The public is running ahead of Starmer on Brexit

The poll spoke to voters in the UK as well as in multiple European countries. There were two key messages that the UK government should take to heart: Brexit is over and its divides are weakening – and every voter who it needs to win wants a closer relationship with Europe, and is willing to go a lot further than the government has said it will to get them.

The second is that the UK is pushing at an open door, at least to an extent, when it comes to the popular will of the European people – Europeans generally agree Brexit has been bad for the EU, and are willing to build a closer relationship with the UK, suggesting some post-Brexit exasperation is dissipating.

In other words, there is a path to a closer relationship – and the economic growth that would come along with it – if only Keir Starmer is willing to take it.

Brexit divides are dissipating: the British public accepts we’re a European country

Some of the most stark findings of the research are simply that voters of almost all parties now agree that the UK should have a closer relationship with the EU, with only Reform UK voters saying otherwise – and even there, one in five Reform voters believe the UK-EU relationship should be closer than it is (versus 36% who say more distant).

This consensus looks even stronger when the polling examines the key voter segments Labour identified to build its winning coalition in 2024. The party’s so-called “hero voters” – people who voted Tory in 2019 and switched to Labour in 2024 – back a closer relationship by 78% versus just 4% saying more distant. Red wall voters have a smaller plurality, at 44% versus 18%, but when even the more ‘Brexity’ of voter groups supports a policy by a two-to-one margin, the polls are speaking with one voice to Labour on this.

Significantly, the researchers at ECFR also broke down the vote by how strongly people felt about the answer they gave to this question – which produced even more telling results. 47% of all respondents said they felt “very” or “fairly” strongly that the UK should have a closer relationship with the EU. By contrast, only 8% felt “very” or “fairly” strongly that the relationship should be more distant. The strength of feeling has shifted sharply away from isolationism – the people who care most are the ones wanting to build bridges with our neighbours.

What people want and people expect on the UK’s future EU relationship is quite different.

Unsurprisingly given the polling results above, voters are almost twice as likely to think leaving the EU was bad for the UK than they were to think it was good, with just under one in five not expressing an opinion either way.

Despite that, fewer than one in three UK voters believes the UK is “likely” to rejoin the EU in the next 20 years, meaning at least 24% of the population believe Brexit was a bad idea but don’t think anything will happen to fully reverse it before the mid-2040s. This could prove the basis of yet another profound disconnect between Westminster and voters – especially if the UK’s economic situation doesn’t improve – and, as a result, is worth tracking.

Europeans are, generally, happy to build closer ties with the UK

A significant finding of the ECFR research was that the public of multiple EU nations is amenable to their leaders negotiating closer trade and general relations with the UK. In all five of the countries polled, the share of voters in favour of closer ties with the UK was at least three times larger than those who said it should be more distant.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, French voters were the least enthusiastic about closer UK ties, but even there “closer” was the most popular of the answers of choice. In all five EU nations, more voters supported closer UK-EU ties than maintaining the status quo.

There is also now widespread agreement that the UK’s decision to leave the EU has been a bad thing for the EU itself, and not just the UK – though generally UK voters think it was a little worse than European voters do (except in Poland).

Even in Italy, where Giorgia Meloni is prime minister and a Eurosceptic mood is prevalent, voters are three times more likely to say the UK’s decision to leave the bloc was bad for the EU. If some EU officials are still insisting the EU is better or stronger without the UK – and this seems a less common viewpoint than it was a few years ago – voters are not taken in. Brexit is recognised as a mutually harmful decision.

The public say they’d accept the return of free movement – if we believe them

Given how much the UK’s political discourse is dominated by immigration, and how much the rise of Reform UK is clearly alarming both Labour and the Conservatives, the most shocking finding of the ECFR polling was that UK voters seem quite overwhelmingly in favour of allowing a return to freedom of movement if it would bring closer trading ties with the EU.

The wording of the question – which is included in the charts below – avoided the ambiguity some such questions include, and did not rely on voters understanding what is meant by “free movement”. Instead, it explicitly asked about giving EU voters the right to live and work in the UK, and voters seemed to overwhelmingly be okay with conceding this. Startlingly, even Reform UK voters seemed relaxed about the proposition – with 44% saying they were in favour, versus 45% against.

The numbers here are even more overwhelming when the vote is broken down into the key Labour voting groups, showing strong majorities in every single target voter group in favour of free movement, including the red wall and so-called “hero voters”.

Labour strategists would be right to treat these figures with caution. Given the simmering anti-immigration sentiment from voters, they suggest a degree of confusion on behalf of voters. It is possible that because the question doesn’t explicitly say it’s referring to an automatic right to live and work in the UK some voters thought it meant any Europeans working in the UK – though this seems somewhat unlikely. Voters were also less willing to accept the UK agreeing to abide by EU rules on food safety and product safety for a closer trading relationship (51% for, 31% against), despite the UK currently doing this anyway. Accepting the rulings of the European Court of Justice was even more of a borderline issue, at 41% for and 40% against.

It is also possible voters are just more broadly confused on immigration: accepting lots of Ukrainians into the country was popular, as was offering a home to people from Hong Kong who fled after China ended its historic freedoms – but voters rebelled against the immigration stats that were boosted by these influxes. Voters may accept free movement and then blame politicians for its results and see no contradiction.

Nonetheless, the polling more broadly challenges Labour’s stubborn insistence that there must be no serious movement on the EU and that the public is bitterly divided. If there is pressure, it is only in one direction, and it’s towards closer relations. Those views are even stronger among the people who vote Labour and the voters it needs to win the next election. Ignoring the issue of Brexit and hoping it goes away is looking less and less like a viable strategy for a party hoping to stay in power beyond one term.