No you twerps, 70% of us don't want a hard Brexit

TLDR : That claim that everyone is suddenly in favour of a hard Brexit is complete and total bollocks. It's statistical games taken to a whole new level. Nor do they even suggest people want to expel foreigners.

This was not a conventional opinion polling exercise in which a sample of respondents are asked a straightforward question and their answers published after some standard statistical adjustments for national representativeness. Instead, it was a complex and innovative process designed to “reveal” people’s underlying preferences when faced with forced trade-offs over potential outcomes.

Each person was presented with two menus of Brexit-related outcomes and asked to choose which one they preferred. The option of “neither” was not available... The mix of the two menus offered to respondents was randomly generated. After their first choice, respondents were asked to repeat the process a further four times, every time with two new randomly-generated menus of options.

One of these menu options was the “future rights of current EU nationals in Britain”. And one of the extreme options presented for this category was “all must leave”. And here is the important part. No one was directly asked: “Do you think all EU nationals should leave Britain after Brexit”?

Instead, this was an option that cropped up as part of large bundle of outcomes that respondents were asked to choose between. On the favourability index the researchers constructed this option got a score of about 29 per cent for Remainers and 42 per cent for Leavers. But that does not mean 29 per cent of Remainers support the deportation of EU nationals.As the researchers stress: “These values cannot and should not be interpreted as the raw or unconstrained percentage of respondents supporting a given feature level; instead it measures the degree to which individuals trade-off any given level for all of the others.”

It gets even worse for the hard Brexit conclusion :

As well as asking respondents to choose between various randomly-generated baskets of outcomes, the researchers also presented them with three “fixed” baskets. And these were constructed by the researchers to roughly resemble three Brexit outcomes often described as “soft”, “hard” and “no deal”. Respondents were forced to state a preference. They were not given the option of saying “don’t know” or “neither”.

Further, respondents were not given any sense by the framing of the question of the consequences of the choice of basket. For instance, in the “no deal” basket there were superficially attractive items such as “no payment” to the EU and rather anodyne-sounding ones such “some administrative barriers to trade and 2.5 per cent tariffs”. There was no mention of the fact that “no deal” would mean the UK being in breach of its international treaty obligations. There was no hint at the travel chaos and economic pain that would inevitably follow such a “cliff-edge” outcome. Similarly, the hard Brexit scenario contained no mention of the economic pain relative to the soft scenario.

http://www.independent.co.uk/infact/brexit-report-latest-remainers-deport-eu-citizens-uk-back-hard-european-union-study-explained-a7892216.html