As the U.K. heads to the polls next week, a majority thinks that leaving the EU was a mistake and has delivered few benefits—and new problems.
That’s surprising, it seemed like such a bad idea from the get-go, but who knew it would actually turn out that way? I’d say hopefully it can serve as a warning to other countries that might want to leave the EU, but the kind of people that would want to leave in the first place probably aren’t the kind of people to actually consider evidence anyways. I’m sure we’ll see this replay in other EU countries as these far-right, oddly Russian-friendly parties start getting into power and wanting to weaken the EU/NATO.
It did actually do that. The UK wasn’t even the most Eurosceptic country around the time of 2015/2016. (I.e. the aftermath of the refugee crisis where the EU took a severe hit in popularity across the union).
Anti-EU sentiment was huge around that time particularly in the UK, Latvia, Hungary, France, Greece, Spain and the Netherlands. Averaged across all members of the union, less than 50% looked at the EU favourably after removing “don’t know” answers (Eurobarometer survey).
The UK (or rather more specifically, David Cameron), was just the only one stupid enough to pull that kind of reckless political brinkmanship.
He thought that by calling the referendum and having Remain win (which is what polling indicated, plus he probably didn’t think Tory media would love Brexit so much considering he, the PM, was massively against it), UKIP would fall apart, anti-EU sentiment would subside, and the emergence of a competing right-wing party would be halted.
Logical, but a ridiculously high-risk game. He gambled the UK’s international standing on political games to help his own party.
By 2019, after seeing the ensuing shitshow that the Tories handling Brexit was, as well as the refugee crisis becoming a memory not an ongoing event, the EU had rebounded and hit its highest approval rating since 1983.
