On January 31, 2020, at 11 p.m. (London local time), the United Kingdom put an end to almost four decades of European integration. The Brexit opened an unknown path for both the UK and the EU, marked by a succession of stumbling blocks that have not been fully resolved and that have been felt in a lower level of social support for the resounding divorce.
Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the main face of the Brexit campaign and tenant of Downing Street at key moments of the negotiation, promised that the country would be freer to adopt its own laws and weave new alliances.
However, political messages aside, the reality is different. In October 2021, the Office for Budget Responsibility, an independent body of the British government, estimated that Brexit would represent a burden for the United Kingdom equivalent to 4 percent of GDP.
There are no new estimates on the table, but reports from the British Chamber of Commerce have confirmed that the trade deal sealed with the EU has not yet helped more than three-quarters of businesses, now facing more red tape and even a shortage of labor.
The pound has also lost value – it began to lose value even before Brexit, in anticipation of what was to come – and inflation closed 2022 above 9 percent, in a particularly complicated year in which collateral damage from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was added.
At the street level, part of those who voted in June 2016 to separate from the European Union -they were a majority with 52 percent- have begun to wonder if they did the right thing. Thirty-one percent of the population continue to defend Brexit, but 55 percent believe the country was wrong.
Analyst Lukas Paleckis, a researcher at polling firm YouGov, told Europa Press that this remorse did not come immediately and has been on the rise, something attested to by multiple polls conducted in recent months.
Paleckis explains that until the end of 2021 the proportion of ‘Brexiters’ who regretted their vote did not reach 10 percent. «In the last twelve months, we have seen this figure rise and in our latest poll it stands at 19 percent,» he says, which equates to almost one in five voters.
On possible turning points, he admits that it is «difficult» to pinpoint where it all started to go wrong in terms of social support, but a specific study on the reasons that have led some Brexit supporters to now disavow their position in 2016 shows that 25 percent of them believe that «things have gotten worse».
Nineteen percent cite the rising cost of living and 11 percent feel cheated. For the annals of political propaganda has been the £350 million Johnson promised the UK would save a week out of the EU, despite there being no basis to support it.
The Brexit has also served over the years to highlight the divergences by territory. In Scotland, 62 percent of voters favored remaining in the EU, a central argument for pro-independence supporters to call again for a referendum on secession.
In Northern Ireland, the option of remaining in the European bloc also triumphed, with 55.8 percent, and the territory currently lacks an incumbent government largely due to divergences over the new framework of relations with the EU after Brexit.
The withdrawal agreement included a specific protocol to avoid the introduction of a ‘hard border’ on the island of Ireland, but ‘de facto’ this forces controls on traffic to and from Britain. For Unionists, this protocol distances Northern Ireland from the UK as a whole and is unacceptable.
Gibraltar accumulated an even greater rejection of Brexit — 95.9 percent — and is still awaiting the framework of future relations that will allow it to remain in the Schengen orbit and will contemplate the end of the fence. One of the main stumbling blocks in the negotiations is the form and substance of the control to be established at Gibraltar’s entry points.
The division is also evident by age, since while only 5 percent of British citizens between 18 and 24 years of age support Brexit three years after the divorce, the figure soars to 54 percent among those over 65 years of age.
«In relation to the handling of the UK’s exit from the EU, young people are more likely to say that the government has handled the issue badly,» adds Paleckis, who extends this age disparity to other policy issues.
In any case, in a UK still trying to recover from the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, which has seen three prime ministers parade down Downing Street in a single year and lost its queen for seven decades, Brexit seems to have lost weight in the social imagination.
Paleckis explains that «when you compare Brexit to other problems facing the country, it doesn’t seem to have the same level of importance.» The economy virtually dominates everything and, for 65 percent of Britons, it is a top issue, ahead of healthcare (55 percent) and immigration (28).
The fact that the United Kingdom is outside the European Union does not appear until the fourth position in the YouGov polls, with an average of 19 percent. Citizens who voted to remain in the bloc attach more importance to it, as 29 percent do consider Brexit a major problem.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
