28 January 2019

The Guardian: 'Meaner and angrier': Brexit exposes growing fractures in UK society

Britons have become angrier since the referendum to leave the EU, according to a survey which suggests there is widespread unhappiness about the direction in which the country is heading.

Sixty-nine per cent of respondents said they felt their fellow citizens had become “angrier about politics and society” since the Brexit vote in 2016, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer, a long-established, annual survey of trust carried out across the globe.

Forty per cent of people think others are now more likely to take part in violent protests, the UK results from the survey show, even though violent political protest in Britain is rare.

One person in six said they had fallen out with friends or relatives over the vote to leave the bloc, the survey found.

Edelman, which said the findings exposed a “disUnited Kingdom”, found widespread concern about where the government was heading, particularly among those who voted remain, and those who backed Labour.

Overall, about 65% of Britons think the country is “on the wrong track”, the survey suggests. Amongst remain voters the figure is 82%, but even among leave voters the figure is 43%.

Some 60% of people who identify with the Conservatives think the country is heading in the right direction, but among Labour identifiers, the figure is just 20%.

According to Edelman, which conducted online interviews with more than 2,000 people in the UK between December 18 and January 7, the results show “party politics is clearly failing many Britons”. Just over a third of respondents overall (35%) said they trusted Theresa May to do what was right, and just over a quarter (26%) said the same about Jeremy Corbyn. [...]

Full article on The Guardian

2019 Edelman Trust Barometer

© The Guardian