UK citizens seem to trust the EU more than their own parliament, according to a recent poll, reversing a nearly 30-year ‘decline’.

Since the UK voted for Brexit, the share of citizens expressing confidence in parliament has fallen by 10 percentage points to 22%, while confidence in the Brussels bloc has increased by seven percentage points to 39%.

Trust in the UK government also fell from 2017 to 2021.

Findings from the World Values ​​Survey (WVS), which examines trust in institutions in 24 countries from Canada to South Korea, are likely to boost the confidence of supporters of rebuilding UK-EU ties.

Former Brexit Secretary David Davies said the notable shift was likely the result of “a nasty Brexit situation in Parliament since late 2017 that has been completely counterproductive.”

“Confidence in parliament has been halved since 1990,” said Professor Bobby Duffy, director of the Institute of Politics at King’s College London, who analyzed the data.

Three years after leaving the European Union, Britain has not yet benefited from what this process was supposed to bring to its economy. In many areas, including trade and investment, it lags behind its competitors. Britain left the EU. January 31, 2020, although it remained part of the single market and the customs union for another 11 months.

Brexit has affected the flow of people as well as trade. EU citizens who previously had the opportunity to work or study in the UK must first obtain a visa. This had unexpected results: from January to June 2022, EU nationals represented only a fifth of all foreign workers in the UK. And many of them were refugees from Ukraine.

In 2015, by contrast, EU citizens made up approximately 50% of foreign workers in the UK, although a change in the methodology for calculating the numbers in 2020 makes comparison difficult.

At the same time one European Social Survey (ESS), conducted under the auspices of the City University of London, found that European citizens surveyed were less likely to vote for their country to leave the Union in the event of a referendum, as in the UK in 2016, according to a report in The Guardian. . This trend is fixed, with some deviations, in all countries of the Union.

The largest decline in the share of supporters of Finexit (Finnish exit from the EU) was recorded in Finland, where 28.6% of respondents in 2016-17 said they want their country to leave the Union. In a 2020–2022 survey, just 15.4% of Finns said they would prefer their country to be outside the European Union, compared to 13.2%.

Accordingly, impressive shifts in public opinion about leaving the EU. between 2016 and 2022, according to the study, they also took place in the Netherlands (decrease in percentage in favor of leaving the EU by 9.5 percentage points), Portugal (decrease by 9.1%), Austria (8.5 %) and France (8.3%). ), while smaller but statistically significant declines were recorded in Hungary (5.8%), Spain and Sweden (4.6%) and Germany (2.6%).

Source: The Guardian, Bloomberg.