Algarve observation

 

September, like most months of the year these days, has forgotten its place in the calendar. From the shade of the garden overlooking the bay, Praia da Luz – on the south coast of Portugal – lies below in the fierce, crystalline light of an afternoon that belongs more naturally to the height of summer. 

The temperature has climbed into the low thirties again and the sun seems determined to hold its position, pressing down upon the bay with an almost physical weight. Nothing in the scene suggests summer is preparing to leave.

The garden terrace offers sanctuary. Great palms throw ragged shadows across the stone paths, filtering the sunlight into moving fragments. Pines and a gnarled cork tree lean towards the sea, the latter’s trunk dark and contorted, while succulents and cacti rise from the dry earth with the smug resilience of plants that long ago learned not to expect rain. Beneath them, the ground is dusty, baked hard after another long Algarve summer.

Beyond this shaded oasis is the brightness of the beach, a luminous, picture-perfect arch of sand and sea. Praia da Luz is busy without achieving the indignity of being crowded. Bronzed figures, reduced by distance and heat to anonymous specimens of leisure, wander slowly along the water’s edge while others grill in the rays of the overbearing sun. 

Umbrellas provide splashes of colour and the largely theoretical promise of shade. A few young children jump and splash in the water supervised by their parents. The Atlantic, so often restless, has been subdued into a sheet of serene blue and green, barely distinguishable at the horizon from the bleached sky above it.

My view is not the airbrushed Algarve of the holiday brochure but the lived-in daily rhythm of the coast: beautiful, untidy, functional.

Everything seems slowed by the heat, even the practical paraphernalia of resort life: cafés adorning the cobbled promenade dispensing lunch and cold drinks, giant inflatables on the beach awaiting temporary ownership, jet skis bobbing offshore with the neglected air of expensive toys nobody can be bothered to use.

To the east, the land rises abruptly, the great ochre and rust-coloured cliffs providing a reminder that this gentle bay has been carved in harsher times. Villas and apartments climb the opposite slope in white terraces, the inevitable southern European accretion of concrete, balconies and aspirational sea views, their walls dazzling in the afternoon glare.

And yet there is something slightly disconcerting about the perfection of it all. It is mid-September. The afternoon shadows are beginning to lengthen and evenings arrive earlier. Somewhere in the instincts of generations is the expectation that summer should be loosening its grip. But the thermometer says otherwise. Another day in the thirties. Another afternoon when the air barely moves and shade becomes valuable territory.

Perhaps that is what gives the view its peculiar intensity: the collision between beauty and unease. Paradise is still paradise. It has merely developed a temperature problem.

From beneath the trees, however, such thoughts are all too easily postponed. The sea glitters. Beachgoers continue their slow migration between sand and water. A palm frond stirs briefly. And the first month of autumn carries on pretending to be August.

FICTION FOR NOW

 

Talking climate, catastrophe and imagined futures at the Threekingham Literary Festival

by Clive Simpson

There was a phrase I wrote when signing a copy of Flood Waters Down at the Threekingham Boutique Literary Festival which, with hindsight, summed up much of the discussion that followed.

“Fiction – for now, at least.” It was meant to be slightly tongue-in-cheek. But after the summer Britain and Europe have just experienced, perhaps not entirely.

On Saturday (29 August), novelist and creative writing lecturer Amy Lilwall and I opened the literary programme at Three Kings Organic in the tiny Lincolnshire village of Threekingham with a panel entitled 'Imagining Our Future – Climate Fiction'. It was an intimate setting for a very large subject.

The festival itself, held over the August Bank Holiday weekend, was an enjoyably eclectic affair: authors, historians, poets and readers gathering in the conference room of Three Kings Organic, a delightful wine bar and café in a beautifully renovated 1200-year-old former inn.

Over two days of talks, workshops and conversation the programme ranged from Lincolnshire history and the Middle Ages to poetry, creative writing and discussions about the sheer business of being an author.

Our opening panel, hosted by Samantha Maw, brought together two rather different novels. Amy's The Water That May Come imagines Britain preparing for a potentially catastrophic inundation and the possibility of its citizens having to escape their own country. 

Flood Waters Down moves further into a climate-damaged future, following characters attempting to survive in a Britain where weather extremes, environmental degradation and the insidious rise of AI combine begin to fundamentally reshape society.

