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| 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
