Four years after Brexit, support for the EU surges in UK

Four years on from the UK's Brexit vote, a majority of British voters would now opt to remain inside the European Union, says new research.

According to the European Social Survey (ESS), a pan-European poll carried out every two years, 56.8 percent of respondents in the UK indicated that they would vote to remain inside the bloc, an increase from 49.9 percent the last time the survey was published in 2018, reportts the CNN. 

The most recent survey shows that of those questioned in the UK, 34.9 percent said they would vote to leave and 8.3 percent said they would not vote at all.

The findings come in the same week that marked the fourth anniversary of the 2016 referendum. The intervening years have seen the UK engage in divisive internal debate about precisely what form Brexit should take, complicated negotiations with Brussels on how the country would leave the bloc, and painful political deadlock that only ended on January 31 this year, when the UK finally left the EU.

The survey also reveals that support for the EU has grown broadly across the continent.

The latest survey of 26 countries, four of which are not member states, reveals an increase in support for EU membership, suggesting that speculation that other countries would quickly follow the UK to exit the union is possibly unfounded.