Support for rejoining the European Union is at its highest level since the Brexit vote – but political leaders need to seize the opportunity or it will all come to nothing, the UK’s leading polling guru has warned.
Professor Sir John Curtice said public opinion had shifted despite a relative silence from many parties and “therefore, if you were to start to make the argument... you should be able to move the dial further”.
But a future referendum could still be on a knife edge, Sir John suggested, and won or lost in how the argument was framed.
In an exclusive interview with The Independent, he said that 61 per cent of Britons now say they would vote to rejoin, compared to 39 per cent who say they would stay out.
“That is the highest figure that it has been, as an average over any extended period of time, all the way back to 2016,” he said.
But he added that most people who voted in the 2016 referendum “have not changed their minds”. Only about 18 per cent of Leave voters say they would now vote to rejoin, while 11 per cent of Remainers would stay out.
However, there are now 10 years’ worth of people who were too young to cast a ballot in 2016 who can now vote and “they are very heavily in favour of rejoining”, he said.
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Some older voters, who were more likely to vote Leave, have also died, while polls suggest others who could vote but did not are also “balanced in favour of rejoining”.
Asked if he saw the trend continuing, Sir John, who was speaking to The Independent as part of the Europe: The Way Back campaign, said: “Other things being equal, yes.”
Politicians arguing in favour would push the figures higher, he said.
“Public opinion has shifted quite considerably, partly for demographic reasons, even though prior to 2024, apart from the Greens and the nationalists, nobody was arguing in favour of rejoining,” Sir John explained.
“Not even the Liberal Democrats were making that case. They’re kind of now moving in that direction, but [Lib Dem leader] Ed Davey didn’t want to talk about it before 2024 either. So one can argue that the public has shifted despite the fact that they have been given very little indication from their political leaders that they should do so. And that, therefore, if you were to start to make the argument, if you come up with arguments that are anywhere halfway decent, then you should be able to move the dial somewhat further in your direction.”
But he warned the framing of the argument could still define the outcome in any referendum – and said Andy Burnham is going to have to “sell” his post-Brexit reset with Europe to the public.
While the headline figure in favour of rejoining is high, the public is still concerned about issues such as whether the UK would have to become part of the eurozone or the Schengen travel area to be readmitted.
If there was another vote, the Remain/rejoin side “will be starting from a better baseline than they did at the time of the EU referendum… but it’s still an argument that will have to be won and could still be lost unless you win the argument about framing”, said Sir John.
He said Mr Burnham cannot continue to pursue “Labour’s ‘keep quiet’ strategy”, if he is to garner support for closer ties with the bloc.
Sir Keir Starmer and his key adviser Morgan McSweeney’s electoral strategy was “to get Labour to reconnect with working class and Leave voters in the ‘red wall’ who were thought to be crucial to Labour’s chances of winning in 2024”, but that project had only a marginal effect, he said.
Labour had now begun to talk about Brexit “a bit”, he said, but he pointed to the expected UK-EU summit later this year where a deal on food and drink exports and youth mobility is expected to be on the table.
He said: “One of the disadvantages of Labour’s keep quiet strategy, and not really having so far paid much effort into trying to sell what they’re trying to do, is that you make it less likely that in the end the public would accept what you have done.
“At some point, if you are a government and you decide to change things, you need to be willing to defend it.”
He added: “If you don’t defend it, of course, Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch will say this is failing to respect the vote of the electorate back in 2016.”
The Cabinet Office has been approached for comment.
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