Different stories and different approaches, but with a common question lurking beneath them: what happens when the previously unimaginable starts becoming reality? 

When fiction and forecast collide
It was difficult to discuss that question at the end of August 2026 without acknowledging what had been happening outside.

Britain has just experienced an extraordinary summer. Provisional Met Office figures in mid-August put the UK's mean summer temperature at 16.48C to 10 August – already 1.88C above the 1991-2020 average and on course to exceed the previous summer record, itself set only in 2025.

The heatwaves produced a provisional 38C at Kew Gardens, the fifth-highest UK temperature recorded, while 40 observing locations across central and southern England reached 36C or more.

And heat has only been part of the story. Much of England and Wales endured prolonged dry conditions before the weather turned sufficiently unstable for forecasters to start warning of heavy rain, thunderstorms and localised flooding – the peculiar contemporary contradiction of needing rain while simultaneously worrying about getting too much of it too quickly.

This increasingly feels like the climatic world in which we now live: not simply warmer weather but instability and extremes. Heat. Drought. Flood. Fire. Then heat again.

Against that background, sitting in a Lincolnshire wine bar and café discussing novels about flooded landscapes didn't feel quite as speculative as it might once have done. And in this context Lincolnshire really matters – it is a significant food growing and processing area, an increasingly key part of the country’s critical infrastructure.

Large areas of the Fens exist because generations of people have engineered water out of the landscape. Pumps, drains, embankments and sluices maintain an extraordinary artificial geography, much of it at or even below sea level. It is the environment I grew up with – and the landscape in which the idea for Flood Waters Down first took shape.

The night the idea arrived
During the panel, Samantha asked where the novel had begun. I traced it back to the North Sea storm surge of December 2013. At the time I was doing some reporting in the area and visited Surfleet Seas End, where farmers and drainage officials had been watching the water rise alarmingly close to the top of the flood banks.

What stayed with me was the margin. A few inches. Standing there afterwards, I found myself wondering what would happen if, one night in the future, the water rose those extra few inches. What happens when it over tops the bank? Where does it go? And what happens to the people who have spent their lives believing those banks will protect them?

This eventually became the opening chapter of Flood Waters Down. The scene is a remote Fenland sluice at Surfleet Seas End where Jack Craft and his father watch the water rise through the darkness. The water eventually tops the bank and Jack's father sets off upstream in an old motorboat. It is the last time Jack sees him.

Though water is the catalyst, my intention was never simply to write a novel about a flood.. What interested me was what follows as the accelerating effects of climate change take hold. 

Turning fact into “future history”
My route into fiction was different from Amy's. She came through creative writing, completing an MA and PhD before becoming a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Lincoln. I came through journalism.

I became a reporter at 18, partly inspired, rather improbably, by seeing All the President's Men. Later I was able to combine journalism with another lifelong interest – space exploration – and have spent much of the past three decades writing about the international space sector.

Alongside that has been a longstanding interest in environmental issues and climate change. More recently, however, something began to trouble me. You can write factual articles about climate change until, as I put it during the panel, you are “blue in the face”. There is an enormous amount of excellent science, journalism and analysis available.

Yet facts alone do not necessarily connect. Graphs showing projected sea-level rise and reports explaining the consequences of two degrees of warming are important. But neither necessarily answers the intensely human question: what will that actually feel like? 

That was where fiction began to interest me. I described Flood Waters Down during the discussion as a kind of “future history” – taking what we know now and asking what one plausible version of the future might look like if today's trends continue.

There is a distinction between prediction and possibility. Climate fiction does not need to tell us precisely what will happen – its power lies in asking us to inhabit something that could happen.

What if we are the refugees?
Amy's novel The Water That May Come approaches that question from another direction and, interestingly, she told the audience that she had not originally set out to write a climate-change novel at all.

One of its inspirations was a much-publicised theory from the 1990s that a volcanic collapse in the Canary Islands might generate a huge Atlantic tsunami affecting the UK. Another came much later, after Brexit.

Having spent several years in France, Amy began wondering what would happen if Britain suddenly had to be evacuated. Where would British people go? And, outside the European Union, who would take them? It produces one of the most interesting reversals in The Water That May Come – British citizens becoming refugees.

Amy read a passage in which her character Jane is travelling north with a baby, hoping eventually to reach safety in Finland. Passing through the Lake District, she encounters an official responsible for allocating space to displaced people. Jane suddenly understands her position. She is, effectively, a refugee in her own country.

