One year on, most voters say Brexit has gone
badly
An Opinium poll also found that 42% of people who
voted Leave in 2016 had a negative view of how it had turned out
Toby Helm
Sat 25 Dec
2021 20.00 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/dec/25/one-year-on-most-voters-say-brexit-has-gone-badly
More than
six out of 10 voters believe Brexit has either gone badly or worse than they
expected – a year after the UK left the EU, according to an anniversary poll
for the Observer.
The Opinium
survey – coming a week after the minister in charge of Brexit, Lord Frost,
resigned from Boris Johnson’s government – also found that 42% of people who
voted Leave in 2016 had a negative view of how Brexit had turned out so far.
26% of
Leave supporters said it had gone worse than they expected, while 16% of those
who voted for Brexit said they had expected it to go badly and had been proved
right.
Among
people who voted Remain, 86% said it had gone badly or worse than they
expected. Overall, just 14% of all voters said Brexit had gone better than
expected.
Adam
Drummond, of Opinium, said the most striking finding was that Leavers 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% of Remain voters said, ‘I
expected it to go badly and think it has’, only 17% of Leave voters said, ‘I
expected it to go well and think it has’.
“Only 7% of
Remainers think Brexit has gone better than expected versus 26% of Leavers
saying it has gone worse than expected. So instead of two uniformly opposing
blocs, the Remain bloc are still mostly united on Brexit being bad while the
Leave bloc are a bit more split.”
The poll
comes ahead of the introduction on 1 January of full customs checks on goods
being exported from the EU to the UK, which business leaders believe could
deter some smaller operators – such as food exporters – from supplying UK
retailers as their costs and paperwork increase. These will be followed by more
checks on food imports from mid-summer.
Shane
Brennan, chief executive of the Cold Chain Federation, said he expected many of
the problems faced over the past year by small UK businesses exporting to the
EU, particularly the rising cost of sending small amounts because of new
charges, would now confront those sending small specialist consignments the
other way, from the EU to the UK.
He warned
that this could lead to less availability of specialist food products from the
continent arriving in UK shops. “Small traders have a choice, find a way to
send more less often, or don’t send it at all,” Brennan said. “For lots of
businesses you can’t justify sending a lorry load of fresh food a day or week
and so you won’t do it. The net result is less variety, less fresh, quality
specialist goods on the shelf, from outside the UK anyway.”
His fears
were echoed by Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the Food and
Drink Federation, who said: “As new trade barriers are introduced, it is
inevitable that businesses will experience issues at the border. In some cases,
this could result in significant barriers that risk blocking deliveries from EU
suppliers altogether, at least temporarily, while businesses adjust to the new
requirements or restructure their supply chains.
“For
just-in-time supply chains, this presents a real risk which could disrupt the
operation of UK supply chains where a critically important ingredient is
delayed or fails to arrive. Such delays could also lead to other ingredients
already at factories being unusable.”
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