{"id":88125,"date":"2026-06-24T00:01:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-24T06:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/?p=88125"},"modified":"2026-06-23T16:29:13","modified_gmt":"2026-06-23T22:29:13","slug":"ten-years-after-brexit-the-dismal-verdict-is-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/ten-years-after-brexit-the-dismal-verdict-is-in\/","title":{"rendered":"Ten years after Brexit, the dismal verdict is in"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Ten<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This essay has been updated to reflect news developments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ten years ago this week, Britain threw away its geopolitical compass and voted to quit the club of European nations it had been a part of for more than 40 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leaving the European Union was supposed to allow Britain to \u201ctake back control\u201d of its destiny. The word that really mattered in that campaign slogan was \u201cback\u201d \u2014 the trick was to look backward to reimagine the future. (Not for nothing has Donald Trump\u2019s promise of the past decade been to \u201cMake America Great Again.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brexit, as Britain\u2019s exit from the European Union came to be known, was supposed to be the vessel in which Britain could return to the decades after World War II, when Winston Churchill could pretend, just about, that Britain still counted as a global power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Boris Johnson, the most prominent face of the campaign to leave and later the prime minister who would negotiate the terms of Brexit, declared that breaking with Brussels would once more open the door to a dynamic, cosmopolitan and global Britain. All Britain had to do was walk through it. \u201cWe can see the sunlit meadows beyond,\u201d he said in a speech a few weeks before the vote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A decade later, the cost of that freedom \u2014 of the return, as Mr. Johnson repeatedly put it, of precious national sovereignty \u2014 is blindingly apparent. The vote to leave the European Union was a real cry of pain from a large section of the electorate that thought itself left behind by economic progress. The desperation remains. The \u201csunlit meadows\u201d were a mirage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beyond Brexit\u2019s heavy economic cost, the divisions over it ushered a new era of fragmentation and volatility into British politics \u2014 witnessed again on Monday with the resignation of Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Mr. Starmer was the sixth occupant of the office during the past decade. In the previous two decades, there had been just three prime ministers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a moment in the summer of 2016, the Brexiteers persuaded a small majority \u2014 the vote was 52 percent to 48 percent \u2014 that Britain could throw out the austerity that had followed the 2008 global financial crash, reverse the hollowing out of well-paid manufacturing jobs and trade freely and profitably on international markets. Immigrants who had flocked to Britain from Eastern and Central Europe would be sent home. Europe merely held Britain back, and to choose to leave was to believe, as Britons had before, that the nation was meant for more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The language of the Leave side echoed the arguments of leaders in the 1950s. Rather than joining the new Coal and Steel Community and Common Market \u2014 the beginning of the new supranational structures that would create the European Union \u2014 Britain reached for past glory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the six founding members \u2014 Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands \u2014 were preparing to sign the Treaty of Rome in the spring of 1957, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, a Conservative, was in Bermuda with President Dwight D. Eisenhower in an attempt to rekindle the special relationship forged during the war by Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was a reluctance to admit that Britain was becoming a regional rather than global power. As a Conservative foreign secretary in the early 1950s, Anthony Eden had spoken for the political establishment when he said that \u201cBritain\u2019s story and her interests lie far beyond the continent of Europe.\u201d Europe was simply too small an arena for British engagement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, the retreat had begun in 1947 with the end of British colonial rule in India and continued through the 1950s as former Asian and African colonies sought independence, and the failure, in 1956, of the Anglo-French military expedition to seize control of the Suez Canal was a watershed. But while Macmillan spoke of the \u201cwind of change\u201d blowing through the British Empire, the nation\u2019s political elites struggled to adjust to any lesser role for Britain in the world. Public opinion pointed in the same direction. Britain, voters were told, had won the war, and heads of state from all around the world had flocked to London for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. Why should it sign up to a European enterprise of defeated nations?