That prompted one of the strongest strands of our conversation. We are accustomed to seeing refugees through the distancing lens of television screens and newspaper reports: people crossing borders, boarding boats, fleeing floods, wars, droughts and failed states.

But what if the people looking for sanctuary were us? What if a British family arrived at a foreign border carrying everything it could salvage?
What if we needed the small boat?

Fiction can perform that reversal extraordinarily effectively because it removes the comforting distance between observer and victim.

Geography of disaster
Disaster fiction traditionally destroys places such as New York, Washington, Los Angeles or London. Hollywood has demolished them repeatedly, Samantha observed. “It feels different when catastrophe arrives in Spalding, Boston, Sittingbourne or Nuneaton,” she said.

Both novels use familiar British geography. In Flood Waters Down, the Fens are central to the story. Spalding becomes important. London is decaying under the combined pressure of climate disruption and social breakdown.

Amy, meanwhile, makes Nuneaton significant precisely because of its geography: being about as far from the sea as it is possible to get in England.

For readers who know these places, the effect can be oddly unsettling. Climate change stops being something happening to a Pacific island or a melting glacier thousands of miles away. It happens down the road.

Don't buy a bungalow
The point became unexpectedly entertaining when the discussion opened to the audience. One questioner recalled hearing archaeologist and Fenland expert Francis Pryor discussing his book The Fens. His advice, she remembered, to people contemplating the future of low-lying Fenland communities included two particularly memorable suggestions. “Don't buy a bungalow.” 

And, if evacuation ever becomes necessary, don't expect the official evacuation routes to be empty. It raised laughter but the underlying point was serious. How prepared are we? 

There is an enormous difference between escaping an immediate disaster and coping with its aftermath. If flood water arrives tonight, the immediate question is how to get people somewhere safe. But suppose the water doesn't go away?  Where do those people live next week? Next year?

What happens to property, farmland, communities, schools and businesses? And what happens to the emotional connection people have to places where their families may have lived for generations?” These are no longer questions confined to novels.

The UK's Climate Change Committee warned earlier this year that heat, flooding and drought pose growing risks to the British way of life. Its assessment suggests that by mid-century peak river flows could be up to 45 per cent higher than now, while 92 per cent of existing homes could be at risk of overheating. Water-supply shortfalls in England could exceed five billion litres a day.

In July, the Government adopted a cross-government planning assumption of at least 2C of warming by 2050 – an acknowledgement that adaptation can no longer be treated as an optional add-on to emissions reduction.

There is something sobering about official government planning beginning to occupy territory once largely inhabited by speculative fiction.

Who gets to escape?
Another theme linking our books was inequality. Amy has a billionaire, Pinko, who can contemplate climate catastrophe from an entirely different position to Jane, a single mother with vastly fewer resources. While other people worry about evacuation, Pinko can move horses, throw parties and ultimately escape in a helicopter.

It led to an excellent audience question: how do you make a billionaire sympathetic in a novel about a crisis to which extreme wealth and consumption are hardly irrelevant?

Amy's answer was that she had deliberately shown him living outside the world of “mere mortals”. Yet she also resisted making him a caricature. 

In Flood Waters Down, Baroness Lydia Frampton occupies similar territory although she is a considerably darker character. She is fabulously wealthy, politically connected and intelligent. Her response to climate breakdown is essentially to construct an escape from it: an enclave near Spalding where the very wealthy can insulate themselves from the deteriorating world beyond.

The question behind both characters is increasingly pertinent. When things become difficult, who gets out? Who owns the helicopter? Who has the fortified house? Who can relocate? Who has access to water, energy and security? And who is left standing beside the rising river?

Climate change is environmental but its consequences are inseparable from wealth and power.

Can we simply leave Earth?
Towards the end of the session, Samantha brought my other journalistic life into the conversation. If the Earth becomes increasingly difficult to inhabit, she asked, can we simply colonise Mars? My one-word answer was “No”, which probably requires qualification.

Humans may eventually establish some kind of presence on Mars. But the popular idea that an alien planet provides an easy escape hatch from a damaged Earth bears little relationship to the physical realities involved.

Mars is lethally hostile. Radiation alone presents enormous challenges. Then there are questions of life support, food, human physiology, psychology, reproduction and simply keeping people alive millions of miles from Earth.

