Archive The myth of British Euroskepticism Ten years of polling data yields little evidence that Brits want to leave the EU.

Everyone agrees that the United Kingdom is one of the knottier problems on Europe's list. From a quick scan of the press, you can glean that French government sources are “tired” of David Cameron, that this or that German intellectual thinks the UK should leave, that nobody knows what the prime minister intends to ask for in his touted renegotiation of the EU treaties.

Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK Independence Party, dramatizes this consensus every day. Euroskepticism is popular! It seems to define populism for both the British political class and, weirdly, for the European Union itself.

There is, however, no evidence that Euroskepticism is on the rise in the UK. YouGov has surveyed how the British public would vote in an EU referendum on 72 occasions starting in September 2010. You can get the data here. This is what it can tell you:

That's right. Since early 2012, British support for the EU has strengthened continuously. As the 2015 election campaign gets going, "Yes" votes hold a 10 percentage point lead. Ironically, the more the prime minister promises to to hold a referendum, renegotiate, and to make (unspecified) demands on the EU, the more he has convinced the nation we ought to stick with it.

We can see that more people are being convinced over time in the next chart. This contains the same YouGov polling data as the first chart, but I've manipulated it to reflect the reported level of apathy about the vote. The shift in opinion appears even more visually dramatic in these terms, but the interesting bit is that the level of apathy has remained practically constant, around 20 percent. It's not that the apathetic are being mobilised — instead, one-time "No" voters are changing their minds.

What’s happening here? Why weren't we told? Why does everyone still think hating the EU is so popular, though there has only ever been two MPs, UKIP’s Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless, who belong to a specifically Euroskeptic party (and in both cases the men defected from the Tories)?

The answer might be in the data.

Opinion, like the wind, has both direction and force. YouGov's polls for the Sun try to capture this by asking the public to name what they think the top three issues are for themselves and the nation. Competing pollsters do something similar, asking for issues for the country and then in your neighbourhood. The point is, however, the same — to elicit answers that reflect real interests rather than whatever happens to be in the news.

In the next chart, we are going to see how this distinction changes things, for the general population and also for UKIP voters.

On some issues, UKIP voters don’t differ drastically from the general public. The economy and health matter immensely for both groups. Pensions don't exercise the public much in the abstract, but people worry about them quite a bit in private. Immigration, however, vanishes as an issue when people are asked to think about their daily lives. UKIP voters most differ from the general public in that they worry intensely about immigration and Europe in the abstract, but, like everyone else, they worry about these issues much less in reality. The general public hardly worries at all about Europe, and worries even less when asked to think about it.

One way of looking at this is just to assume that the public is crassly indifferent. Another, however, is that opinions that change this much under pressure are usually weakly held. UKIP voters' dread of Europe halved when they were asked to think about it.

There are about two million Europeans from outside the UK living in its borders, about two million Britons living elsewhere in the EU, and about 44 million adults in the UK. About 10 percent of the adult population, therefore, benefits directly from freedom of movement. There are typically about a dozen numbers in a mobile phone recent calls list (or, to be exact, there are 10.8 “friends or family” according to this paper) so if we make the heroic assumption that everything here is normally distributed, a typical citizen must love someone who would have to move or get a visa in the event of "Brexit." The simple politics of love bolsters support for the EU in the UK.

Of course it won't be a normal distribution – some people will know a lot more migrants than others — but then there are a lot of other ways people make use of the EU, so I think this is a safe bet. What we can say, though, is that all these people have to think hard about the issue when a politician with the power to initiate exit stands up and starts threatening to do so. And, as we saw in the first chart, about 40 percent of the general public realize at this point that nodding along with your favorite media source's Brussels-bashing doesn't matter very much.

My prediction is two-fold:

The UK isn't going anywhere. The referendum probably won't happen because David Cameron won't become prime minister, and there is strong evidence that "Yes" could win if he does. Peak UKIP is past, and the party will disappoint in the election results. Its share of the vote will be substantially less than the peak poll rating (25 percent) achieved in November, and it will get two or fewer MPs.

We'll see what happens at the polls on May 7.

Alex Harrowell blogs at The Yorkshire Ranter and Fistful of Euros.

This article was updated on April 26. The UK Independence Party currently has two members in the British parliament. An earlier version misstated the number.