As its title of the report indicates, the study Exploring ‘Bregret’, Public attitudes to Brexit, seven years on, conducted and published jointly by Public First and UK in a Changing Europe, is focused on the investigation of negative shifts of opinion about Brexit, especially among those who voted Leave in 2016.
The study comprises two items:
- A large nationwide survey with a sample population of 4000, with results segmented by age, gender, social class, region, referendum vote and political orientation, comprising 133 questions, some of them highly detailed, some addressed to specific subgroups and opinion categories. The report of the raw survey results covers over 500 pages. This survey, commissioned by UKICE conducted by Public First was first published on its own in June 2023.
- A 63-page report produced jointly by UKICE and Public First, based on the earlier survey plus focus groups of leave voters conducted by Public First in three strongly leave-voting referendum areas: Bassetlaw, Thurrock and Ashfield. The study was published in October with significant publicity, including media articles and public discussions by the authors and their organisations (AM and SS for UKICE; JF and SW for Public First), and has since been widely cited.
The report was discussed in a lunch-hour online discussion, “Assessing ‘Bregret’” on 14 November 2023, involving Anand Menon and Sophie Stowers (UKICE), Sarah Wolf (Public First) and Lara Spirit (The Times).
Key messages
Its key messages were:
There is widespread disillusion with the results of Brexit, however:
- a fidelity narrative: not many leavers have changed their minds
- an optimism narrative: many leavers still think Brexit will turn out well in due course
- a betrayal narrative: many leavers think Brexit could have gone better but has been poorly or negligently implemented
- there is a high level of disillusion with politicians
- people are tired of talking about Brexit
- young people tend to be more strongly against Brexit but their views are ‘complex’ and ‘nuanced’.
- Remainers have inaccurate opinions about the motivations of leave voters, in particular exaggerating their hostility to immigration and immigrants.
Both of these studies, qualitative and qualitative, were one-off snapshots, not time series, i.e. they do not provide an indication of current trends: comparative past data is provided only by the current recollections of interviewees, further filtered through the commentaries of the authors.
The survey asked questions not previously or regularly explored by other surveys.
In terms of questions asked previously and regularly by other surveys, certain key results were in line with consistent findings of other contemporaneous studies – hindsight on the 2016 vote; preference given a choice now, indicating a swing of 10-15% from the 2016 vote.The survey does not frontally challenge these consistent findings but its general message is that things are not what they seem and “Bregret” is neither as wide nor deep as has been supposed nor markedly consistent even among the young.
Optimism message
The optimism message is heavily stressed in nearly all the project messaging, but the evidence is softer than is claimed. The actual survey question about Brexit’s future outcome was: “if you had to guess…”, which invites the interviewee to set aside doubt and predict on the basis of gut feeling and hope rather than expectation. The survey does not follow up this question with an invitation to explain the ground for this relative optimism, nor does it specify how far in the future an expected happy outcome might lie.
Brexit fatigue
The other most cited result of this report is the “fatigue” finding: most of us “wish we would stop talking about Brexit”. Unusually, this simple question is posed with no supplementary question about how this statement is understood or why it is supported. However, another question, addressed specifically to new and younger voters, produces a different answer which is ignored in the authors’ commentaries: younger people are emphatically not content to regard Brexit as a closed issue. More generally, of course, fatigue with Brexit emphatically does not equate to satisfaction with Brexit or appreciation of its authors and promoters.
Limited to leave voters
The authors at no point explain why their qualitative research is limited to leave voters and conducted in three areas chosen for their exceptionally high leave voters 2016. [Q: is there evidence that opinion has shifted less in strong leave areas since 2016?]
Significant biases
The survey and its accompanying analyses involve three significant biases: the extensive disregarding of remainer opinion; the inattention to demographic change; the restriction of ‘Bregret’ to a thoroughgoing reversal of opinion.
a) a net shift of opinion among 2016 voters from leave to remain requires that relatively more leavers have changed their opinion than have remainers. Menon et al are impressed by the low number of changed leaver minds. Logically they should be equally impressed by the even lower number of remainers who have changed their view. But, as noted above, the almost sole observation about remainers in this survey is that (according to leavers) remainers have mistaken beliefs (or prejudices) about the motives of leavers. Another highly respected pollster, Peter Kellner; commented on the other hand:
“Drilling down into YouGov’s latest figures, we find that just 65% of Leave voters now say Britain was right to quit the EU. The other 35% either say it was wrong (22%, or more than three million people) or don’t know (13%, or almost two million). In contrast, Remain voters line up solidly behind the view that Brexit was a mistake. As many as 91% still think this.”
