Poll shows most Britons think it was wrong to vote to leave the EU

Claim:

A poll shared online in October 2025 showed most Britons thought it was wrong to vote to leave the European Union.

Rating:

Context

Though the poll circulated in October 2025, it reflected results from a YouGov poll carried out in June 2025. According to YouGov’s poll, 56% of Britons surveyed believed it had been wrong for Britain to vote to leave the EU.

In October 2025, a claim circulated online that most Britons thought it was wrong to vote to leave the European Union. The claim appeared to be based on a poll showing more than 50% of respondents thought process, dubbed Brexit, was a mistake.

The United Kingdom left the EU in 2020, four years after 51.9% of voters in a referendum were in favor of leaving the political and economic union.

One Reddit user posted an image of the 2025 poll results with the caption, “Most Britons now consider that it was wrong to leave the EU”

The claim and poll also spread on Facebook (archived), Threads (archived), X (archived) and Bluesky (archived).

YouGov, an online research data and analytics company headquartered in the U.K., did publish poll results in June 2025 that showed that 56% of respondents said that, in hindsight, Britain had been wrong to vote to leave the EU. According to YouGov’s data, the company surveyed 2,239 adults in Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales — the United Kingdom excluding Northern Ireland). 

The British newspaper the Financial Times quoted this research in an Oct. 20, 2025, article, and users widely shared a graph showing YouGov’s results.

Although it was not possible for Snopes to independently recreate YouGov’s poll and results, based on the polling data that users shared on social media, the claim that most Britons thought that it was wrong to vote to leave the EU was true.

Understanding YouGov’s poll

YouGov made the data it used in its June 2025 poll publicly available. According to that data, it asked 2,239 adults in England, Scotland and Wales the question, “In hindsight, do you think Britain was right or wrong to vote to leave the European Union?” Respondents could answer “Right to leave,” “Wrong to leave” and “Don’t know.”

The company used weighted sampling to ensure a representative result, according to the data. Weighted sampling is a technique by which researchers correct over- or underrepresentation of certain groups in samples to make the results representative in a larger population.

For example, YouGov’s data showed it surveyed 926 people who voted to remain in the EU in 2016 and 828 who voted to leave. In the company’s weighted sample, it reduced the weight of replies from remain voters so the sample had a more representative 786 remain voters and 799 leave voters (or 49.6% remain and 50.4% leave, a closer reflection of the 2016 referendum’s 48.1% Remain and 51.9% Leave result).

YouGov weighted responses according to what respondents voted in the U.K.’s 2024 general election and 2016 Brexit referendum, their gender, social class and location. The company establishes which weightings correctly represent the U.K.’s population using the national census, other large-scale surveys, election and referendum results and official population estimates, according to its website. 

Respondents in YouGov polls self-report information about themselves, their political leanings, social class and more, and YouGov selects its respondents using this information in a process it calls “active sampling.” Though the company takes steps to ensure only selected respondents can actually fill out a poll, it has no control over whether respondents lie when they self-report their information, which could lead to skewed samples. 

Christopher Davies, a YouGov spokesman, told Snopes via email that the company used various forms of technology to “identify and remove potentially fraudulent respondents.” Davies added, “The most common cause of ‘lying’ isn’t fraud but false recall, where people forget how they actually voted. To address that we ask and retain people’s recalled vote as soon as possible after elections to use it for future weighting and sampling.”

YouGov said on its website it had “a strong history of accurately predicting actual outcomes across a wide range of different subjects, including national and regional elections.” Its model was the most accurate in predicting seats won in the 2024 U.K. general election, according to the British Polling Council, an association of polling organizations of which YouGov is a member.

According to What UK Thinks: EU, a website that collates polling results about Brexit, at the time of this writing, YouGov was the most recent (June 2025) polling organization to have surveyed Britons on whether voting to leave the EU was wrong. Other polling companies such as Kantar and Omnisis also asked similar questions, though not at the same time as YouGov, meaning it was difficult to directly compare results across companies.