Majority of people not proud of post-Brexit Britain, new survey reveals
A new poll has found that the majority of Britons are not proud of their country.
The wide-ranging survey of attitudes also found that people increasingly believe the UK is divided, that so-called culture wars exist and that life was better in the past.
Researchers from King’s College London (KCL) said the “frightening increase in national divisions” that began post-Brexit was “translating” into other divisions around party politics and immigration and the “culture wars”.
Findings from the university’s policy institute and pollster Ipsos showed that less than half of Britons are now proud of their country, falling from 56 per cent to 46 per cent in the last five years.
When it comes to the general feeling of division in the UK, 84 per cent of people said they felt this way. This rate was 74 percent in 2020.
Fully half of people say they believe the culture in the UK is changing too quickly, up from a third (35%) five years ago, while a similar proportion (48 per cent) say they want their country to be “the way it used to be”. This increased by nearly a quarter (28%) in 2020, with findings showing an increase across all age groups.
Professor Bobby Duffy, director of the policy institute at KCL, said: “This latest study shows a frightening rise and decline in feelings of national division in the UK in just a few years. We have seen rapid increases in beliefs that the UK is divided, that ‘culture wars’ are real and that things were better in the past.”
The survey also found that 86 per cent of people felt there was tension between immigrants and those born in the UK; this rate was 74 percent in 2023, indicating a new record.
The researchers said the findings showed public opinion on transgender rights had “changed significantly”, with those saying these rights had “gone too far” more than doubled since 2020, from 17 per cent to 39 per cent now.
This view has become more pronounced across all age groups, and although less than a fifth (19 per cent) of 16 to 24-year-olds feel this way, the proportion has more than doubled in the past five years, from 9 per cent in 2020.
Overall, 19 per cent of those asked said they felt transgender rights did not go far enough in the UK; This rate is down from 31 percent in 2020.
The survey of 4,027 people aged 16 and over in August came four months after the Supreme Court ruled that the words “woman” and “gender” in the Equality Act 2010 referred to a biological woman and biological sex.
Elsewhere, almost half (48 per cent) of the public said they viewed being described as “woke” as an insult rather than a compliment; this rate was less than a quarter (24 percent) in 2020.
Woke is defined by the Cambridge dictionary as “aware of social problems, especially racism and inequality.”
Mr Duffy said Britain had experienced an “incredibly divisive period during the EU referendum and its aftermath” and that division had “transformed into party political and other divisions, with attitudes to immigration and the pace of change in culture generally being central to the pace of change”.
Gideon Skinner, senior director of UK politics at Ipsos, said: “Perceptions of political and cultural discord are growing, reflecting society grappling with nostalgia, the pace of change, growing tensions over immigration and polarized views on what terms such as ‘woke’ mean.”
But he warned: “There is no clear consensus on many issues, and the differences in figures need to be understood; it should be remembered that many people are not extreme in their views.”
