Peter Kellner / Oct 2026
Photo: Shutterstock
Andy Burnham’s ambition to reset relations with Brussels comes at a significant moment. For years after the 2016 referendum, Brexiters could claim that most current voters had chosen to leave the EU. No longer. The pro-Brexit majority has literally died out. Most voters still alive backed Remain.
A decade ago, older voters backed Brexit by almost two-to-one. Over time, the remorseless impact of mortality has meant that, among survivors, the gap between the two sides steadily shrunk.
I have been tracking the shifts for some years. The table sets out my latest estimates. Around 3.8 million leave voters have died since the referendum ten years ago, compared with 2.1 million remain voters. This means that 14 million survivors voted Remain, while 13.6 million voted Leave: a pro-EU majority of 400,000.
We cannot identify the precise date when the number of survivors crossed over from a pro-leave to pro-remain majority. We must rely on estimates, which have a margin of error. The crossover may well have happened sometime last year. But the margin of error meant we could not be precise.
Now the estimated gap is large enough for us to be certain that the crossover has taken place.
This matters. The referendum campaign by Brexiters to “take back control” promised that a vote to leave the European Union would both enrich Britain’s economy and enhance its democracy. It has long been clear that the economy has got worse, not better. Moreover, the recent story of immigration – the biggest specific concern of Leave voters – is that of losing control, not taking it back.
The one remaining argument for sticking with Brexit is that any attempt to reverse the referendum would be fundamentally undemocratic. The people spoke; their verdict stands.
That is true only if the votes of the dead still count. The crossover among the living undermines the last defence in the democratic case for Brexit. Two others had already crumbled.
First, seven million Britons have reached voting age since the referendum. They oppose Brexit by around five-to-one. Assuming the same turnout pattern as in 2016 (60% among that age group, compared with 90% among the nover-65s), new remainers outnumber new leavers by 3.5 million to 700,000.
On demographics alone, and assuming nobody has changed their mind, there is now a 55-45% majority in favour of EU membership-.
Secondly, five million voters have changed their minds – three-quarters of them from voting Leave to wanting to rejoin. Altogether, we end up with a current majority of almost nine million for rejoining the EU. This 63-37% margin matches the average of polls conducted in the past month.
Brexiters will continue to say we were right to leave the EU. But only if they include the dead, exclude the young and ignore buyers’ remorse can they still say they have democracy on their side.
An edited version of this analysis was first published by New World. The author’s free substack can be found here.
