The public agrees - we can't be kept in the dark

Avaaz, to whom I am grateful, commissioned ICM to ask the following:

“The government has undertaken studies about the impact of Brexit on the UK on a range of areas from food prices to ensuring the NHS has enough nurses, but has said that they will not publish the results. Do you think that the government should or should not make the results of these studies publicly available?”

They have given me permission to publish the answer.

83% of the public (sample of 2,057) say the government should make the studies public; 9% say should not and 8% don’t know. The full polling can be read here. These studies cover the entirety of the traded economy. What the polling shows is that as a country we are united in wanting the Government to tell us what it knows about what Brexit means for us. Although Government has now said that "information will be forthcoming," concerns remain about when it will be forthcoming - and what will be forthcoming. But the public agrees - we can't be kept in the dark. Separately, the Good Law Project which I direct and Molly Scott Cato, MEP, have written to DExEU threatening to sue unless Government releases both (1) the secret Brexit studies prepared by DExEU and (2) an unpublished Treasury analysis comparing the economic benefits of future FTAs with the economic cost of leaving the customs union (described by Charles Grant here). We will be making an announcement on Monday as to what steps we will take in that litigation following the Government's announcement. [twitter-follow screen_name='jolyonmaugham']