Three Out of Five Young Britons Want a New Vote to Rejoin the EU

A new poll finds that 60% of young British adults between the ages of 18 and 28 want the United Kingdom to hold a new vote on rejoining the European Union, or EU. The survey was carried out by a research group called More in Common and shared with the newspaper The Guardian. Most of these young people — known as Generation Z, or 'Gen Z' — were children during the 2016 Brexit vote and could not vote at the time. Now that they are adults, many say they believe Brexit has been a failure for the country.

The 2016 Brexit vote asked British citizens whether the UK should stay in or leave the EU, which is a group of European countries that share trade rules and work closely together. The Leave side won with about 52% of the vote, but older voters were a big part of that result. Many young people who are adults today were too young to vote back then, and they grew up watching years of political debate and arguments about Brexit. According to the new poll, half of Gen Z Britons — 50% — now say Brexit has been a failure, while only 16% say it has been a success.

When the poll looked only at young people who said they would actually show up to vote in a second referendum, the results were even more one-sided. Among that group, 81% said they would vote to rejoin the EU, while only 19% said they would vote to stay out. The poll surveyed 440 young people across Britain. These numbers show a very strong lean toward Europe among young adults who are engaged with politics.

Luke Tryl, the head of More in Common, said that Brexit was a big moment in the lives of many Gen Z Britons. He said many of them remember the 2016 vote clearly, even though they were too young to take part. 'Ten years on, our polling of Britons aged 18 to 28 reveals how they feel about Brexit: they tend to believe it has failed, and three in five want a fresh referendum on rejoining,' he said. He also noted that young people are not eager to return to the endless arguments about Brexit that filled the news during their childhood.

The poll also showed that young Britons are split on why Brexit went wrong. About 37% said Brexit could have worked but was ruined by politicians who handled it badly. Another 29% said Brexit was never going to work at all. This means many young people do not blame the idea of Brexit itself, but rather the way leaders managed it. Only 11% said Brexit has worked well so far.

Hostility toward Brexit is strongest among the very youngest adults. Among 18- to 21-year-olds, who were only six to nine years old during the 2016 vote, 53% say Brexit has failed and only 12% say it has been a success. Slightly older Gen Zers, those aged 25 to 28, are a little less negative, but still 48% call it a failure compared to 20% who call it a success. Across the whole Gen Z age group, the feeling that Brexit did not go well is very common.

Experts say the group of people who are allowed to vote in the UK has changed a lot since 2016. A pollster named Peter Kellner has pointed out that more than 6 million British people who voted in 2016 have since died. Because older voters were much more likely to have voted to leave the EU, their deaths have shrunk the pro-Brexit share of the population. At the same time, about 6 million young people who were too young to vote in 2016 have now grown old enough to vote. This generational shift means that, according to some analysts, the group of voters who want to leave the EU may no longer be the majority.

The poll found that 62% of young Britons — about three in five — say there should be a referendum on rejoining the EU within the next five years. Only 11% of people under 29 said they are against holding another vote, while 27% were unsure. Among young people who personally want to rejoin the EU, the support for a new vote is even higher, at 88%. However, Tryl noted that even young people who support rejoining are worried about getting stuck in another long, distracting debate about Europe. They said they care most about everyday issues like the cost of living, affordable housing, jobs, and climate change.