As we write this, in between bouts of weeping with exhausted misery, frustration and rage, Her Majesty’s Opposition’s interminable will-they-won’t-they game of attempting – maybe, one day, perhaps – to bring down the government and force a new election leading to a new EU referendum continues.
And as the SNP in particular devotes huge amounts of energy to trying to stop Brexit, against the wishes of its own voters, we wondered how the public not just in Scotland but in the two constituent nations of the UK that voted Leave felt about that.
Uh-oh.
The first finding wasn’t exactly news, but still marked a development.
Numerous polls have previously found that English voters are willing to offload the rest of the UK in the name of Brexit, but until now the margin had been fairly close. Now, however, England is running out of patience. By a resounding margin of 55-36, English voters now prioritise getting out of Europe over hanging onto their Celtic cousins.
(In Scotland, meanwhile, the vote was close to a three-way split between getting out of the EU, staying in the UK, or doing neither.)
Unsurprisingly the vast majority of Leavers put Brexit first. But more soberingly, even among Remain voters a substantial 28% would rather just get Brexit over and done with once and for all than worry about hanging onto Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – and another 16% of Remainers (or 12% of the ones in England alone) don’t want to keep the UK together at all.
Strikingly, even Scottish Tories, albeit narrowly, wanted Brexit done more than they wanted the United Kingdom preserved. We didn’t see that one coming.
But readers, that’s not even scratching the surface of this giant mess.
Because for all their demands for a second referendum, neither Labour nor the SNP even know what they’d want on the ballot paper yet. And whatever they chose should the situation arise it’d leave a lot of people angry.
Of the four options currently under debate – Remain, no-deal, Theresa May’s deal (or variant thereof) or a notional new deal negotiated by a Labour government, at least a quarter of people want any given option included in a new referendum.
That would either produce an impossible shambles of a four-way vote, or a situation where at least 15 million people had been disenfranchised before the referendum even happened by being denied an option they wanted to vote for. But it gets worse.
That’s because less than half of respondents wanted Remain to be on the ballot paper at all, and less than half wanted no-deal as an option.
So by far the most popular options on each side are BOTH supported by less than half of the population – and remember, that’s not “Which one would you vote for?”, that’s just “Which one would you want to be offered to people on the ballot paper?”
Only 19% of Leave voters thought that putting any sort of Remain option on the table was legitimate, presumably wanting a choice only between a deal and no-deal. Even more bizarrely, 22% of Remain voters didn’t want Remain to be an option, and of the three deal options, the most popular with Remainers was the one that nobody knows anything about because it doesn’t even exist yet.
Not mad enough for you yet? Then let’s throw in the fact that Great Britain as a whole – and both England and Wales individually – by a clear margin doesn’t want another referendum at all, and despite 62% of them voting Remain, only half of Scots do.
And those figures include almost a quarter of all Remain voters.
Why is there so little enthusiasm for a new referendum? Maybe because – perhaps understandably – barely a quarter of respondents believe that the result of a new referendum would be respected by Parliament.
They’re heavily out numbered by the 43% who don’t believe it would be, and 30% who simply don’t have a clue.
Just 41% of people who would vote Remain were there to be another referendum, and a truly shocking 17% of Leavers, had any faith in their elected representatives to enact their wishes at the second time of asking, whatever they were.
At this point, readers, we’re kind of relieved that out of good taste we hadn’t added a question about whether all politicians ought to be strung up from lamp-posts or fed to wolves immediately. We suspect the numbers would have been overwhelming.
But the findings of this poll are nevertheless an astonishing indictment of every one of the UK’s 650 MPs. They’re trying to force a second vote on the people of the UK that they don’t want, whose options alone would be unknown, controversial and divisive, and which only a minority of voters believe would be respected anyway.
We need a new word for how screwed UK politics is, folks. But we can say one thing with confidence – if politicians bring about a new EU referendum, they better not be expecting to be thanked at the ballot box for it.
The ramifications of that, for Scotland in particular, shouldn’t need to be spelled out.
