I have been surprised by the way opinion has stayed pretty much where it was on the day of the referendum so far. If you look back on polling about the EU since we joined, opposition to it has generally been at just about the 50% of the population reasonably often, but it has been quite a bit lower for long periods of time. My guess was that once the vote had been taken support for leaving would begin to fall back to its more normal level of around 40%. I wasn’t sure though. It was equally possible that it would become more popular as people found out more about it. Basically, if there was a backlash against the ludicrous Project Fear projections it was possible that there would be post vote Brexit boost. Neither of those eventualities seemed unlikely and both would have been easy to explain.
But the fact is that people seem to be holding pretty firm to what they thought a year ago for the most part, even though the overall situation we find ourselves in has changed a lot, and even though a lot of the drawbacks that have been talked about are beginning to come into view as very real possibilities. There is still some propoganda efforts going on on the leave side. So a poll that showed that a large number of people who prefer to remain nonetheless accept that the vote was to leave and so that is what we should do. I fall into that camp myself and find it rather irritating to have my belief in respect for the democratic process to be interpreted as support for the outcome of that process. I believe that the party that has the most seats in the House of Commons should form the government. It doesn’t mean that I support that party.
But leaving that bit of sophistry aside, there are some indications that opinion is shifting away from leaving the EU, albeit very slowly. A recent survey by Survation - one of the pollsters who weren’t made to look ridiculous by the recent election result - indicates that a big majority now want to stay in the single market. Another survey shows that 89% of people want to keep their EU passports. The benefits of being an EU citizen are clearly only lost on a small proportion of people in the UK. In fact that survey is to my mind really strong evidence that while there still may be a narrow majority that would vote to leave the EU in any new referendum, they might well not be as unhappy as all that if it turned out that we were going to stay in anyway.
So although there is no strong evidence of any desire to overturn the vote to leave just yet, there is evidence that there won’t be a huge number of people who would really be that upset if a way were to be found to do exactly that. In fact I’d go a bit further. The right sequence of events could still sink Brexit. Imagine some Tory MP decides to throw their hat into the ring for a leadership contest on the promise to ‘reverse Brexit’. They might for example do so on the grounds that they wanted to widen the debate. That after all was how Jeremy Corbyn came to be on offer to Labour Party members. A fluke result splits the support of the pro-Brexit majority and they become leader. To unpick the crisis the only solution is another referendum - but this time there are 3 options. With the choice between remain, hard or soft Brexit does anyone doubt that remain would win?
Okay, none of this is likely. But a lot of unlikely things have happened lately.
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