.

In Northern Ireland, the option to remain in the European bloc also triumphed, with 55.8 percent, and the territory currently lacks a government in office, largely due to differences over the new framework for relations with the EU after Brexit.

The withdrawal agreement included a specific protocol to prevent the introduction of a 'hard border' on the island of Ireland, but 'de facto' this forces controls on traffic to and from Britain. For unionists, this protocol distances Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom as a whole and is inadmissible.

Gibraltar accumulated an even higher rejection of Brexit - 95.9 percent - and is still pending the framework of future relations that will allow it to continue in the Schengen orbit and will contemplate the end of the Fence. One of the main stumbling blocks in the negotiations is the form and substance of the control that will be established at the points of entry to Gibraltar.

The division is also evident by age, since while only 5 percent of British citizens between the ages of 18 and 24 support Brexit three years after the divorce, while the data shoots up to 54 percent among the elderly 65 years old.

"In relation to the management of the United Kingdom's exit from the EU, it is more likely that young people say that the Government has mismanaged the issue," adds Paleckis, who extends this age disparity to other issues of a political nature.

In any case, in a UK still trying to recover from the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, which has seen three prime ministers walk down Downing Street in the same year and has lost who was its queen for seven decades, Brexit seems to have lost weight in the social imagination.

Paleckis explains that "when you compare Brexit with other problems facing the country, it does not seem to have the same level of importance." The economy practically dominates everything and, for 65 percent of the British, it is a matter of first order, above health (55 percent) and immigration (28).

The fact that the United Kingdom is outside the European Union does not appear until fourth position in YouGov polls, with an average of 19 percent. The citizens who voted in favor of remaining in the bloc do give it more importance, since 29 percent do consider Brexit an important problem.