Europe in numbers

It looks like a contest between the polls and history; and despite being a pollster, my money is on history repeating itself. If there were a UK referendum on whether to leave the EU, we would vote to remain.

In the October 1974 general election, Labour promised a referendum on membership of the Common Market, as it was then called. At the time—and just like today—the public divided 3-2 for leaving. But when the referendum was held, the following June, we voted (as the final polls predicted) by almost 2-1 to stay in.

In the autumn of 1982, Gallup found that by 3-1, we thought membership was bad rather than good for Britain. Labour reckoned that a campaign to leave would be a vote-winner in the 1983 election. Margaret Thatcher, then a keen supporter of membership, campaigned hard against Labour’s stance. She won the argument: by polling day, a 3-2 majority concluded that membership was a good thing.

Later in the 1980s, when Thatcher grew disenchanted with the European Community (as it had then become), the public followed suit—for a while. But when in 1990 the Iron Lady came back from an EC summit in Rome, shouting “no, no, no” to everything the rest of Europe wanted, this provoked the leadership contest that brought her premiership to an end. Voters disagreed with her. By 4-1 they thought membership was a good thing.

The pattern is clear. When voters don’t think much about Europe, they don’t like it. But on the rare occasions that it becomes a big domestic issue, they discover that EU membership is a good thing after all.

Today we are in the normal, default condition of a country in which people pay little attention to Europe. The EU itself monitors our disenchantment with its twice-yearly Eurobarometer surveys (see above). Its latest edition, released in February, reports that the British have a worse opinion of the EU than people in any other member state. Just 19 per cent of us have a positive image of the EU, compared with 27 per cent for the next-lowest country (Finland) and an average of 38 per cent across all 27 member states.

However, Eurobaromoter also tells us that 56 per cent of British voters admit they don’t know how the EU works. That is not surprising when YouGov finds consistently that only 3 or 4 per cent of the public thinks that Europe is one of the three most important issues (in a list of 12) for them and their family. In short, the polling evidence is that the EU and its supporters in Britain have failed to secure public understanding, and approval, of the EU. But a referendum campaign that required us to confront the far-reaching consequences of departure would probably prompt us to vote to stay.