“After decades of poll-watching, I cannot think of another major controversy that divides the country down the middle, where so many on one side of the argument have stayed so firm for so long.”
b) The study tends to give the impression that a major real movement of opinion from leave to remain would have to be confirmed by a certain number of leave voters changing their minds. This is however only partly true. A substantial part in the aggregate opinion change between 2016 and 2013 is due not to individual opinion change but to “demographic metabolism”, also termed “voter replacement”. Older votes die, young people join the electorate; most old people are leavers, and most young people are remainers. Studies by Hix et al, Kellner and Willner confirm that demography alone accounts for a substantial part of opinion change over this period – between about one-third and two-thirds of a net swing of between 10 and 15%. Menon and Stowers at one point acknowledge this is part of the story, but after commenting that (as is generally acknowledged) it is not the whole story, and then proceed to ignore it in their report.
c) The survey elicits in some detail the different reasons why different voters think Brexit has gone badly, and whether or how it could have, or could yet go better. This allows for a spectrum of views, influenced by multiple component assessments, about the current situation and future prospects. In some places, the authors specify a definition of ‘true’ Bregret which is a full conversion from having voted for Leave to the view that Brexit is something that could never have worked. Unsurprisingly, the number of full conversions is found to be relatively low, around 4% (which of course would still have been enough to wipe out the Leave majority in 2016). It implies that this casts doubt on the size of the reported current majority for rejoin. But this is based on a fallacy: in order to favour reversing Brexit, it is not necessary to believe that Brexit must under all circumstances fail, but only that under real-world conditions the chances of future benefit are likely to be outweighed by the chances of ongoing harm.
Young people.
The report cites a question in the poll which invites voters who were too young to vote in 2016 to choose for or against each of three options: a close relationship with Europe, rejoin the EU or hold a referendum. Responses are overwhelmingly in favour of all three options, by margins respectively of 61% to 7%, 56% to 11% and 53% to 11% – ratios respectively of yes to no of 8.7 to one, 5.1 to one and 4.8 to one. (The overwhelming scale of these majorities, confirmed in other surveys, is somewhat obscured in the survey’s discussion by being reported as ‘net’ majorities (i.e. ‘yes’ percentage minus ‘no’ percentage): at least one inattentive press report has mislaid the word ‘net’, so the difference between yes and no numbers is misreported as being the yes support number.) The fact that the less ambitious of the three options commands slightly less overwhelming support inspired the author to comment that “there is even among the young a real sense of voter fatigue when it comes to the Brexit debate”. The graphic in the report presenting this result is headlined “The most popular proposal for the future of the UK-EU relations amongst young voters is the formation of a closer working relationship”. This is misleading because the options presented in the question were not mutually exclusive: the vast majority of young voters who desire a closer relationship also favour rejoin, and/or an option to choose rejoin through a referendum.
This remarkable interpretation is buttressed by the result of the question cited above – among 18-24 year olds, “‘I wish we stopped talking about Brexit’ (27% net agreement, vs 37% nationally).” Just what people were expected to have understood by this sentiment or taken it to mean in practical terms is left unexplained: for some, it may have meant that they desired action about Brexit rather than just talk.
What is remarkable is that the polling survey contains a much more explicit question specifically about young voters’ attitudes, whose result is only fleetingly mentioned in the report (p 60)[1]: this is the last of the survey’s 133 questions:
Which of the following comes closest to your view? (from the report)
- “The debate over Britain’s EU membership and Brexit is settled and should not be reopened
- The debate over Britain’s EU membership and Brexit is not settled and should be reopened
- The debate over Britain’s EU membership and Brexit is not settled, but we should not have another referendum”.
The respective agreement scores for these three options were 9%, 45%, and 14%. Excluding don’t knows, two in three young voters wish to see the Brexit debate reopened.
