LONDON (The Independent) – More than six in 10 voters in Britain believe Brexit has gone badly or worse than expected, a new poll has found a year after the UK left the EU.
The Opinium survey for The Observer also found that 42 percent of people who voted Leave in 2016 had a negative view of how Brexit has turned out, The Independent reported.
The survey comes a week after Brexit Minister Lord Frost resigned from UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government amid disagreements in its “direction”.
Foreign secretary Liz Truss has now taken over post-Brexit negotiations.
Some 26 percent of people who voted to leave the EU said it had gone worse than expected – 16 per cent of Leave voters expected it to go badly and said they had been proved right.
The Observer said that 86 percent of people who voted to stay in the EU said it had turned out badly or worse than expected, while 14 per cent of all voters said the process went better than anticipated.
Opinium surveyed 1,904 adults in the UK between 21 and 23 of December.
Adam Drummond of Opinium said the most prominent finding was that Leave voters were now more hesitant about the virtues of Brexit than previously.
“For most of the Brexit process any time you’d ask a question that could be boiled down to ‘is Brexit good or bad?’ you’d have all of the Remainers saying ‘bad’ and all of the Leavers saying ‘good’ and these would cancel each other out,” he said.
“Now what we’re seeing is a significant minority of Leavers saying that things are going badly or at least worse than they expected. While 59 percent of Remain voters said, ‘I expected it to go badly and think it has’, only 17 percent of Leave voters said, ‘I expected it to go well and think it has’.”
The UK has seen significant disruption at the hand of Brexit this year, with shortages of HGV drivers, manual laborers and care workers. The government was forced to offer 5,500 visas to poultry to tackle shortages while a similar scheme was introduced to bring in more HGV drivers to tackle the petrol crisis.
A recent poll also found that Remain would win a second Brexit referendum by a narrow margin if the vote were held today. Five years to the day since the 2016 referendum took place, a Savanta ComRes survey found 51 percent of respondents would now vote to remain, whereas 49 percent would vote leave, based on interviews conducted last week.
The polling also showed that very few people had shifted positions since the 2016 referendum. Only 6 percent of Remainers said they would now vote Leave, and 7 percent of Leavers would now change their vote to Remain.