Britain’s second thoughts about Brexit are only growing stronger

Ten years ago today, the people of Britain voted to leave the European Union. The referendum of June 23, 2016, was a vote against the status quo, an insurgent choice onto which a discontented electorate could pin every grievance which Britain’s political class had ignored.

A decade on since that seminal event, the roles have reversed. Brexit – as the process of leaving the EU came to be known – is itself now the status quo, but the country has quietly turned against it, although no alternative attracts a majority of voters.

This is the strange condition in which the anniversary finds Britain – a verdict of failure attached to a decision no one in power is willing to reopen. A dilemma which has defied every British government since and has destroyed the political careers of no fewer than six consecutive prime ministers in 10 years, including Keir Starmer, the incumbent, who is also currently on his way out.

The Brexit of 2016 was argued over trade, sovereignty and immigration. A decade later, the dimension that matters most is the one barely mentioned at the time: security. Britain left the EU to stand on its own. In 2026, it finds itself marooned between a Europe it spurned and an America it can no longer count on.

A curious obsession

Since it was founded as a European Economic Community in the 1950s, Britain has always had a love-and-hate relationship with the organisation. It started by dismissing the Community as just a supranational talking shop that won’t succeed. Eventually, however, the Brits applied to join, but soon after they were finally admitted in 1973, they started talking about leaving.

That’s not to say that the Brits didn’t make major contributions to the EU. They helped guide the EU away from its old obsession with regulating internal markets. None other than Lady Margaret Thatcher, the “Iron Lady” famous later in life for opposing the EU, was one of the chief architects of the EU’s single market, providing for the borderless exchange of goods, services, capital and people.

After the end of the Cold War, Britain also pushed for the quick enlargement of the EU to include the former communist countries of central and eastern Europe. Ironically, many developments which the EU is so proud of today started as British initiatives.

Yet at home, Europe never ceased to be a toxic political problem with both major political parties. Initially, it was the centre-left Labour Party that was divided on the topic. But since the 1990s, it was the centre-right Conservatives who started to be torn asunder by the question of Europe.

The referendum disaster

In most European countries, some leaders were prepared to sacrifice their political careers to defend the EU and its vision. Few such politicians ever existed in Britain. In all other EU member states, some politicians would build their careers in the EU and then return to their home countries; in Britain, people who went to Brussels seldom returned to careers in London. For most British governments, the EU was a chore to be endured, not an opportunity to be seized.

That was the background to the disastrous decision of then Prime Minister David Cameron to hold his 2016 referendum. He believed that the result would be a foregone conclusion – stay in the EU – and that the referendum would silence his critics for many years to come.

These were frivolous assumptions. There is a reason why the Constitutions of many countries not only limit referendums for very specific and grave questions of national identity or existence but also insist that the results are only valid if special majorities are secured.

But since Britain has no written Constitution, Cameron ignored all cautionary provisions. And he was defeated when 51.89 per cent of voters – well below the total of those registered to vote – opted to pull Britain out of the EU.

A lot has been written about that outcome. Some critics suggest that the people who opted for Brexit did not know what they were voting for. Perhaps, but on what basis do we believe that those who voted to stay in the EU understood the intricacies of the Union perfectly? Dismissing one’s opponents as too stupid to know what they are doing is hardly a productive approach.

Others claimed that Russia, eager to destabilise Europe, was behind the Brexit vote, but provided no conclusive evidence. And some critics have claimed that the result was too close to be authoritative or binding. Still, the Brexit camp prevailed by over one million votes, hardly a statistical fluke.

The reality is that voters wanted to rebuke a cosmopolitan political elite who seemed unable to address their concerns about high immigration levels, stagnating economies and crumbling services. Brexit was a political earthquake whose aftershocks were felt around the globe. It shifted nations from a world which seemed to be getting ever closer and where globalisation was the dominant ideology, into a world that is becoming more fragmented. Brexit has ushered in a decade that has left Britain and Europe in a worse shape.

But how much worse?

Counting the costs

It’s impossible to assess accurately how much the British economy suffered as a result of Brexit. One reason for this is that such calculations are dependent on a set of arbitrary claims, such as the assumption that, had Britain stayed in the EU, it would have performed as well as other major EU member states.

Matters get even murkier if one recalls that during the past decade, the Covid-19 pandemic buffeted the world, and Europe was heavily impacted by the war in Ukraine and by substantial jumps in global prices of food and energy.

