This is Paul Adamson and I'm in conversation with Peter Kellner.

Peter Kellner is the United Kingdom's leading poster and president of the polling organization,

UGov.

First question piece, it's September 2015.

Referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union is likely to take place sometime within the next 12 months.

Can you give me a flavour of the current state of British public opinion on Europe?

Paul, when we've been tracking attitudes to the EU for some years.

And in the first couple of years of the current

Conservative government, when it was in coalition of the Liberal Democrats,

three or four years ago there was a pretty consistent majority,

and quite a large majority for Britain withdrawing from the EU.

And it started to turn round once David Cameron clarified his own position and started making

the case for remaining a member and since last Christmas over something like nine months now

there was until a few weeks ago a small but consistent majority for staying in.

So a typical poll would have 45% saying they were going to stay in, 35% saying they

go to come out, 20% saying they don't know all they wouldn't vote.

Our latest poll just last week found that that margin had narrowed two

percentage points. Now that might just be a statistical blib, but I have a feeling that the

contraction of the lead is real because of the issues around migration and refugees.

The European Union is once again seen as a source of Britain's problems rather than a

source of the solutions to Britain's problems. So we'll see over the next few weeks what happens both in the problem of migration and refugees

and whether that has a knock-on effect in terms of British attitudes with as we say the referendum

...