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 21st century\u2019s Brexiteers were every bit as insouciant in their rhetorical disregard of Britain\u2019s relative decline. Nearly four years after the vote to leave, Mr. Johnson, by then prime minister, chose the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, once a hub of the British Empire\u2019s maritime power, to mark the conclusion of negotiations on the terms of Brexit. That 2020 speech, \u201cUnleashing Britain\u2019s Potential,\u201d sought to again conjure an earlier age of swashbuckling adventurism. His secretary of state for trade, Liz Truss, he said, had her teams in place to strike new global trade deals. \u201cThis is the moment for us to think of our past and go up a gear again,\u201d he said. \u201cTo recapture the spirit of those seafaring ancestors immortalized above us whose exploits brought not just riches but something even more important than that \u2014 and that was a global perspective.\u201d Britain was on the threshold of a new golden age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was, of course, a fantasy. Mr. Johnson got Brexit through, but as the Conservative pro-European Michael Heseltine has often put it, this is the sovereignty of the man in the desert. The economy has stalled and trade has shrunk. Britain is poorer than it might have been. Its gross domestic product is at least 4 percent \u2014 but could be as much as 8 percent \u2014 lower, according to independent calculations, while business investment is more than 10 percent lower. It added new frictions to the lives of Britons: new border checks when traveling to E.U. countries, stricter residency rules for living there, fewer opportunities for students to study abroad. Even just using a cellphone while \u201croaming\u201d often costs more than it used to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There have been other costs, one of them a weakening of the glue between the nations of the United Kingdom itself. The referendum result was more a statement of English than of British nationalism \u2014 majorities in Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain. Forced to leave, Scottish nationalists claimed stronger cause to promote their case for full independence from England, and the complex political arrangements for Northern Ireland needed to protect the Good Friday peace agreement between Irish nationalists and British unionists in the province have weakened the cause of the unionists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rather than a newly independent Britain cutting a swath on the international stage, economic realities forced cuts in spending on foreign aid and diplomacy. The hopes among Brexiteers for a new Anglosphere, adding the English-speaking Commonwealth nations of Canada, Australia and New Zealand to Britain\u2019s \u201cspecial relationship\u201d with the United States, turned to dust, and Britain\u2019s privileged place in Washington was lost to Mr. Trump\u2019s disdain for traditional alliances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

John Major, who as a Conservative prime minister in the 1990s fought off his party\u2019s anti-Europeans, has been blunt in his conclusion. Brexit has left Britain poorer, weaker and locked out of the richest free trade market in history. \u201cThe U.K. once reveled in being a leading member of an E.U. with half a billion citizens and the undoubted first ally of the United States \u2014 the world\u2019s most eminent superpower,\u201d Mr. Major said in a speech last year. \u201cToday, we know we are neither \u2014 and so does the world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Johnson\u2019s moment in the sun was also short-lived. Even as he spoke that day in Greenwich, the first cases of the new coronavirus were appearing in Britain. Within a little over two years, he would resign in disgrace for partying during the lockdowns that his government imposed. Ms. Truss would become prime minister for less than 50 days, and, in July 2024, the Conservatives would be wiped out in a general election, replaced by Mr. Starmer\u2019s Labour government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When President Vladimir Putin of Russia launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it was a salutary reminder of the lesson of several centuries of European history. An island Britain may be, but it cannot escape the facts of its geography. Its security is inextricably bound to that of its neighbors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When he became prime minister in 2024, Mr. Starmer scrambled to rebuild bridges with Britain\u2019s erstwhile European Union partners. He made some progress. Alongside Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany and President Emmanuel Macron of France, Mr. Starmer has been a leader in the coalition of the willing buttressing President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine\u2019s government as the Trump administration drastically cut American military aid to Kyiv. Together with European partners, Mr. Starmer also acted as a brake on the White House\u2019s attempts to insist on a peace deal that would, in effect, hand Mr. Putin victory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the economic front, the prime minister negotiated with Brussels to strip away some of the more nonsensical obstacles thrown up by Brexit to free trade, student exchanges and energy cooperation. He also sought to participate in the European Union\u2019s burgeoning program for collective defense procurement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is an irony here. Many in the Brexit camp saw Britain\u2019s close relationship with the United States as an alternative to its European connections. But Mr. Trump has turned away from all of his trans-Atlantic partners, Britain included. One senior adviser to Mr. Starmer told me that Mr. Trump was pushing Mr. Starmer further toward Europe. The prime minister seemed to say as much himself in April, saying at a news conference that renewing closer relations with Europe would mean \u201ca partnership for the dangerous world that we must navigate together.