Putting somebody into a rocket and firing them towards Mars is the relatively straightforward part. Building another functioning world is not. The irony is hard to miss.

We already possess an extraordinarily sophisticated spacecraft with abundant water, breathable air, a functioning biosphere, magnetic shielding, tolerable gravity and an immensely complicated life-support system that has operated successfully for billions of years. It's called Earth. Looking after it remains considerably easier than terraforming Mars.

The empathy gap
Perhaps the phrase from Amy that stayed with me most was “the empathy gap”. Those of us living in Britain can still, for much of the time, experience climate change at a distance – punctuated by increasingly frequent reminders closer to home. 

We know it is happening. We see the pictures. We read the statistics. Then we make a cup of tea and continue with the day. Although even that comfortable separation is becoming harder to maintain after summers such as this one.

Amy argued that stories can bridge some of that gap because readers become emotionally invested in people rather than statistics – and I think she is right.

Nobody cries over a graph. We might, however, care deeply about an invented woman driving north through England with a baby, wondering whether she will ever see the Lake District again.

We might care about a Fenland man standing beside his father as water creeps over a bank. And having cared about them, perhaps the graph means something different.

That does not make fiction a substitute for science. Quite the opposite. The science provides the foundation. Fiction asks us to imagine living inside its implications.

Fiction – for now
At the end of the discussion, Samantha asked what we hoped readers would take from our books. My answer was straightforward. Don't ignore what is happening now because doing so stores up consequences for the future.

Flood Waters Down isn't intended as an exact prediction of life in Britain in the near future. I sincerely hope much of it remains fiction. But its world is not conjured from nowhere.

The heat, floods, storms, migration, technological disruption, inequality and political reluctance to confront uncomfortable realities all have roots in the present. That is why climate fiction feels increasingly relevant. It allows us to rehearse possibilities before we have to live them. It lets us ask what happens to ordinary people when systems begin to fail. Who adapts? Who profits? Who leaves? Who stays? Who helps somebody else – and who closes the gate behind them?

On an unsettled August bank holiday weekend in a small Lincolnshire village, those questions generated a lively, thoughtful and occasionally amusing hour of topical conversation. At the end, the audience applauded and everyone headed outside for coffee, books and the next festival session. The real world resumed. For now, at least.

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Editor's note:  Flood Waters Down is available through bookshops and online retailers in paperback and ebook editions. For author signings, talks or literary festivals please contact Clive Simpson direct. 

In Lincoln author signed copies can be purchased from Lindum Books and Lark Books, and in Sleaford and surrounding areas from The Travelling Bookshop.

Three Kings Organic is an elegant organic Wine Bar and Café in the picturesque Lincolnshire village of Threekingham. It serves top quality food and drink, with future plans to develop a flagship cookery school and shop on-site. A unique and enterprising venue with first class service and hospitality. 

Why I wrote Flood Waters Down

Surfleet Seas End - one of the atmospheric settings for Flood Waters Down.

People often ask where the idea for Flood Waters Down came from. The answer isn't a single news story or scientific report, but the intersection of decades spent as a journalist covering science, climate and the environment, and a lifelong connection with the Lincolnshire Fens. The following Author's Note, originally published with the novel, explains some of that journey.

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I'VE spent much of my professional life as a journalist writing about technology and space travel. There have been many highlights, among them visiting the launch pad of Yuri Gagarin in Kazakhstan and reporting from the Kennedy Space Center on the final flights of the Space Shuttle. While these great symbols of humanity’s progress bring optimism and perspective, they also reveal how small and fallible 21st century life is.

My early days as a reporter, with many long hours in courts and local government meetings, taught me to assiduously follow the facts. The crafting of fiction, however, has offered the freedom to explore consequences in this modern world of ours. When it comes to climate change, for example, news reports might still define the contours, but fictional stories inhabit the reality.

When I first began sketching the outline for Flood Waters Down, it wasn’t from a desire to predict or warn about some of the dire consequences that might be awaiting humanity, but to examine a question that has been quietly fermenting beneath much of modern life for several decades. What happens when the systems we built to protect and support us become the instruments of our undoing?

The novel grew from that uneasy thought – a mixture of recognition and inevitability – and became a story about people, water and the limits of control.

The Fens of South Lincolnshire, where I spent my formative years, provided the ideal canvas on which to explore two main themes – the calamity of anthropogenic climate change and the insidious growth of artificial intelligence (AI).

