New Referendum Would Flip Brexit Result 10 Years On, Poll Finds

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-08/new-referendum-would-flip-brexit-result-10-years-on-poll-finds

by MilnerRoute • 1 month ago

56 95 1 month ago

Tufts University asked an academic what the financial results were for the UK:

"The British GDP has been reduced by 6–8%, business investment has been reduced by 12%, and trade volume has been reduced by 15%, compared to what it could have been if the U.K. had remained in the EU."

https://now.tufts.edu/2026/06/08/10-years-after-brexit-vote-...

Insanity• 1 month ago

Which is pretty much aligned with what more level-headed people predicted would happen, if my memory is correct. There was a strong push for UK to leave EU, but it was more based on emotion than rational. Of course the 'right' used the narrative of prosperity to get votes, but it never really made sense economically to leave the strong economic power of the EU and try to be independent again.

The UK is not the empire it was once, they need ties with mainland Europe, their closest trading partners, to be economically viable. So this doesn't entirely come as a surprise to me.

dijksterhuis• 1 month ago

Your username is weirdly on point for discussion of the topic at hand i guess xD

bpye2• 1 month ago

Which is pretty much aligned with what more level-headed people predicted would happen, if my memory is correct.

Of course this was painted as "project fear", and Michael Gove famously said that people had had enough of experts.

mrguyorama2• 1 month ago

Of course the 'right' used the narrative of prosperity to get votes

They used lies. Literal fabrications out of whole cloth.

They said that the UK was spending hundreds of millions of pounds on the EU, and if they pulled out they could use that money on like the NHS or something.

Lies.

gadders• 1 month ago

The first time in history people have been able to accurately predict a counter-factual.

Of course, any economic gains weren't guaranteed and were predicated on competent national government and we saw what happened there.

However, net-net, I'd rather have one shite layer of government, rather than two.

bonzini• 1 month ago

However, net-net, I'd rather have one shite layer of government, rather than two.

To make a parallel that might work for California or NY. In Europe however there is no single country that is so much better than the others at making money, in the same way as those two. Even countries that didn't enter the EU (Switzerland, Norway) accepted most of the EU regulations because they need some of them.

The UK in that respect already had the sweetest deal of all EU members; and, unlike Switzerland or Norway, actually had a say on the regulations that it had to follow. Plus, they had and have a messy situation due to (non-EU-related and therefore unaffected by Brexit) agreements that the border with Ireland cannot be a customs union, so the only thing a competent national government could do was to tell people they had been duped and promised something impossible. The result would have been a Switzerland- or Norway-like non-membership, with small benefits and less power in the EU.

onlyrealcuzzo• 1 month ago

"The British GDP has been reduced by 6–8%, business investment has been reduced by 12%, and trade volume has been reduced by 15%, compared to what it could have been if the U.K. had remained in the EU."

The average person doesn't care about any of that.

If ~99% of those gains go to ~0.1% of people, the average person does not care.

What they do care about is, did MY expenses go up higher than MY wages. Did MY opportunities get better or worse...

In the UK example, the result is potentially even worse - but I would guess the response to COVID & global wars are likely to have a bigger impact on that than Brexit.

marcusverus• 1 month ago

Ah yes, economists are famously capable of accurately projecting a decade in the future.

mynameisash• 1 month ago

https://archive.ph/giLPA

noncoml2• 1 month ago

I don’t buy it. They are getting ready make Farage a prime minister, based on the exact same premise: xenophobia.

delecti2• 1 month ago

I'm sure that's part of why, but the bigger reason is probably a more reflexive "well we switched more left and it didn't help, what if we go the other way." After a dramatic Labour win, they're just Conservative-lite. That kind of "well this didn't work, lets go the other way" response doesn't necessarily mean anything about any party's actual popularity.

noncoml2• 1 month ago

Huh? Brexit materialized in 2020. Labour happened in 2024. Immigration going up between 2020-2024. Going down since 2024. And that’s somehow Labour’s fault?

jltsiren• 1 month ago

Those two outcomes are not mutually exclusive. A first-past-the-post system can give the power to a minority, if the opposing votes are divided. In the 2024 elections, Labour got a third of the votes but almost two thirds of the seats.

bpye2• 1 month ago

If they do, Reform would almost certainly form government on a minority of the vote. Brexit was a yes/no question.

zuzululu5• 1 month ago

None of this should be surprising unless you've been just gobbling up whatever you heard through mainstream media.

Britain is at a breaking point. There are existential questions to be asked:

Is Britain British without British Bourgeoisie that have lived there for thousands of years with new arrivals that have no commmon culture or connection to the land?

