The question is now when, not if, we should rejoin the EU

With an average of the 10 polls taken during October showing Rejoin leading Stay Out by 47%-37%, with 16% undecided, it’s now almost a given that Britain wants to return to the European Union. So the question of when we should vote again on EU membership is coming to the fore.

And whatever the likes of Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak may believe, those questioned in a new survey for the More In Common think tank want the question put soon – very soon, in fact.

More than one in four people – 26% – want another Brexit referendum within a year and a further 21% say one should be held in the next five years. So in total, 47% of Britons want their chance to vote again on Europe by the end of 2028.

Another 6% said that there should be at least a decade before another poll on membership of the EU, while a remarkable 27% wanted to pull up the drawbridge for future generations and said there should never be another vote on Brexit.

Luke Tryl of More in Common said that young people were driving the demand for a new ballot. He told HuffPoUK: “What’s most interesting about our latest polling on Brexit is that the rejoin lead is driven almost entirely by those who couldn’t vote in 2016. It is clear that there is growing momentum to revisit the issue, with around half of the public wanting to see a referendum on rejoining in the next five years.

“Whether we ultimately rejoin in such circumstances will then ultimately be determined by whether those too young to vote in 2016 actually turn out in a future referendum.”

There were 41 years between Britain’s 1975 vote that confirmed our membership of what was then the European Economic Community and the one that took us out in 2016 – and if that pattern was repeated, we would not vote on Europe again until 2057.

More In Common’s survey of 2336 adults between October 14-16 seems to indicate that the country is not prepared to wait another 34 years.