The oceanic flatness of the landscape, its sweeping horizons and vast panoramas are part of my DNA. Like many areas of the world, this is a land of understatement, a man-made illusion with its intricate artificiality of dykes, pumps and watery channels designed to keep the sea and rivers at bay. For centuries, people have conspired with gravity and ingenuity to make it habitable, as if permanence could be engineered. But the truth of the Fens is that they are always waiting to return to water.

Flood Waters Down takes that latent tension – between cultivation and reclamation, order and entropy – and follows it to a logical conclusion. The narrative is troubled by the effects of accelerating climate change, and also by the human capacity for denial, greed and self-interest – forces as elemental as any flood tide.

The characters inhabit an egotistic world that has gone beyond complacency to the edge of catastrophe. Some cling to the remnants of bureaucracy and hierarchy; others attempt to forge new lives, closer to the margins. What binds them all is the struggle to define meaning when the accepted norms of the past have disappeared.

Technology drifts through the world of Flood Waters Down, not as a marvel to be worshiped, but as a symptom. AI records, predicts, optimises – and, in doing so, renders human judgement obsolete. The absence of empathy, disguised as efficiency, is bureaucracy perfected. AI doesn’t hate or lie – it simply doesn’t care. The danger isn't that machines will outthink us, but that they already reflect us perfectly – our appetite for convenience and comfort, and our willingness to delegate morality and responsibility.

If there’s satire within the story, it’s the dry, shaken-not-stirred sort, the humour of dogged human persistence, of denial and the absurdity of our faith in possessions and objects. The Fens are testimony to precisely that impulse – the rearrangement and taming of nature until it looks like reason.

A work of fiction, however, allows something more generous – the possibility of resilience, and of rethinking the terms of adaptation and human existence. Beneath the dystopian veneer, there are still gestures of tenderness and hope, though people generally adapt because they must, and only sometimes because they want to.

Writing Flood Waters Down often felt like walking a tightrope stretched between realism and allegory. The setting is near future but, even as I write these words, the pressures are building: the slow-motion disaster of climate neglect, the monetisation of scarcity, the quiet capture of truth by systems too complex to question. The Fens – low, mutable and fragile – become a lens through which to experience it all.

In some ways, this novel is less a warning or parable, more a meditation on cause and effect, on what we choose to preserve, and on the truths we believe or deny. If it has a single contention, it is that the future is never as distant as we imagine. It’s a slow, steady progression, often only visible after the rising water laps at the door.

Thank you for stepping into this part real, part imagined landscape of the near future. I hope you find in it not only the unease of recognition but also the quiet persistence that defines the human condition; the urge to overcome and rebuild, even as the landscape and the civilisation that built it sink into oblivion.

Editor's note: This post reproduces the Author's Note from Flood Waters Down with the permission of Cliftop Publishing. The novel was published in April 2026 and is available through bookshops and online retailers in paperback and ebook editions. For author signings, talks or literary festivals please contact Clive Simpson direct.

 

When reality catches up with fiction

 

EVERY so often, reality catches up with fiction. Watching Europe endure another brutal heatwave this week, I found myself thinking back not to a scientific paper or a news report, but to a passage I wrote for Flood Waters Down several years ago.

It comes from the opening of Chapter 3, introducing one of the novel's principal characters at his Surfleet Seas End houseboat home.

It was barely nine o'clock in the morning, and already the outside temperature was edging towards thirty degrees centigrade as the sun climbed into a cloudless sky of menacing blue. Jack Craft had become accustomed to the energy-sapping heat of such days that now interspersed the frequent storms like a distorted form of meteorological punctuation.

The more temperate and predictable seasons of the past had never been part of his experience. He often wondered what it would have been like to live a life that was, in meteorological terms at least, almost carefree compared with the harsh realities of survival he now faced each day.

Reading those words today gives me no satisfaction. If anything, it is deeply unsettling because the novel is set 20 years or more in the future, whereas the conditions that inspired it are seemingly becoming steadily less fictional.

This June, temperatures across Europe climbed into territory once regarded as exceptional. Hospitals have come under pressure. Wildfires have flared. Roads have buckled. Railways have slowed. And before the continent has had time to recover, forecasters are already warning that another spell of intense heat may arrive within days.

