Telegraph:
Business
Devastating MORI poll shows Europe's peoples share British rage over EU
"When David Cameron first announced the UK’s referendum on Europe in 2013, the reaction from EU capitals was disdain. Brexit would be a disastrous error for Britain – perhaps suicidal – but Europe would brush off the effects.
As I reported at the time, Spain's foreign minister José Manuel Garcia-Margallo told us that Brexit would lead to "terrible devastation" of our industries, leaving nothing left but "a few petty bankers" in xenophobic isolation.
"David Cameron must understand he cannot slow the speed of the EU cruiser," came the finger-waving admonition from Madrid.
The penny has since begun to drop that Brexit fall-out might be very serious for them as well.
Yet even as recently as this February the prevailing view was still that the referendum saga was largely a British affair, to do with the idiosyncrasies of an island people, or some such peculiarly British pathology, or to do with the post-imperial hang-ups of the English – an irritating canard that inverts the truth, since those Britons with an imperial reflex often rediscover their natural home in the EU power structures.
This was still the view of the policy elites even after the Schengen fire had been raging for months. There was a strange reluctance to accept what has been obvious for a long time, that comparable feelings of irritation with Brussels have been welling in France, Italy, Holland, Scandinavia, and Germany itself.
They still could not see that the EU had over-reached disastrously, or that it had breached the historical contract with Europe’s nation states, or that broader contagion was a mounting threat to their own interests.
Above all, there was a refusal to acknowledge that great numbers of people across Europe have views all too like the British, and also think the EU Project is out of control.
The Justice Secretary Michael Gove may have gone too far last month in proclaiming a European Spring, or a “democratic liberation” of the Continent, but he was surely right to discern the rumblings of revolt, for that is exactly what the latest Ipsos MORI poll reveals.
The survey is astonishing, even for those of us who have for years been following the disastrous misgovernment of the eurozone, a self-induced slump that ultimately lasted longer than the European leg of the Great Depression.
It shows that 60pc of Italians want a referendum of their own, and that 48pc would now vote to leave the EU. If you had suggested ten years ago that such a set of views might ever be possible in Italy – I know, because I tried – you would have been laughed into silence.
Everybody agreed – did they not? – that Italians were happy to delegate their government to the mandarins in Brussels because they do not trust their own corrupt and dysfunctional elites.
As a long-time devotee of the 19th century Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, I never fell for the argument that there is no such thing as an Italian nation, no collective sense of patriotic feeling.
There most certainly is such a nation, and it is in a state of risorgimento right now. I will be writing over coming days about the traumatic effects of monetary union for Italy: suffice to say that Rome will determine the fate of the euro.
The MORI poll shows that 58pc of the French also want their own referendum, and 41pc say they would vote to leave. Swexit sentiment in Sweden is running at 39pc.
But what most surprised me is that half of those surveyed in countries making up 80pc of the EU population think that Brexit would set off a domino effect, and that it would do more damage to the European Union than to Britain itself.
Specifically, 51pc said Brexit would have a negative impact on the EU economy, compared to just 36pc who thought it would be bad for Britain’s economy. This really is an upset.
It suggests that very large numbers of people on the Continent have reached their own damning verdict on EU pieties and on the EMU construct, perhaps because they know that their own youth have been flocking to London to work, as if were a new Manhattan.
A majority in Italy, Poland, the US, India, and South Africa actually thought the British economy would fare better once it broke free from the EU. This too is a shocker.
The MORI poll is a cannon shot across the bows of Brussels and the EU nomenklatura in a string of countries. They are not up against a truculent Britain, as they suppose: they are up against their own record and their own peoples.
Link go article, and MORI graphs.....
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/05/10/devastating-mori-poll-shows-europes-peoples-share-british-rage-o/