There are also matters of national policy choices, such as Britain’s decisions, which led to the country having among the highest energy prices in Europe as a means to reduce carbon emissions; this had nothing to do with EU membership but continues to weigh heavily on Britain’s economy.

A rough comparison with how 23 other developed countries have performed over the past decade indicates that the British economy could have been 10 per cent bigger had the country stayed in the EU during this period.

Under this calculation, compiled by Bloomberg, the news agency specialising in financial data, Brexit has cost the country around £300 billion (S$512 billion) over the decade.

But as Bloomberg points out, these calculations are skewed by the strong performance of two of Britain’s major trading partners and key export destinations, the US and Ireland, Britain’s immediate neighbour and a small country which serves as a big destination for multinationals. If one strips these two out of the figures, the estimated cost of Brexit goes down to around 2 per cent to 4 per cent of British gross domestic product.

Still, certain conclusions emerge clearly. While the British economy was not hit as badly as critics of Brexit claimed – warnings about the end of London as a global financial centre were disproven – nobody has argued that Brexit has been beneficial to it.

Nor can anyone credibly say that the other supposed benefits of leaving the EU have materialised. The highest immigration numbers in Britain’s modern history were recorded after Brexit, but instead of importing European labour, Britain admitted migrants from the Indian sub-continent and Africa.

And instead of transforming Britain into a nimble global trader freed from EU shackles, successive British governments had to fight hard to find new markets. Yes, there were pioneering deals with Singapore over digital services, and Britain did become a member of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. But the impact such initiatives have on trade volumes is measured by fractions of one percentage point.

A very British conundrum

Unsurprisingly, therefore, the pressure is on to reconsider Brexit. Successive opinion polls suggest that a majority of Brits now regard Brexit as a mistake. And some political analysts claim that demographic changes support such shifts.

Of the electorate that delivered the 2016 result, more than six million have since died, while another six million who were too young to vote then are now on the electoral roll. And the newcomers, according to opinion polls, break for rejoining by something like six to one, according to Peter Kellner, a noted British pollster.

So, allegedly, the question is no longer whether the Brexit verdict can be reversed, but whether any politician will dare to start the process of returning to the EU.

Curiously, given these arguments, however, those who plunged Britain into Brexit remain popular. Nigel Farage, the populist regarded as the “Father of Brexit”, now leads his Reform party, which continues to top opinion polls by claiming that the problem was not Brexit as such, but the fact that the separation from Europe was not bold enough.

Meanwhile, mainstream politicians are reluctant to promise another referendum to reverse the Brexit decision.

They know that, once this battle is joined, it will occupy the nation’s entire political scene for a long time, crowding out all other urgent issues, such as stimulating economic growth or reducing the country’s soaring debt and unsustainable social spending.

And they also know that regardless of what opinion polls say now, the result of a new referendum remains unpredictable.

Inside the EU, Britain was able to negotiate exemptions from the obligations to accept a single common currency or eliminate border controls, policies which remain unpopular with British voters.

But if Britain rejoins the EU now, the country will no longer automatically enjoy these exemptions, so British politicians would either have to justify these measures to the electorate or go to Brussels and beg for fresh concessions. The mere thought of facing such alternatives is enough to send all British politicians running for cover.

But in many respects, the debate about rejoining the EU is now secondary to a much greater challenge: that of upholding the security of the continent. The promoters of Brexit claimed that, freed from the supposed restrictions of the EU, Britain would be able to forge a closer alliance with the US, and especially with President Donald Trump, a man Farage touted in 2016 as his personal friend.

The result was precisely the opposite: a transatlantic relationship that is dissolving before our very eyes, and a US president who dismisses Britain as yesterday’s story. In an ultimate insult, Trump posted on social media an announcement about Starmer’s resignation before the British leader even had a chance to announce his plans.

Britain’s trade relationship with the EU will continue to be a topic of diplomatic tussles, but it is the question of Britain’s involvement in the provision of European security that is now the critical task.

Critical but still not urgent enough, for Andy Burnham – the man slated to replace Starmer as prime minister – prefers to maintain the silence which prevails over most European debates.

Burnham – who may become the seventh prime minister since Brexit – was once a passionate believer in the EU. Now he says that “I am not proposing the UK considers rejoining the EU”. All very predictable. All very British.