Wednesday 10 June 2015

Percentage of Britons with a positive appraisal of the EU

In a post a couple of days ago, I compared British opinion on the EU to opinion in other members of the EU-28, based on data from the most recent round of Eurobarometer. I reported that Britons have some of the least sanguine views of the EU, consistently ranking below the vast majority of member states, and trailing only Cyprus and Greece. The table below displays the actual percentages of Britons endorsing the various statements corresponding to the survey questions I examined.


For three out of the five questions (image of the EU, feeling of EU citizenship, belief about a future outside the EU), opinion is evenly split. In one of these cases (image of the EU), there are a considerable number of undecideds. It is particularly noteworthy that only 50% of Britons feel they are citizens of the EU, given that anyone with British citizenship is perforce a citizen of the EU. For the other two questions (trust in the EU, voice in the EU), opinion is quite heavily skewed against the European Union. In both these cases, there are relatively few undecideds. A caveat regarding the question on trust is that responses are almost identical when the question is framed with respect to the national government: 31% of Britons tend to trust it, while 62% tend not to trust it.

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