Brexit: 10 Years Later

Ten years ago this week, on June 23, 2016, the United Kingdom shocked the world and voted to leave the European Union, 52 to 48 percent. The cursed ratio. The people behind the Leave campaign called it the will of the British people. Most voters didn't even know what Brexit was, and a decade later the country has changed its mind. Poll after poll shows more Britons want back in.

A country that never thought it was European

The United Kingdom doesn't really think it's part of Europe. For five hundred years it looked anywhere but the continent to expand its influence, across two successive rounds of empire building: first in North America, later in India and Africa.

Fast forward to the twentieth century. After Europe tore itself apart twice in less than thirty years, national leaders had an idea. Take the raw materials that fuel war out of the hands of warring states (states that, honestly, had been fighting each other for a millennium) and hand them to a neutral third party. The European Coal and Steel Community was born. Over the next twenty years its scope widened, and in 1957 the European Community became a common market for goods.

There were only a handful of members at first: France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Italy. The United Kingdom, the small damp island off the coast of most of them, opted out, still trying to squeeze what it could from a dying empire and later the Commonwealth.

Independent nations do what they want. Freedom does that. But Britain's outsized position, built on an empire that once covered a quarter of the globe, started to shrink, and eventually Europe looked like the better bet. The French had other ideas. Charles de Gaulle vetoed British membership, and only after his resignation and death in 1970 did it become possible. Once he was out of the picture, the Conservative government of Ted Heath moved quickly, and Britain joined the European Community on January 1, 1973.

A 1975 referendum ratified the decision. It was championed by the political right, traditionally the side in favor of international cooperation and free trade. Opposition came mainly from the left, including the Labour Party, on the grounds that British workers would be exposed not only to the free movement of goods but also of labor, as workers crossed borders chasing visa-free jobs. In the end two thirds of voters liked the idea and confirmed membership, and that was the status quo for the next fifteen years.

The great swap

During the 1980s, Conservatives and Labour swapped positions on Europe. Under Thatcher, the Conservatives began to question a perceived loss of sovereignty, even though Britain always had a say in EU matters. After Labour's disastrous 1983 election, the party moved toward a more Europe-friendly platform, drawn in part by the worker protections taking shape on the continent, a contrast to Thatcher's domestic agenda. By the 1997 Labour landslide the positions had mostly flipped. Labour was largely pro-EU, with some exceptions, and the Conservatives were increasingly hostile, echoing Thatcher's vision of a European superstate run by bureaucrats in faraway Brussels ordering the British around.

By the time the Conservatives returned to power in 2010, the fault lines were clear. Nigel Farage's UK Independence Party, UKIP, was a perennial thorn in the Conservative side, and it would only grow stronger unless David Cameron made a deal with the devil to keep the right onside. Vote Conservative in 2015, he offered, and a referendum on Europe would follow if they won.

They won. The referendum was set for June 23, 2016, forty-one years and a couple of weeks after the vote to stay in. There were two sides: Remain, which Cameron himself backed, and Vote Leave, supported by Conservatives such as Michael Gove and former London mayor Boris Johnson. Nigel Farage was heavily involved in the monster he had been gestating for decades, using literal Nazi propaganda and framing to frighten the public into believing that continued membership meant the end of their way of life.

Labour, the largest opposition party, stayed noticeably quiet. It is suspected that leader Jeremy Corbyn secretly favored Leave, along old-school socialist, protect-the-British-worker lines. There was a Labour In for Britain campaign, but it paled next to the others.

Remain held a slight edge when the referendum was announced. Over time, Leave closed the gap.

Everyone, even Leave supporters, was shocked by the result. 52 percent Leave, 48 percent Remain. And famously, no one really knew what it meant. The day after the vote, the most Googled questions in the UK were "what is the EU" and "what happens now we've left the EU." The average British voter didn't know what they had just declared independence from.

Treating it as a personal failing, Cameron resigned the next day, leaving someone else to clean up the mess he had started.

Two years to untangle forty

That someone was Theresa May, the former home secretary who, for reasons no one has yet discovered, triggered Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, starting a two-year countdown to finish negotiations. Untangling forty-plus years of regulation and relationships in two years was never realistic, and it didn't happen. The EU extended the deadline several times to save Britain from itself.

