{"id":2276,"date":"2026-07-16T11:21:18","date_gmt":"2026-07-16T10:21:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/thinking-wales\/?p=2276"},"modified":"2026-07-16T12:19:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-16T11:19:09","slug":"from-leave-to-rejoin-welsh-public-opinion-ten-years-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/thinking-wales\/from-leave-to-rejoin-welsh-public-opinion-ten-years-on\/","title":{"rendered":"From Leave to Rejoin: Welsh Public Opinion Ten Years On"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just over 10 years ago Wales voted to leave the European Union (52.5% Leave, 47.5% Remain). A few weeks ago I spoke at a Wales Governance Centre event marking the anniversary (alongside colleagues Dr Rachel Minto and Professor Jo Hunt) and presented some of the current trends in public opinion on the UK leaving the EU, drawing on new survey data collected by Cardiff University and YouGov in May 2026 (N = 3,763), alongside a decade of British Election Study data. This post pulls together the main threads: how attitudes have shifted since, who has moved (and who hasn’t), and the longer-term ways the referendum has reshaped identity and constitutional politics in Wales.<\/p>\n

1. A Decade of Hindsight<\/h2>\n

At the Britain-wide level, the story of the last ten years is one of slow but steady movement. Asked whether Britain was right or wrong to vote Leave, the two lines crossed within about eighteen months of the referendum and have been diverging ever since. By 2026 the gap is roughly 25 points: around 57% now say Britain was wrong to leave, against around 31% who say it was right.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

Figure 1: In hindsight, was Britain right or wrong to vote Leave the EU? % of respondents, all pollsters, 2016\u20132026 (whatukthinks.org)<\/em><\/p>\n

Part of this can be explained by voters, mostly Remain but also increasingly Leave, believing that many of the policies surrounding the UK’s exit from the EU have not worked. For example, when we ask Welsh respondents to rate the economic impact of Brexit on a 0\u2013100 scale (where 50 is neutral), 2016 Remain voters place it deep in negative territory, at around 22\u201323 for both the UK and Welsh economies. Leave voters also place it below the neutral point, though are still more positive than Remain voters. Nonetheless, there is no obvious constituency in Wales, on either side of the 2016 divide, that on average believes Brexit has been economically beneficial.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

Figure 2: Perceived economic impact of Brexit, Wales. Mean on 0\u2013100 scale by 2016 referendum vote recall.<\/em><\/p>\n

2. Where Wales Stands Now: A Rejoin Majority<\/h2>\n

So what would happen if the question were asked again? Our May 2026 data is unambiguous. Asked how they would vote in another referendum on EU membership, 61.4% of Welsh voters say they would vote to rejoin, against 27.2% who would vote to stay out, with 8.7% unsure and 2.7% saying they wouldn’t vote. Excluding those without a clear preference, that is a 69\u201331 split in favour of rejoining.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

Figure 3: Most Welsh voters want to rejoin the EU.<\/em><\/figure>\n

The voter flow data shows where this majority comes from. 2016 Remain voters have held together remarkably well: 90% of them would vote Rejoin. Leave voters, by contrast, have fractured. Two-thirds (66%) would vote to stay out, but a full quarter (25%) would now vote to rejoin the EU. Add in those who didn’t or couldn’t vote in 2016 \u2014 a group that skews young and heavily pro-Rejoin \u2014 and the arithmetic of the new majority becomes clear: it is built on Remain loyalty, generational replacement, and Leave defection, in that order.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

Figure 4: How 2016 referendum voters would vote now.<\/em><\/p>\n

3. Who Moved?<\/h2>\n

Comparing each group’s 2016 Leave vote share with its support for staying out today shows movement towards Rejoin almost everywhere, but at very different rates. Among 18\u201334s, support for staying out sits at just 18% (against a 22% Leave share among those old enough to have voted). Among the 55\u201364s it has fallen from 51% to 37%. Women have moved further than men, producing a 10-point gender gap in Rejoin support: 71% of women against 61% of men.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

Figure 5: % voted Leave in 2016 vs % preferring Stay Out now, by demographic group.<\/em><\/p>\n