It is unfortunate that the survey does not report the views on older voters on this same question.
In May 2024, following the calling of the General Election, the European Movement published the finding of a poll conducted by We Think that 58% of voters thought that “Brexit and Britain’s relationship with the EU should be one of the main issues in the election”.
Motives of the leave vote
a) Immigration vs sovereignty
One of the bullet points in the report’s Executive Summary states that “Immigration played an important role in convincing people to vote Leave. Yet this importance tends to be overestimated by non-Leave voters, especially relative to other issues, such as control over the lawmaking process, and independence from EU institutions”.
The survey indeed takes some pains to question both remainers and leavers about the motives of the Brexit leave vote, and it emerges – perhaps unsurprisingly – that they disagree. The survey appears to attribute this discrepancy to misperception on the part of remainers. The report does not present any argument as to why this interpretation is necessarily or obviously correct; nor, here or elsewhere, does it cite any earlier or contemporaneous independent evidence on leave voters’ motives and concerns, a question which has commanded considerable attention and research effort since the referendum was held.
There is evidence that overall UK attitudes to immigration have become more positive since 2016, although a sharp recent increase in immigration in 2022-23 has given rise to renewed anxiety. Until the recent surge it was suggested that the public is prepared to accept and even welcome a high level of migration as long as the state has the power to control this level. But in 2016 a clear expectation in many leave voters was not only to control, but to reduce immigration. If the latter was a key aim of Brexit then it may – at least currently – be considered to have failed. The authors do not say why they have singled out for attention the topic of Remainer reception of Leaver opinion. Perhaps it is intended to buttress the prediction that pro-Leave opinion will remain robust over time. Perhaps it could serve to help undermine persisting disapproval of Brexit by those with inaccurate prejudices about the motives of Brexiters. It is worth recalling that Leave campaigned with great intensity via social media in the last days of the campaign over the fear of future immigration to the UK, and its campaign manager attributed their victory to this late offensive. The authors possibly assume too readily that people are infallible sources concerning the motives of their past choices: where people’s anxiety about immigration has since decreased, this change might affect their memory of their attitude at the time of the 2106 vote.
Overall impression
One’s overall impression of this report is that it tends, and perhaps seeks, to play down the scale and seriousness of Bregret, to minimise the evidence that Leave voters are changing their minds and that opinion is shifting overall. The report acknowledges that immigration was a big factor in the referendum but says that leave voters think that other issues were equally or more important. For those who do not wish the Brexit issue to be fundamentally reopened, it is easier if the Brexit vote is not linked to attitudes which have since changed, or to expectations which have not been, and perhaps realistically were never likely to be delivered. It would at least be understandable if some leave voters have retrospectively adjusted their memories of their motivations, and some commentators may be content to adopt and endorse these retouchings of history. The last government in its ongoing defences of Brexit placed heavy stress on the recovery of national sovereignty and the nation’s unqualified power to make its own laws. These are objectives that could be argued to have been delivered although it is contestable whether this have delivered a gain in real autonomy, let alone democracy. A process of adjustment could be occurring by which the expectations of leaver voters are retrospectively retouched to align them with the results actually delivered.
Diverting attention retrospectively from the salience of immigration in the minds of leave voters my offer, for some, the convenient purpose of occluding the massive exploitation of immigration issues, especially in its last stages, by the Leave campaign.
b) Sovereignty vs economy. “No one voted to leave to be better off.”
What, then about the economic benefit of Brexit? One form of Brexiter revisionism says that the Leave vote was primarily about restoring national independence and freedom, not about material comfort, and that leave voters were and are prepared to make material sacrifices in the cause of freedom. This is indeed stated in so many words by the co-director of Public First, Rachel Wolf, during a public online lunchtime discussion of the report hosted by UKICE: “people did not vote Leave in order to be better off”.
In fairness, it should be said that no such claim is put forward in the report and no evidence is presented in support of such a claim. Wolf’s bold rewriting of history nevertheless went unchallenged during this public discussion. The report itself states more than once that the promised economic benefit, specifically in terms of the cessation of payments to Brussels, which could instead be allocated to the NHS, was a real and major motive of leave voters.
