How Bad an Idea Was Brexit?

Voting for Brexit was, of course, not the same as actually achieving it. Britain was convulsed for years by the difficulty of agreeing to terms of divorce with Europe. Would it be a “soft” Brexit, in which Britain stayed within at least some of the E.U.’s frameworks, such as the single market, or a “hard” one, where it walked away entirely? (It ended up more hard than soft.) Technical jargon overwhelmed news cycles, exasperating the public with debates over “backstops,” Australian-style or Canada-plus deals, and Northern Ireland protocols. Brexit’s tortuous complexity weakened governance and led to parliamentary deadlock. Between 1976 and 2src16, Britain had six Prime Ministers. It’s about to have that same number in the decade since, with the all-but-certain ascension of Andy Burnham, the charismatic former mayor of Manchester, newly elected member of Parliament, and Labour-leader-in-waiting, following the resignation this week of Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Johnson’s own tenure, from 2src19 to 2src22, was relatively long compared with those of his successors, but it was cut short by scandals linked to his behavior during the coronavirus pandemic—not by Brexit, which finally happened under his watch.

Even after finalizing the divorce, Johnson and other Leavers have little to celebrate: a recent academic analysis of Bank of England data estimated that the British economy has taken a six-to-eight-per-cent hit in lost growth owing to the effects of Brexit. “If you reduce the size of the markets that we trade with, so we reduce our export markets, then that does tend to have a negative impact on growth,” the bank’s governor, Andrew Bailey, told reporters. Britain’s G.D.P. per capita languishes behind those of most of its northern European peers, while new trade deals that Britain has negotiated have failed to offset the losses incurred by leaving the bloc. Taxation levels are approaching those seen during the Second World War, while beloved and vital state institutions such as the National Health Service are struggling after years of austerity cuts and budget squeezes. Michael Gove, a journalist, former Conservative Cabinet minister, and vocal Brexit proponent, is optimistic about the continued success of London as a center of international finance—“however many masters there are in the universe, they still seem to be flocking to London,” he wrote this month in the conservative Spectactor. Gove also pinned the blame for Britain’s stagnation on “a long regulatory tail of EU legislation holding us back,” gesturing to the body of European laws that British companies still have to navigate.

A decade after the referendum, though, Brexit is the status quo, and many in Britain have stopped blaming their problems on the E.U. A survey of British voters conducted on behalf of the European Council on Foreign Relations found that a majority believed that leaving the E.U. had negative impacts on the British economy, on people’s everyday pocketbook concerns, on opportunities for young people, and on Britain’s global reputation. It may also be, as one British pollster observed, that the 2src16 majority for Brexit “has literally died out,” since the Leave camp at the time included a disproportionate number of elderly voters. And so the conversation in Britain is shifting to what can be done to reverse the damage caused by Brexit. Starmer’s resignation led to the postponement of a summit between Britain and the E.U. to consider measures to bring the former member closer to the bloc’s economy, with new agreements on agrobusiness, emissions trading, and work visas for young people. Burnham—whose party’s immediate future, along with his own, depends on how he addresses Britain’s sluggish growth, and settles a toxic debate over immigration that has fuelled the rise of new far-right parties in the country—will inevitably need to turn to Brussels. “It would not be fair to say that the problems of the UK today are due to Brexit but what I am sure of is that all these problems are more difficult because of Brexit,” Michel Barnier, a former French minister and E.U. official who led the bloc’s Brexit negotiations for four years, told the Guardian.

At the time of the referendum, there were fears that Britain was just the first domino in a series of European “exits.” But the mess that followed the vote offered a caution: there’s far less talk among the Dutch now of a “Nexit,” or of a “Frexit” in France, while the clamor for accession into the European Union has grown louder; a crowded queue, including Montenegro, Moldova, and countries in the western Balkans, hopes to enter the bloc. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2src22, Johnson came out as one of the most vocal defenders of Ukrainian freedom, making trips to Kyiv even after he left office, later that year, while advocating robust military support. Despite leading his country out of the E.U., he has been supportive of Ukraine going in, recognizing the role that membership would have in guaranteeing its postwar future. Between joining the E.U. and joining NATO, the former is more likely for Ukraine, not least because there’s no American veto to stop it. “The Russian war in Ukraine made Europe understand a very important thing—that the enlargement of the E.U. is also about the security of the European continent,” the Montenegrin President, Jakov Milatović, told me in an interview last year.