The partisan pattern is more interesting still. Supporters of every party in the Welsh-progressive bloc have become more pro-EU: over 90% of Welsh Labour and Plaid Cymru supporters would now vote Rejoin, alongside 95% of Greens and 86% of Liberal Democrats. Reform UK supporters remain firmly for staying out (79%). There is one exception to this general drift towards Rejoin: Welsh Conservative supporters are the *only* group to have become more supportive of staying out over the decade. As the party’s electorate has shrunk, it has distilled down to its most committed Eurosceptic core.<\/p>\n

The age pattern deserves its own note. Plotting Rejoin support across the life course, the crossover point \u00a0at which staying out overtakes rejoining now sits at around 80 years old. Among voters under 40, Rejoin support runs at 75\u201390%.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

Figure 6: Rejoin and Stay Out vote share across the life course.<\/em><\/p>\n

National identity still structures the EU question too, though to a lesser extent than it did in 2016. Rejoin leads comfortably at almost every point of the Welsh and British identity scales. The one place the race tightens to a dead heat is among the strongest English identifiers in Wales, a group that was also most distinctive in its Leave voting a decade ago.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n
Figure 7: Rejoin and Stay Out vote share across Welsh, British, and English identity scales<\/em>.<\/figure>\n

4. The Long Shadow: Identities, Not Just Attitudes<\/h2>\n

The Referendum was not only about EU membership but has also had profound effects on how we think of ourselves. Research by Hobolt et al<\/a>\u00a0 showed that ‘Leave’ and ‘Remain’ had evolved into powerful social identities by 2018 \u2014 stronger, for many people, than party attachments \u2014 creating ‘perceptual screens’ that shape how people process new information, and producing genuine discrimination between groups. These identities have proved remarkably durable: a decade on, most people in Wales, England and Scotland still identify with one side or the other. And the spillover extends well beyond politics, influencing who people want their children to marry, who they would accept as a lodger, and who they ‘swipe right’ on in dating apps.<\/p>\n

The referendum also reshaped national identity itself, in ways that were not symmetric. Across Britain, Remain voters’ sense of Britishness fell after the referendum \u2014 and nowhere more than in Wales, where Remain voters recorded the biggest drop of any group in any nation. Strikingly, Brexit left Welsh identity untouched: the referendum changed how Welsh Remainers felt about *Britain*, not how they felt about Wales (You can read more on this\u00a0research here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

Figure 8: Change in British identity after the referendum, by nation and vote.<\/em><\/p>\n

Finally, the EU question has become more tightly bound up with Wales’s constitutional debate. In 2016, the correlation between constitutional preference (from abolishing the Senedd to independence) and EU attitudes stood at r = 0.30. By 2026 it had risen to r = 0.44. Support for rejoining now rises steadily with support for greater Welsh self-government, and pro-independence respondents back Rejoin at close to 90%.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

Figure 9: Constitutional preference and EU attitudes, Wales 2016 vs 2026.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a05. Ten Years On<\/h2>\n

A decade after voting to leave the European Union, Wales now has a clear and durable majority for rejoining it (69% of those with a preference). But the more important finding, I think, is that the EU Referendum and subsequent Brexit process created identities that outlasted the arguments, weakened the Britishness of half the Welsh electorate while leaving Welshness untouched, and further fused the European question to the constitutional one. The divide has also been\u00a0subsumed into existing party blocs<\/a>, adding another variable by which voters sort themselves. The 2016 divide has not disappeared and is likely to be shaping Welsh politics for the next decade.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Just over 10 years ago Wales voted to leave the European Union (52.5% Leave, 47.5% Remain). A few weeks ago I spoke at a Wales Governance Centre event marking the […]","protected":false},"author":1044,"featured_media":2279,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[106,26,53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-brexit","category-british-politics","category-eu"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8iFWs-AI","meta_box":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/thinking-wales\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/509\/2026\/07\/clean2.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/thinking-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/thinking-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/thinking-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/thinking-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1044"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/thinking-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2276"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/thinking-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2276\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2294,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/thinking-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2276\/revisions\/2294"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/thinking-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/thinking-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/thinking-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/thinking-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}