It is tempting to dismiss each event as simply another extraordinary summer but that misses the point. Prof Sir Jim Skea, Chair of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, expressed it succinctly during an interview on BBC Radio.

"One heatwave by itself doesn't tell you that climate change is happening. But if it becomes a pattern, if they keep coming back, and if the long-term temperature records are an upward rise, it's a sure sign,” he stated

Such distinctions do matter because climate is measured over decades and centuries not afternoons or years. Yet patterns are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Records that once stood for generations are now broken frequently. Events described as "once in a century" seem to arrive with unsettling regularity.

Conversation is changing too. For years, much of the debate focused on preventing future warming. Now it is increasingly about adapting to the warming that is already here and locked in.  That is assuming we can adapt at large.

As Prof Skea observed, much of Britain's infrastructure was built for a different climate. Our homes, hospitals, railways and roads were designed for weather that is becoming part of history rather than everyday experience. He argues that even as temperatures continue to rise, we have not paid enough attention to adaptation.

The world’s oceans tell an equally worrying story. New figures released this week show that global ocean surface temperatures reached their highest June level on record. That’s relevant because the oceans are Earth's great heat reservoir, regulating weather, influencing rainfall, feeding storms and sustaining marine ecosystems.

Samantha Burgess, Deputy Director of the European climate service Copernicus, explained that warmer oceans affect almost everything: marine ecosystems come under stress, sea levels continue to rise through thermal expansion, storms gain energy and even fish populations begin to shift.

Perhaps most strikingly, she noted that changing ocean temperatures are already altering European weather patterns, making summer heatwaves “more intense, more frequent and more longer lasting than they were historically speaking”.

In other words, what we are experiencing is not simply bad luck. It is easy to become overwhelmed by statistics. Every few weeks seems to bring another record, another graph trending upwards, another headline declaring the "highest ever".

But climate change is not really experienced through graphs. It is experienced through cancelled train journeys, sleepless nights, reservoirs running low, rivers shrinking, forests burning and communities beginning to wonder whether the weather they once regarded as normal has quietly slipped into history.

When I began writing Flood Waters Down, I was interested not in predicting the future but in exploring where today's trends might eventually lead. As a space and environmental journalist, I had spent years reporting on climate science, flooding and changing landscapes. Fiction offered something journalism could not: the opportunity to imagine what it might actually feel like to live inside those changes.

The novel focuses on rising seas because it impacts the landscape of the Lincolnshire Fens that has always fascinated me. But flooding is only one chapter of the climate story. Heat, drought, wildfire, rising sea temperatures and more violent storms are all connected. They are different expressions of the same changing planet.

Science provides the evidence. Fiction asks a different question: what does it feel like to live there?

That was one of the issues I wanted to explore in Flood Waters Down. Looking across Europe today, it feels rather closer to home than when I first wrote the opening lines of that chapter.

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Editor's note: The picture at the head of this article is based on an original photo by the author from a shop window display during a visit to Manitou Springs, Colorado. The book title was added subsequently. 

Flood Waters Down (2026) is available now in paperback and ebook from bookshops and online.

Brexit at Ten: the long decade

Photo: Clive Simpson

TEN years ago tonight I sat up late watching the results of the EU referendum come in. Like millions of others, I had expected the country to step back from the brink. Instead, on the morning of 24 June 2016, Britain woke to discover it had embarked upon the largest act of economic and political self-harm in its modern history.

A decade later, the verdict is in. Brexit has failed. That is not a partisan slogan or the bitter complaint of someone who voted Remain. It is the unavoidable conclusion reached after ten years of evidence.

The remarkable thing about the tenth anniversary is not that Brexit remains controversial. It is that anyone still feels able to argue it has been a success.

Had Brexit delivered even a fraction of what was promised, now would be a day of national celebration. There would be speeches, commemorations and triumphant headlines. Politicians would be queueing up to claim credit. Instead, most would rather avoid mentioning it at all.

That silence speaks volumes. As I wrote in the aftermath of the referendum, Brexit was never really about Europe. It became a vessel into which voters poured every frustration they felt about austerity, immigration, stagnant wages, housing shortages, failing public services and political neglect. The European Union became a convenient proxy for a host of domestic failures that had little to do with Brussels and everything to do with Westminster.