Any deal had to pass Parliament, where most MPs had opposed Brexit in the first place. Even those willing to honor the "will of the people" couldn't agree on what that meant. They ruled out no deal, a clean break with zero trade relationship and a start from scratch, but found no majority for anything beyond that. So May resigned and left it to her replacement.

That replacement was the Brexit ringleader himself, Boris Johnson. After some shenanigans proroguing, or suspending, Parliament so he could work without scrutiny, Johnson called a snap December election to win a majority big enough to "get Brexit done." It worked. Voters were exhausted after three years of fighting, no-deal threats, and a clock that kept resetting. On December 12 the Conservatives won 365 seats to Labour's 202, Labour's worst result in about a century.

With his pro-Brexit majority, Johnson got his agreement. At midnight on February 1, 2020, the United Kingdom left the European Union, the first and only country to do so.

Ten years on, a change of heart

Six and a half years later, after COVID and Ukraine added plenty of noise to the data, the British public has largely changed its mind. 61 percent think the government handled Brexit badly. 57 percent think leaving was wrong. Six in ten call it a failure, and they blame Boris Johnson and the Conservatives. 55 percent want to rejoin, though that drops to 35 percent if rejoining means adopting the euro.

Which may well be the price of readmission, if the EU even wants to bother with British foolishness. Given the political instability that could soon produce the most anti-European government in London since the Napoleonic Wars, it probably won't.

The puzzle is how "taking back control" became so unpopular. Westminster can now sign any deal it likes. That is the reclaimed sovereignty Leave sold. The problem is that Britain is the junior partner in almost every negotiation. A country of 70 million people with a GDP around 4.25 trillion dollars cannot go toe to toe with a bloc of 450 million and a GDP of 20 trillion. Voters seem to have worked that out during the Brexit talks themselves.

The numbers since then are not kind. Estimates put British GDP down roughly 6 to 8 percent, investment down 12 to 18 percent, and employment and productivity down around 4 percent, all compared with pre-Brexit levels.

Then there's immigration. Britain is free to clamp down, and immigration drives political chaos there much as it does here, but it now does so without the automatic partners it had as a member. The EU's Dublin Convention requires migrants to be returned to the country where they first entered the bloc, usually Italy or Greece. Outside the EU, Britain has to send them back to the bloc, and the bloc has no reason to take them. And net migration into the UK has actually risen since Brexit.

Trade tells the same story. Britain can strike its own deals and set its own product standards. Fine. But selling into Europe still means meeting European standards, now with a mountain of paperwork and extra taxes that come with sitting outside the customs union. Plenty of smaller firms have stopped shipping to Europe altogether, which hurts their bottom line further.

And Scotland. 62 percent of Scottish voters chose Remain, only a couple of years after choosing to stay in the UK, a choice that rested in large part on UK membership of the EU. Scotland is again looking across the North Sea, and recent polling gives independence a narrow edge. Put that next to the country's present instability, and it looks very much like the British public was sold a bill of goods.

The lesson

The Leave voters weren't fools. I have friends who voted that way. They were sold lies by populists who ignored every expert screaming that this was a terrible idea. The trade deal would be the easiest in history, they promised, while ignoring the land border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. You cannot keep that border both closed and secure and open and free flowing at the same time, which is exactly what the Good Friday Agreement that ended the Troubles requires.

They deserved real answers to real problems. What they got was a lie slapped on the side of a bus and a billboard that would have been shocking a century ago.

The 51.9 percent who voted Leave had genuine grievances. Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, and the rest pointed those grievances at the wrong people, for their own gain. Britain always had a say in the European Union, through its seat on the European Council, its members of the European Parliament, and the veto every member holds over major policy decisions.

"Take back control" reached back to a day when Britain was a superpower, and it ignored almost all the history that made that possible. This is a small island that happened to industrialize before anyone else, thanks largely to the accident of sitting on the coal that fueled the industrial revolution. It built an empire with itself at the center, profiting from unfree labor and cheap raw materials, and came through both World Wars relatively unscathed. The good old days Brexit promised were always an illusion.

The British are waking up to that, as the current government rebuilds the relationship one piece at a time, rejoining the Erasmus education program and easing border checks with Europe.

And that is the Shakespearean tragedy of Brexit.