Can Japan be called Japan without Japanese that have lived there for thousands of years and their homogeneous identity?

Why is it okay for one but not the other? Where does this double standard come from ?

The fact is the loudest voice in the room so far has never been representative of the answer to the above questions.

moomin4• 1 month ago

Objectively, Japan needs to do something about its culture. It’s literally killing the country.

Pretty sure a Japanese person could say the same thing about the U.K.

nephihaha6• 1 month ago

Japan is doing something. It is decades behind Europe but going down a similar path.

HoldOnAMinute• 1 month ago

There would need to be a mental and cultural framework where the old ways are loved, respected and allowed to be mourned.

henearkr6• 1 month ago

It's not ok in Japan either.

And its "homogeneous identity" is mostly a construction, dating back from the Meiji era.

And Heian period Japan had a completely different set of values, not less nor more valid than Meiji era Japan, just different.

So the identity of a nation is not something eternal nor absolute.

Heck, there is even proof Japan has been a mosaic of at least three sets of human populations in prehistoric times, arrived at different times on the land.

So here you are: yes Japan was, long time ago, a land of immigration.

nephihaha6• 1 month ago

Japan is fairly homogenous with the obvious exception of the Ainu and certain castes. Much more so than Persia/Iran, Russia, Mexico or India. When Japan had a large empire, that was not so much the case, because they ruled over very different peoples.

hiddencost• 1 month ago

Easy question with an easy answer that threatens a lot of bad people: immigrants are good.

slashdev• 1 month ago

That’s way too simplistic.

Not all immigrants are good. Many cost society more than they contribute. The right kind of immigrants are good.

nephihaha6• 1 month ago

Immigrants are people. People are not automatically good. Or bad.

Migration is not just a choice between an open door and a closed door, but a spectrum. There are a variety of levels between those two extremes.

henearkr6• 1 month ago

Yes.

Mixing of cultures always lead to adding up their different solutions to all kinds of problems, improving the fitness of the result among other groups of humans.

It's gathering all the positive ideas or traditions of several groups, and the less useful or negative aspects tend to just fade naturally.

rubyn00bie• 1 month ago

Having a storied history, culture, and customs go beyond simple birthright citizenship and xenophobic behavior to enforce said culture and sense of identity. The US, for all its faults, exemplifies how unnecessary it is to rely solely on where you were born— anyone can move to the US, get citizenship, and call themselves “American.” I honestly cannot understand what “connection with the land” even means in reality. Most people aren’t farmers, and land has no inherent culture. People do, and culture is acquired by living in it and participating in it. Culture also changes overtime and is, like the earth itself, for the living.

This idea that for some reason other human beings cannot embrace, be a part of, and contribute to existing culture simply because they were born in a different country is flagrantly absurd. It’s also how people who are born somewhere, but don’t “look the part” have to fight an uphill battle to prove they are.

So yeah, Japan could be called Japan if people who live there are culturally Japanese, participate in shared culture, and contribute to it. I am also absolutely aware that isn’t possible by any reasonable means currently, but it doesn’t change the fact it should be.

newaccountman22• 1 month ago

The result of the poll in the article seems to be a soft rebuke of the kind of viewpoint you espouse.

Can Japan be called Japan without Japanese that have lived there for thousands of years and their homogeneous identity?
Why is it okay for one but not the other? Where does this double standard come from ?

Disingenuous question; even people who like Japan and Japanese culture tend to dislike how xenophobic and racist it is.

zuzululu5• 1 month ago

which is why Sane Takaichi became PM ? I do think there is a clear distance from all the Japan experts on HN and reality

add-sub-mul-div• 1 month ago

I don't understand Japanese culture well enough to comment on it, but if it contained the ugliness of xenophobia and white supremacy as they exist in America I'd surely oppose it.

iamflimflam1• 1 month ago

Are you British or do you live in Britain?

sph2• 1 month ago

Why? One can parrot Reform talking points from anywhere.

zuzululu5• 1 month ago

I don't consider my self British even though my Croatian roots can easily pass as one and I lived there during my early adulthood

but one need not live in Britain to know its issues and see past the filter of MSM

we have X now so we can get a more raw look at what's actually happening and what we are not being fully shown.

socalgal23• 1 month ago

Great Radiolab on this topic

https://radiolab.org/podcast/americanish-2306

It's also fun to watch people's heads explode over the hypocracy pointed out by this episode. Short version: If Samoa has to follow non-racial discrimination rules than Samoa as a place of Samoans will cease to exist. Without taking a side, the same is true of Israel.

10xDev2• 1 month ago

Japan never colonised India, Japan never colonised an African nation, Japan never colonised a Caribbean nation.