The cure turned out to be worse than the disease. The promised economic renaissance never arrived. The bonfire of red tape never happened. The NHS did not receive £350 million a week. Trade did not become easier. British exporters did not discover a golden age of global opportunity. Instead, a growing body of evidence points in precisely the opposite direction.

Recent research suggests that Brexit has reduced UK GDP per capita by between six and eight per cent compared with similar advanced economies. Business investment is estimated to be 12 to 18 per cent lower than it would otherwise have been, while employment and productivity have both suffered significant declines.

These are not abstract statistics. They represent lost opportunities, lower wages, reduced tax revenues and fewer resources for public services than would have otherwise been the case.

In 2019 I described this as Brexit's "invisible uncertainty" – the economic drag created when businesses postpone decisions, investors look elsewhere and opportunities quietly disappear. A decade on, that uncertainty is no longer invisible. It is reflected in the country's weaker growth, lower productivity and diminished prospects.

Even before the long-term consequences became clear, markets delivered an immediate verdict. When the referendum result emerged in June 2016, sterling experienced its largest single-day fall since the era of floating exchange rates began. Unlike the stock market, which eventually recovered, the pound never truly regained its former strength.

Of course, Brexit supporters have spent years arguing that the real problem was not Brexit itself but the way it was implemented. It is a familiar defence.

Communism never failed because of communism. It failed because it was implemented incorrectly. Brexit, apparently, suffers from the same convenient excuse. Yet the reality is that Brexit was always built upon contradictory promises.

Britain would enjoy all the benefits of membership without any obligations. Immigration would fall while the economy boomed. Trade would become easier despite introducing barriers with our largest trading partner. Regulation would be slashed while standards remained unchanged.

These things could never all be true at the same time and, 10 years on, the public increasingly recognises that fact.

In 2022 when I wrote ‘Breaking the Brexit Taboo’ and questioned why Brexit was still treated in some quarters as an act of disloyalty. Today the taboo has largely disappeared. The debate has moved on from whether Brexit can be criticised to whether anyone can credibly claim it has succeeded.

According to recent polling, 57 per cent of people in Great Britain now believe leaving the EU was the wrong decision, while only 30 per cent think it was right. The only surprising thing about that statistic is that 30 per cent still think it was the right decision.

The referendum itself now feels like a relic from another political age. David Cameron, who called it, resigned within hours of losing it. Theresa May was consumed by it. Boris Johnson rode it into Downing Street before being destroyed by his own conduct. Liz Truss briefly crashed the economy. Rishi Sunak inherited the wreckage. Keir Starmer attempted to manage the consequences but had only been repairing EU relations in a limited way.

By this tenth anniversary Britain has gone through seven prime ministers since the vote. Stability and prosperity were among Brexit's promises. Neither has been delivered.

And then there is immigration. One of the central arguments advanced by Leave campaigners was that Brexit would allow Britain to "take back control" of its borders.

Yet net migration reached record levels in the years following departure from the EU. Whatever one thinks about immigration itself, Brexit demonstrably failed on one of its own defining tests.

Several years ago, in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, I coined the phrase "long Brexit". The comparison with Long Covid seemed appropriate then and even more so today. The acute political shock may have passed but the symptoms remain stubbornly present.

Economic under performance, labour shortages, trade friction, political instability and endless arguments about Europe continued to shape British life long after the referendum itself had disappeared into history. A decade later long Brexit remains with us.

Perhaps the saddest aspect of the entire saga is the opportunity lost.

Imagine a Britain that had spent the last decade focusing on housing, productivity, energy security, climate adaptation, infrastructure, education and healthcare rather than tying itself in knots over customs arrangements, trade agreements and constitutional disputes.

Imagine a politics that had sought solutions to the country's real problems rather than inventing imaginary enemies.

Instead, an entire generation has lived through a period dominated by a project that promised national renewal and delivered national diminishment.

The irony is that Brexit was sold as a means of restoring sovereignty and confidence. Yet modern Britain feels less confident, less prosperous and less influential than it did in 2016.

Brexit was sold as an event. In reality it became a condition and history will ultimately decide where the episode sits in the long story of this country. But ten years on, one conclusion seems unavoidable. The referendum was not the beginning of Britain's revival. It was the beginning of a long decade of decline.

And, as the country prepares for yet another Prime Minister and another round of ministerial changes, we are still living with the consequences.

