A new referendum in 2040? It may be closer than that…

When Sir John Curtice last week predicted that Britain would hold another referendum on EU membership by 2040, the frisson of Brexiteer fear was palpable.

Some outraged Leavers took to social media to claim that the correct date for any possible re-vote was 2057, mirroring the 41 years between the referendums of 1975 and 2016. Others claimed no vote was necessary because the EU would have collapsed by 2040 anyway (Nigel Farage has predicted this to occur by 2031, so Brussels only has seven years left to implode – better call in Liz Truss).

In the Daily Mail comments section, people with usernames like Lovely Pureblood and SaluteTheFlag fulminated that continental Europe was doomed and that young voters who now support Rejoin would surely change their minds once they “realise they can’t get jobs or houses because of the millions of EU migrants that arrived”. Someone called Ready To Decide wrote: “In 1999 if somebody had said the NHS would be asking if you were male, female, both or other then I would have been talking to someone living at the funny farm”, suggesting that he or she was in the wrong discussion entirely. Or possibly typing from the “funny farm”.

What none of them did was pay close attention to the interesting bit of what Curtice said in a discussion with the UK in a Changing Europe think tank, which came straight after his remark that “I wouldn’t be surprised if it [a new referendum] happened by 2040.”

The polling expert then explained that it was likely to be demand from Labour supporters that made another vote happen. He said: “Labour’s vote is almost as anti-Brexit as it was back in 2019. It’s not unlikely that the next Labour government is going to hit political trouble fairly early on because it’s a terrible, terrible legacy they are going to inherit. Then they’ve got to think of ways to keep their voters on board.

“A lot of their voters would be hoping that a Labour government would do something on the EU which is perhaps rather more than the current Labour Party is saying it wants to do on the EU.”

The logic seems fine, but there’s surely a query about Sir John’s choice of 2040. If Labour runs into big trouble by 2026, can it really wait another 14 years before risking something that, if won, would reshape Britain’s economy? Would it even be in power by 2040 without a dramatic move – either a wealth tax of some kind, or a much closer relationship with Europe? Will it not have to move far quicker to satisfy the disaffected support that Curtice rightly identifies?

As Brexit damage – including new, price-raising border checks on food imports – continues to pile up, 2040 only sounds fine if it means holding a referendum tonight at 20 to nine.