\u201d A summit with E.U. leaders, part of this reset, was planned for July but postponed after his resignation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With public sentiment now fairly firmly settled in \u201cBregret,\u201d some pro-European politicians have started to make a case for rejoining. But Mr. Starmer, loath to lose more voters to Nigel Farage\u2019s anti-immigrant Reform Party, which consistently tops voting intention polls, continued to tread warily.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His resignation had no direct connection to his European policy, but it spoke to the post-Brexit tide of populism in the nation\u2019s politics. The prime minister fell because of fears within his own party that his unpopularity was ceding traditional Labour ground among blue-collar workers to the far right \u2014 and still pro-Brexit \u2014 Reform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In any case, there is no certainty of an easy route back into Europe for Britain. Opinion polls point to a majority of Britons believing Brexit was a mistake but do not yet point to a public clamor to overturn the result. Leaving the European Union took four years of intense, often acrimonious, negotiation. Rejoining could well take longer \u2014 particularly since, after the unwanted upheaval of Brexit, Britain\u2019s former partners would have their own conditions for resuming the relationship. And many of the popular resentments toward elites at the heart of Brexit still fester, finding new expression in Reform and Mr. Farage, who blames the split\u2019s implementation for its failures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Brexiteers found an opportunity in 2016 in significant part because of the failure of successive governments to address the fundamental economic and social issues that lay at the heart of popular discontent or to tell the hard truths about the inevitable, and difficult, political trade-offs that would be necessary to restore a vibrant economy and begin the rebuilding of decaying public services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those who said leaving the European Union was the answer were peddling a nostalgic delusion, but for those who considered themselves left behind, it was an attractive one. A reversal would force the profound psychological shift that Britain has tried so resolutely to avoid since the dissolution of its empire: that Britain can still count itself a great nation, but it is no longer a great power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Macmillan government had grasped the reality when it eventually lodged an application for British membership of the common market in 1961. Macmillan may have first thought a special relationship with Washington was the answer \u2014 as Greece to America\u2019s Rome \u2014 but by the early 1960s, he had acknowledged that in a world of new power blocs, Britain could not stand apart from its closest allies and trading partners. Europe\u2019s continental economies, rebuilt from the ashes, were flourishing. Britain was struggling. It could not sit on the sidelines as the rest of Europe pooled its strengths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Britain never became a comfortable member of the European Union. Other nations saw advantage in the enterprise \u2014 France and Germany in avoiding another war, and Spain, Portugal and Greece in buttressing their transitions to democracy. Britain signed up not with enthusiasm but because it saw no other choice. It managed the bumps in the road and profited; before the 2016 vote, it had a serious voice in both Brussels and Washington. It has lost both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

History\u2019s dismal verdict on Brexit has been written: Untrammeled sovereignty can end up looking like lonely isolation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few months after the Brexit referendum, when the United States selected Mr. Trump as its president and read the rites over Pax Americana, America chose exceptionalism, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As different as the circumstances and characters on either side of the Atlantic were, there was a shared story in these epochal statements of national independence. Both were populist revolts against ruling elites. Stop the world, voters declared, we want to get off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

America is not Britain. Even if American power is now contested by China and other rising nations in the global south, the occupant of the White House still leads the world\u2019s pre-eminent nation and has at his disposal unparalleled military might. But Mr. Trump in his second term, watching America\u2019s old allies desert it in the war against Iran, is beginning to count the costs of his disdain for the international order established by the United States after World War II.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTaking back control\u201d left Britain alone. \u201cMaking America great again\u201d may yet come to mean the same to America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n