Questions of method
A few peculiarities in the study’s method have already been mentioned.
a) The most obvious is that a publication subtitled “Public attitudes to Brexit, seven years on” might be expected to pay equal attention to the evolving views of the public as a whole regardless of how they voted, rather than, as is the case here, primarily and predominantly to those of leave voters, and supplementing its nationwide polling survey by focus groups conducted with leave voters only in three exceptionally pro-Leave areas. In the report, the narrative moves seamless between survey and focus group materials, as though the latter can be assumed to provide a balanced qualitative complement to the former.
b) The elaborate and detailed survey questionnaire has at least one striking omission: at no point are voters directly asked whether they consider they were lied to in the 2016 campaign, and if so by whom. (One single quoted focus group response out of 60 says that they were lied to and would like a referendum on rejoin, but this solitary opinion is preceded by a dismissive comment.)
c) At several points the study authors write of the “indifference” of the public on various questions, as indicated by responses to the survey. The evidence of “indifference” cited here consists solely in the number of the “don’t know” responses. But a don’t know reply can be due to multiple reasons or feelings (uncertainty; conflicting considerations; lack of information) other than indifference to the subject of the question.
The report as narrated in the media: apathy, indifference, anger
The report received significant media coverage, including a long article by Menon and Stowers [UKICE] in the Mirror, an article by James Frayne [Public First] in ConservativeHome, extended pieces in the Times and Guardian, and shorter reports in the Express and Sun. These pieces variously select certain messages from the report and add others.
The Express quotes Menon: Speaking about the result, UK in a Changing Europe director Anand Menon said: “While very few people think Brexit is going well, a large number of Leavers also believe it is still too soon to make a definitive judgment.” He continued: “Many Leave voters believe Brexit has not been a success because politicians have let them down. The danger is that this will lead to an erosion of faith in politics and politicians”.
An extended article in the Mirror by Menon and Stowers was headlined “Leave voters’ optimism in politics has been ‘squandered’ since the 2016 Brexit vote”. It has been customary in discussion of Brexit and the question of rejoin to recall the period of the Referendum as a time of toxicity and trauma, deep divisions and bitter polarisation, even within families and between generations; one MP was brutally murdered and there was a spike in racist and xenophobic attacks and abuse. Menon and Stowers here take a different line, expressing regret for a lost moment of public political engagement and enthusiasm. “Do you remember those sometimes-heated conversations in pubs, restaurants and round the family dinner table? Whatever you think of Brexit itself, one consequence of the vote was increased interest in politics.” The Brexit vote “raised hopes [especially among the disadvantaged] that the rejection of EU membership would serve as a signal to our politicians that things must change. Seven years on, these hopes have been cruelly dashed.” This picks up a theme present although not heavily emphasised in the report: where the Brexit vote was used by some voters as “a howl of protest”, the change which was being sought was not necessarily., or specifically Brexit. Some protest voters are known to have been Remainers who had assumed Remain would win and who on discovering the result of the Referendum at once bitterly regretted their choice. But here, in the narrative of the report authors, the failure to deliver Brexit is a culpable and negligent failure of politicians.
The Guardian quotes Menon: “The UK in a Changing Europe director, Anand Menon, said disappointment about the way Brexit has been managed is likely to exacerbate mistrust of politicians.”
Menon is similarly quoted in the Times:
“’Many Leave voters believe Brexit has not been a success because politicians have let them down. The danger is that this will lead to an erosion of faith in politics and politicians,’ he said. “Nearly half (48 percent) said there was a way in which politicians could have made Brexit work, but that they did not even try, while 70% of Leave voters who feel that Brexit has gone badly believe that it could have gone well but just did not happen”.
James Frayne in Convervativehome, where he has been a columnist since 2016, begins by pouring cold water on the story of leaver discontent.“Each day, large numbers of people regret their choice of lunchtime sandwich and large numbers regret putting on a pair of uncomfortable trousers. And, each day, large numbers of people regret voting for Brexit in 2016. And, each day, they forget all about these mistakes after a few minutes and move on with their lives.”
Frayne, as we saw, similarly dismisses as “vanishingly small” the cohort of leavers (4%) who are now fully converted Remainers.