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Photo: The Sir Peter Scott lighthouse at Sutton Bridge from a photo by the author. The original picture was taken during a recce trip for the novel Flood Waters Down, a climate change and AI thriller which is available now.

Brexit election's invisible uncertainty

Space Oddity

Breaking the Brexit taboo

Media creates climate of crisis

 

As an independent journalist, I value accuracy, fairness and accountability in public discourse – qualities that seem too often absent from the current landscape of UK political reporting.

Scrutiny is essential. It is the lifeblood of democracy. But what we are witnessing is so much more than the scrutiny of power.

We are seeing something more corrosive: a sustained, often selective, campaign of narrative-building that risks distorting public understanding of what is actually happening in government.

At the centre of this storm is British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and his administration.

Manufactured collapse

Based on headlines alone, one might assume the country is in a state of political collapse.

Yet step away from the commentary – watch a parliamentary session, observe a select committee hearing – and a different picture emerges: slower, less dramatic and far more grounded.

I would urge anyone genuinely interested in the truth to do exactly that. Watch the proceedings yourself. Strip away the commentary, the panel discussions, the relentless “insider” and “anonymous” briefings.

What remains is not chaos, but governance. And that raises a difficult question: why does so much of the media coverage suggest otherwise?

Power narrative

Depending on who is in power, there is an uncomfortable elasticity in how certain sections of the media treat institutions.

When Conservatives governed, the civil service was routinely derided as “the Blob” – an obstructive, self-serving bureaucracy. Under Labour, the same media voices often present it as unimpeachable and beyond reproach. This political bias is far from subtle.

Even the treatment of individuals reflects this inconsistency. Figures praised one year are condemned the next, depending not on new evidence but on shifting political winds. 

Consider how Nigel Farage could describe Peter Mandelson as “enormously talented” in 2024, only to demand a Prime Minister’s resignation over his association with him by 2026. The facts did not change. The politics did.

Reporting or engineering?

Journalism carries responsibility. When a story involves potential breaches of serious legislation – such as the Official Secrets Act – the ethical course is clear: verify, inform authorities where appropriate and report responsibly.

When that line blurs, trust erodes.

The handling of recent political stories by prominent journalists such as Pippa Crerar, Chris Mason, Nick Robinson and Laura Kuenssberg prompts serious questions – not about their right to report but about the balance between urgency and verification, between narrative and fact.

The issue is not that journalists should refrain from criticism. It is whether that criticism is proportionate, properly evidenced and free from agenda.

Ignoring the record

Lost in the media noise is something rather inconvenient to the prevailing narrative: delivery.

By the government’s own accounting, around 20 manifesto pledges have already been delivered, with dozens more on track before the end of the Parliament.

This is not a trivial achievement, particularly given the economic and geopolitical headwinds facing any administration.

Yet these developments rarely feature on front (or inside) pages or on news programmes. They are eclipsed by speculation, internal briefings and personality-driven conflict – the meat of today’s social media-driven political journalism.

Compare this to the treatment of Boris Johnson, whose premiership – despite being marked by international scepticism – often received coverage that softened or reframed controversies.

In contrast, Keir Starmer is widely regarded on the international stage as measured and credible. One might reasonably ask whether that contrast itself invites a different kind of scrutiny – or even hostility.

Illusion of consensus

There is also a growing sense that parts of the media are not merely reporting events but actively shaping expectations – particularly around electoral outcomes.

The suggestion of an inevitable surge for figures like Nigel Farage is increasingly presented as fact rather than possibility. This in itself creates a feedback loop: coverage influences perception, which in turn influences coverage.

Democracy depends on participation, not inevitability and not headlines. Voters should decide outcomes.

Personal view

Let me be clear: this is not an uncritical endorsement of the current government. No administration is perfect. Decisions – including the appointment of Mandelson – are open to legitimate debate.

But imperfection is not failure. And disagreement is not grounds for demolition. There is a difference between holding power to account and seeking to undermine it.

Bigger question

What concerns me most is not any single headline or journalist, but the cumulative effect.

When TV, radio and newspaper coverage becomes relentlessly negative, selectively framed and politically charged, it risks eroding trust – not just in government but in journalism itself.

With local and regional elections approaching this is a dangerous place for any democracy.

The role of the media is not to crown or crush leaders. It is to inform the public with accuracy, fairness and context.

At the moment, too much of our political reporting is falling short of that standard.

And that should bother us all – whatever our politics.