Britain overnight cannot have a fresh start from its past, even the royals have ties to other nations. The England that was always English never existed and its history will always be rooted in the British empire (where the sun never set).

po1nt3• 1 month ago

Well Britain didn't genocide the Chinese. And all the countries colonized by Britain are now better of then those that weren't. Look at ex-Rhodesia.

hinata08• 1 month ago

with new arrivals that have no commmon culture or connection to the land

actually Britain still see these arrivals. Brexit restored immigration from people with more walks of life and with a more worldwide origins. There is no fast track for any nationality, like when EU citizens didn't need a visa, so companies are blind to origin.

You only got rid of the maudzits français / stronzo francese who liked the queen way too much and feel at home everywhere. The Québécois, the Swiss, the Dutch and a part of Europe look at Britain as an example for that : it's so funny to see them struggle with the UK ETA app while they no longer have Tyrrells crisps, as they keep complaining about british food and were mean about the tapestry anyway.

But was this show worth the losses that Britain had ?

It's never too late to apply again, Britain hasn't deviated from its course of rule of law and democracy

anigbrowl3• 1 month ago

These questions aren't comparable. Japan had a crash modernization followed by a brief outburst of violent colonialism, which they thought was the style at the time but was actually in decline almost everywhere else.

Britain had an empire that lasted hundreds of years, and whose greatest legacy is linguistic and temporal system dominance. Having spent centuries proclaiming itself to be the literal center of civilization to most of the world, is it really surprising that ambitious individuals gravitate toward it? This is the common culture that Britain set out to impose on its possessions.

It's especially ironic (though not especially surprising) that immigration from former territories went way up after Britain forcibly detached itself from the EU. Perhaps the Brexiteers wil offer to secede from the world next - build a national space program and launch Britain into orbit as a second satellite that can service its markets while orbiting the planet from a distance.

10xDev2• 1 month ago

The comparisons between the two nations are always superficial. When you peel the layers of nonsense off, it is just white supremacy with a mediocre attempt at masking it.

applfanboysbgon• 1 month ago

which they thought was the style at the time but was actually in decline almost everywhere else.

I truly hate the historical revisionism of Westerners. Japan engaged in colonialism because it was an active victim of colonialism, and the only way to fight back was to stand on equal footing. Through the 1800s~1940s, Europe controlled nearly the entirety of Asia. China had been subject to countless treaties forced upon it. The Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma, India were all colonies. 90% of Africa was under European control. 100% of both Americas was under European control. 100% of Australia and New Zealand was under European control. Europeans were literally aiming for world domination. The list of countries free from European colonialism could be counted on one hand: Japan (only because it successfully fought back), Korea (before it got annexed by Japan), Siam, Nepal, Iran pretty much covers it. Yet amazingly Europeans found and continue to find no shortage of pearl clutching over Japan daring to do the same thing they did, in a dog-eat-dog world where not doing so meant becoming another pawn.

To the extent colonialism declined, it was solely due to to the world wars wrecking Europe so utterly they could not maintain their overseas holdings, + the untouched US intervening in eg. Suez Crisis in order to assert itself as the global Western hegemon with no peers.

surgical_fire• 1 month ago

Is Britain British without British Bourgeoisie that have lived there for thousands of years with new arrivals that have no commmon culture or connection to the land?

Thousands of years? Are you talking about celts?

Because Romans later arrived in Britannia and founded Londinium. Is it British when it was founded by those pesky Romans?

Or are you complaining about later populations, such as Vikings or Normans? I mean, they haven't been to the British isles for thousands of years. How can Britain be British with those smelly frenchmen?

Unless what you really are trying to do is complain that Britain now has too many brown people.

gib444• 1 month ago

Why is it okay for one but not the other? Where does this double standard come from ?

Because in Japan AIUI they haven't been infiltrated by people pushing narratives that being eg White British is inherently racist, that to not open your borders to one and all is racism and xenophobia (you can see lots of examples of such people in the post about the Swiss referendum on the 10M population limit), which they do in order to gain for them and their communities.

The existing minority populations know they can abuse our good nature, our placidity, our leftist politicians, and even the English language in order to gain, and to position themselves as continuous victims. Some feminists do the same. The idea that the whole of the UK is full of angry white supremacist racists is the kind of propaganda I allude to (it's funny how many US folk here fall for it).

(I am British, lived here all my life, live in a county with many areas of significant minority populations, and just old enough to have observed plenty of change in England)

asveikau• 1 month ago

Excuse me, are you holding up the British as some kind of pure, undisturbed ethnicity?