“This is crucial: it means only 4% of leave voters have swallowed hardcore Remainers’ line that we were all lied to and that we are [sic] need a vote right now to go back in. The group of leavers who align with the continuity remain campaign are therefore vanishingly small in number”. (Note. The Continuity IRA is a violent terrorist splinter group in Northern Ireland that has rejected the ceasefire of 1994 and the subsequent Good Friday Agreement.)
Of far greater significance, according to Frayne, are “the 16% of incandescent leave voters who feel betrayed by politicians’ incompetence and mendacity, and their collective failure to deliver a Brexit that works. These “betrayed” voters blame idiot leave-minded politicians – basically, the Conservative leadership – for messing up negotiations, for failing to secure our borders and reduce immigration, and for refusing to innovate to deliver economic growth.” The present government must “demonstrate to the betrayed that they are doing everything they can to make Brexit work. Naturally, above all, this means by getting control of our borders. But it also means showing they have ideas to make the most of Brexit freedoms to boost the economy.”
As noted earlier, the report and its authors consistently elide the thought that Brexit itself, including the idea of a Brexit that ‘works’, is the product of (some) politicians’ mendacity. Nothing is more typical of Brexit than the idea that lies can be made true on condition of the application of sufficient intellect and political will. As for “ideas to make the most of Brexit freedoms to boost the economy”: many people are, of course, suffering prolonged economic pain resulting from a previous prime minister’s attempts in this direction.
Regarding mendacity, in both his book and blog on [campaigning, Frayne cites with admiration the American Chris LaCivita, the Republican consultant and “chief strategist for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign that derailed Senator John Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004”. Frayne, James. Meet the People: Why businesses must engage with Public Opinion to manage and enhance their reputations (p. 91). Harriman House. Kindle Edition The Swift Boat campaign was an elaborate and massively resourced smear campaign alleging the 2004 Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry had faked his Vietnam war record. According to Wikipedia, “The group’s tactics are considered an example of a successful political smear campaign for its widely publicized and later discredited claims.” LaCivita has subsequently worked on Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign.
Who are Public First?
Public First was founded in 2016 by James Frayne and Rachel Wolf, who are a married couple. Frayn co-authored the report we are discussing, and wrote about it following publication; Wolf took part in the UKICE-hosted discussion of the report following its publication. Frayne has been since 2000 a friend and on recurring occasions a close collaborator of Dominic Cummings. Ahead of the commissioning on this report, Public First was in the news because of a court case by the Good Law Project challenging the legality of the commissioning by Dominic Cummings from Public First of up to £840,000 worth of government communications services relating to Covid-19 and Brexit, without a competitive procurement process. The challenge was upheld by the High Court but then overturned by the Court of Appeal. Rachel Wolf was a co-author of the 2019 Conservative general election manifesto with its central commitment to ‘Get Brexit done’. Before relocating to Nottingham, Public First was based at 11 Tufton Street; it had and has multiple connections to right-wing think tanks and foundations, often located in or near Tufton Street, many of them closely connected to the Leave campaign and Brexiter politicians in recent governments, and to similar parallel organisations in the USA. Much of Frayne’s career appears to have involved either political campaigning in UK and USA for parties of the Right, or political lobbying on behalf of or with the backing of specific business interests. Some of Public First’s funding has come from the fracking industry and it has employed a former Labour MP who has been a high-profile pro-fracking campaigner. It now conducts polling studies and research for a number of clients with diverse interests and is a member of the British Polling Council. It has not previously worked for UKICE or published polling research on Brexit.
Frayne is the author of a book, Meet the Public (2004) which aimed to instruct corporate communications professionals in new web-based political campaigning methods involving the mobilisation of citizens. In 2010 Frayne founded a blog [now deleted] called Campaign War Room which the Guardian described admiringly as “offering daily insights into political campaigning in the UK and the US.” After 2010, Frayne worked with Wolf and Cummings under Michael Gove at the Department of Education. One of his think-tank profiles states, “James is a leading conservative strategist and has been influential in the Conservative Party’s pivot towards working-class voters.”
The profile of Frayne on the website Powerbase.info comments:
“According to his former biography on the website of his former employer, lobbying agency Westbourne Communications, Frayne: ‘pioneered the use of grassroots “people power” campaigns for business and campaign groups’. He also claims to have successfully lobbied against government plans to increase taxes and regulation on businesses by ‘positioning ordinary people against elites’”.
