Second Thoughts: A Majority of UK Citizens Would Vote to Reverse Brexit

A YouGov poll shows 58 percent of the UK would vote to reverse Brexit and rejoin the EU. The poll is seriously flawed.

Britons Who Want to Rejoin EU at Highest Levels Since 2016

The Guardian reports Britons Who Want to Rejoin EU at Highest Levels Since 2016.

Seven years after the Brexit referendum, the proportion of Britons who want to rejoin the EU has climbed to its highest levels since 2016, according to a new survey. Data from YouGov’s latest Brexit tracker survey found that, excluding those who said they would not vote or did not know, 58.2% of people in Britain would now vote to rejoin.

Asked whether they would vote to remain in the EU or leave in a Brexit-style referendum, 62% of respondents in France and 63% in Italy, which are traditionally among the least enthusiastic EU member states, said they would vote to stay.

Elsewhere in the EU, 87% of respondents in Spain said last month they would choose to remain, along with 79% in Denmark, 70% in Sweden and 69% in Germany.

Implied Implications

• The EU would not let the UK back in unless it scrapped the British Pound and went on the Euro.
• The UK would not get the rebate deal it had before. The UK rebate was a financial mechanism that reduced the United Kingdom’s contribution to the EU budget since 1985. This was a very sore point to nearly every country in the EU. The EU would not get the same deal if it rejoined.
• The UK would have to start funding things like an EU army.
• If the EU ever were to vote for comingled budgets, the UK would start funding projects in 27 nations and would be responsible for bank failures in those nations.

Flawed Poll

I do not doubt the poll, as is, but how many understand the implications?

If these implications were stated in the poll, what would the results have been?

With no explanation of the implications, the poll is fatally flawed.

Brexit Was a Good Choice

The problem was not Brexit but rather the failure of the Boris Johnson administration to take advantage of the new opportunities.

Contrary to Popular Myth, Brexit Was Not a Bad Decision and Did Not Fail

Last month, a friend of mine emailed an article on Brexit by The Atlantic, ‘We’re All Worse Off’ (paywalled).

Perception vs Reality

I responded to my friend that failure is a perception because Britain did none of the things to make Brexit work.

Consider UK policy after Brexit: No tax cuts, no trade deal with the US or China, No dismantling of inept EU rules and regulations, no progress on things like artificial intelligence or energy.  This is not a failure of Brexit, it is a failure to take advantage of things possible without being tied to the EU. 

A few days after I emailed my friend, Eurointelligence, admitted in an article called “Sunrise” that my view is the correct one.

Sunrise 

It was always nonsensical to replace the entire volume of some 4000 EU regulations on a single day. The majority are unproblematic. The intellectual and operational difficulty with Brexit is to select specific areas where regulatory divergence makes sense. We all know about the costs of Brexit are transparent, but the opportunities are hidden, and dependent on how well this divergence is managed.

As Joël Reland from the UK in a Changing Europe think tank explains, there are still 600 EU regulations that will be changed. What will also change is the end of the supremacy of EU law by the end of the year. UK courts will then be able to override EU law. We expect this alone to lead to significant divergence down the road. The government has also given itself fast-track authority on future changes.

But the most important aspect is that this reform is now going hand-in-hand with another initiative that is running in parallel: the pro-innovation regulation of technologies review, led by Patrick Vallance, the UK government’s former chief scientific adviser. The review is finally doing what we had urged the UK government to do right after Brexit, which is spot high-tech opportunities the EU is missing. Artificial intelligence is an obvious one, as is medical research and many other tech developments held back by the EU’s antediluvian data protection regulation. On high-tech industries, the EU has entered a regulatory death spiral, focused entirely on consumers since the EU companies no longer have skin in the game.

The EU’s problems with these industries has been building up over the last 20 years. Innovation and entrepreneurship have fallen down the ladder of political priorities. We also have doubts about the efficacy of Horizon EU, the EU’s research programme. It is large in volume, and a bureaucratic nightmare, according to this survey. But apart from the cumbersome application process, one has to question why it is that the race for several cutting-edge 21st century technologies is nowadays mainly between the US and China. 

We don’t see the UK so much as a threat to the EU in the way Emmanuel Macron and Michel Barnier had imagined, through low-wage sweatshops. The UK will simply exploit areas the EU has left to others.

We expect the UK’s shift in technology focus and regulations to persist under a Labour government. Labour will reap the benefits from what now appears the start of a post-Brexit strategy. Once you have spotted opportunities for investment and drawn in investors, you are not going to reverse to a status-quo ante.

So UK citizens want back in. It’s a foolish position.

Fortunately, the EU would not let the UK back in on terms the UK would accept. These polls are thus meaningless fodder.