You mean the celts who were conquered by Romans who were conquered be Angles who were conquered by Normans? Who speak this bastard language we're using now, where most vocabulary is Latinate upon bones of Germanic?

henearkr6• 1 month ago

That's a dangerous situation for EU:

- UK would rejoin EU,

- and then, later on, Reform would reach power and undermine EU just like Orban did.

So maybe it would be better to refuse UK its reentry into EU...

Beijinger2• 1 month ago

Trump would be happy if the UK joins the US. With Canada. And Greenland. ;-)

bojan3• 1 month ago

A successful rejoin referendum would probably help contain Reform.

However such a referendum is basically taboo in the British public discourse.

nephihaha6• 1 month ago

The taboo is the notion that the European Union needs to be reformed (no pun intended!). I was a Remainer, and do not regret that, but I hoped the EU would clean house. (Yes, the UK should do as well btw. Scotland should be independent. The House of Lords, Whitehall and Royal Family need a major overhaul.)

ben_w• 1 month ago

IMO, the only thing that will contain Reform is Farage suffering consequences for misconduct. That or being overtaken by even worse people. The two things…

henearkr6• 1 month ago

If so, there is some kind of hope.

RobertoG• 1 month ago

what does 'undermine' means here? It seems that there is a 'correct' way of thinking, and if you don't play along you're an enemy or a Russian asset or whatever. Not very democratic.

alibarber• 1 month ago

I'm afraid that it looks as if there are plenty of other contenders for those who might wish to undermine the EU, now and in the future.

ptaffs2• 1 month ago

At the time "polls" predicted a Remain win. Between the vote and the eventual Brexit along with protests, there was a government petition for a redo and a Remain optimism that a re-do would flip the result. For this poll to me meaningful, I would expect to see declining support for Reform. But the opposite is happening.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/revoke-artic...

bojan3• 1 month ago

At the time "polls" predicted a Remain win.

This is a common trope but is simply not true. The polls were really tight[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_United...

ceejayoz4• 1 month ago

Your link largely agrees; the "Polls of polls" shows a general consensus on a tight Remain win, and the chart shows the convergence being very late in the game.

moomin4• 1 month ago

Reform don’t need 50%, though. I don’t think even Margaret Thatcher’s landslide got more than 40% of the vote.

ceejayoz4• 1 month ago

A change of this magnitude probably should've been like an American constitutional amendment; a stricter requirement than 50%+1 vote.

f33d51732• 1 month ago

What percentage of the vote was required to join the EU? The EU effectively constitutes a relinquishment of sovereignty, but that's not how it was sold to citizens, they were told that they could leave at any time.

moomin4• 1 month ago

This is why these kinds of decisions shouldn’t be flipped on a marginal vote. Most countries require a supermajority before doing something like this.

Sadly this now cuts the other way and the EU is highly unlikely to enter into anything with us without serious guarantees.

masfuerte• 1 month ago

We would have had a quorum requirement if it was a proper referendum but it wasn't, it was claimed to be purely advisory. Of course, it was never going to work like that if leave won. David Cameron is an arse.

Beijinger2• 1 month ago

This post is 2 years old and pretty bleak:

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2024/07/02/broken-bri...

po1nt3• 1 month ago

Didn't the polls say the same before brexit? I don't get it. They left to stay away from regulations, just to put even harsher ones.

rich_sasha• 1 month ago

Also today: UK cutting infrastructure investments into healthcare and education by £5bn to fund defence [1].

I'm all up for defence spending in Europe, but if you had anything to do with British state education or healthcare, you know what a desperate move this is.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-07/uk-plans-...

po1nt3• 1 month ago

You don't know how bad it can get. See Ukraine.

socalgal23• 1 month ago

I'm curious what valid reasons there are against Brexit? AFAICT, most people arguing it is/was bad are ignoring any kind of evidence.

The UK is doing fine, especially relative to other EU countries. None of the things the anti-Brexit side claimed would happen have happened.

tim3332• 1 month ago

It's been quite meh economically - we'd be wealthier if we'd remained. Also immigration went up which is not what a lot of Brexiters were hoping.

I think a lot of the Brexit vote was just people being fed up and voting for something different. In my experience few Brexit voters are happy with what arrived.

anonymousiam• 1 month ago

"we'd be wealthier if we'd remained"

Briton would be even wealthier still if they had never joined the EU in the first place.

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...

socalgal23• 1 month ago

There's no evidence Britain would be wealthier if it remained.

mbirth• 1 month ago

Most of the people that want to rejoin the EU never realised that Brexit happened at the same time as COVID and they believe that all the bad things that happened since were due to Brexit and Brexit only. All the while ignoring that most EU countries are not that much better off. Just look at the GDP growth.

New Referendum Would Flip Brexit Result 10 Years On, Poll Finds

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