In their book on the UK lobbying industry, Tamasin Cave and Andy Rowell described Frayne as “the master astroturfer” and “the UK’s pioneer of grassroots ‘people power’ campaigns for businesses. [Cave, Tamasin; Rowell, Andy. A Quiet Word: Lobbying, Crony Capitalism and Broken Politics in Britain . Random House. Kindle Edition. [2014]]
It would be interesting how the studies conducted by Public First for this project have been funded. It would be good to be reassured that UKICE has had robust procedures in place to insulate its activity as a sponsor and communicator of objective publicly funded academic research from the influence of lobbying interests and actors.
Normalising Brexit?
Whether this happens depends, of course, on the public policy remit of UKICE. At the start of 2013,Menon posted a column in the Times’s Red box blog, headlined: “We must adapt to the new Brexit normal”. Menon remarks here: “Certainly, public opinion is shifting. As Sir John Curtice, the polling expert, has put it, rather “than looking like an unchallenged ‘fait accompli’, Brexit now appears to be a subject on which a significant body of voters has had second thoughts”. The root cause is the perception that Brexit has had damaging economic consequences.”
However, after rehearsing a few familiar arguments, his conclusion is: “For all the talk about the fragility of Brexit, there are good reasons to believe the present status quo might endure. This is not to say it won’t continue to be a running sore: knickers will remain in a twist. Nonetheless, there is clearly a real possibility that what we have now is what we are likely to have for the medium term at least. Consequently, far more effort should be spent, as we do in our new UK in a Changing Europe report, in considering ways this relationship could be built on short of a wholesale renegotiation. Welcome to the new normal.”
So, should UKICE now rebadge itself the UKIBN, the Institute of Brexit Normalisation? (In German, this would translate neatly as Brexitgleichschaltung.)
As a high-flying academic with high-profile media access, Menon has been receptive to the claims of Brexiter populists to represent an authentic democratic insurrection against the global elite on the part of the disadvantaged, excluded and underprivileged in our society. One of Menon’s most often repeated Brexit anecdotes is about being interrupted during the Referendum campaign while speaking about the economic effects of Brexit at a public meeting in a Newcastle pub by a woman shouting “That’s your GDP – not ours!” Yet the North East, as has been pointed out, is one of the UK regions that is most closely integrated into European industrial supply chains, and vulnerable to their disruption. The woman in the pub has never been identified.
Conversely, it has at times appeared that the will of the people can seem to be of little meaning to Menon as long as it is ignored by power, in the shape of the current Brexiter consensus of the former and new ruling party leaderships. In the lunchtime discussion of the Bregret report, Menon appeared to question even the meaningful possibility in current conditions of a public majority for rejoin – a majority whose existence was being consistently and regularly confirmed by opinion polls reported on the UKICE website.
Menon, in his comments on their report and elsewhere, consistently focusses on Brexit in terms of its harms to public confidence in politics. Brexit was itself of course sold, to a considerable extent, even by some politicians, as a revolt against the political class. The same political class, elite, ‘deep state’ or ‘blob’ has since been blamed by Brexiters for the failure of Brexit, whether by overt obstruction or by culpable incompetence, weakness or betrayal. These views are assiduously analysed and quoted in this report. As we have noted above, little of anything is said of the dissatisfactions of those who voted against Brexit and (in overwhelming majority) remain unconvinced of its merits or promise and are now the core of a majority which desires its reversal. It is hard to see a better model of democratic politics and government emerging from the demand – even now, after the spectacular eviction of a governing party – that a harmful policy must at all costs be persisted with in bounden fidelity to the result of a past democratic consultation.
The blurb to Menon’s co-authored 2017 book on Brexit conclude with the warning that its reverberations “will continue to be felt for a very long time and could pose a real danger to the health of British democracy if the government fails to deliver on the promises linked to Brexit.”
The lesson he derives in 2023 from this report remains unchanged. In 2017 it was still possible, if one chose, as many did, to warn that the promises of Brexiters were false. Six years later, it might have been timely to consider whether if the health of British democracy is well served by persistently demanding the undeliverable.
[December 2023, revised October 2024]
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