Remain would win a second Brexit referendum by a narrow margin if the vote were held today, new polling suggests.
Five years to the day since the 2016 referendum took place, a Savanta ComRes survey found 51 per cent of respondents would now vote to remain, whereas 49 per cent would vote leave, based on interviews conducted last week.
Compared to the results of the 2016 referendum, where 51.9 per cent of people voted to Leave and 48.1 voted to Remain, the nation appears to remain as divided as ever.
The polling also showed that very few people had shifted positions since the 2016 referendum. Only 6 per cent of Remainers said they would now vote Leave, and 7 per cent of Leavers would now change their vote to Remain.
Chris Hopkins, Savanta ComRes political researcher said: “On the five year anniversary of the Brexit vote, this poll shows a country just as divided as it was during the campaign, with a re-run of the referendum on a knife-edge according to this voting intention.”
Polling found that if the question was put differently, around re-joining the EU, more people favoured remaining outside the trading bloc rather than rejoining it. Responses were similarly divided, however, with just 51 per cent of respondents in favour of staying out of the EU.
Just over 30 per cent of respondents considered Brexit to have been a success, while 34 per cent said it had been a failure.
The one area where respondents seemed to agree was around divisiveness — 51 per cent of respondents said Brexit had left the country more divided, compared with the 13 per cent who found the UK to be more united now than it was five years ago.
Mr Hopkins said that if questions around Brexit were put to the public today, those in favour of remaining would need to focus on persuading those in the Leave camp to reconsider, rather than trying to engage potential Remainers who did not vote in 2016.
“If either of these questions were to be put to the British people again, those who did not vote in 2016 look to be a key source of Remain/Rejoin support, and there are always likely to be sceptics regarding whether such potential voters would even turn out in any future vote.
“Therefore those still in favour of Remaining or Rejoining would need to do much more to convince Leavers that they’d made the wrong decision in 2016, rather than relying on those who did not vote last time to turn out,” he said.
The polling was based on 2,191 interviews conducted by Savanta ComRes between 18 June and 20 June.
