Ten years ago politics of grievance, delusions of restoring lost power and greatness and anti-immigrant bigotry and other attributes similar to cultists in the MAGA base led the "leave vote" to narrowly pass and the United Kingdom left the European Union to supposedly forge its own more independent and prosperous path. Like the Felon's mantra of "make America great again" Brexit was supposed to make the United Kingdom great again with some dreaming of lost empire. Ten years out, the promises of the pro-leave faction have not materialized and, in fact the United Kingdom is worse off economically and far more isolated. Regret for the leave vote is growing yet no one yet is outright clamoring for the UK to be readmitted to the European Union. Meanwhile, has yet materialized. The disaster of Brexit should be a cautionary tale for the Felon and MAGA - and spineless congressional Republicans - that isolation, betraying long time allies, starting trade wars and launching a poorly planned war of choice will only severed to leave the USA diminished, poorer and behind in emerging green energy initiatives. A piece at the
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.
Leaving the European Union was
supposed to allow Britain to “take back control” of its destiny. The word that really
mattered in that campaign slogan was “back” — the trick was to look backward to
reimagine the future. (Not for nothing has Donald Trump’s promise of the past
decade been to “Make America Great Again.”)
Brexit, as Britain’s 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.
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.
A decade later, the cost of
that freedom — of the return, as Mr. Johnson repeatedly put it, of precious
national sovereignty — 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
“sunlit meadows” were a mirage.
For a moment in the
summer of 2016, the Brexiteers persuaded a small majority — the vote
was 52 percent to 48 percent — 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.
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 “Britain’s story and her interests lie far beyond the continent
of Europe.” Europe was simply too small an arena for British engagement.
The 21st century’s Brexiteers
were every bit as insouciant in their rhetorical disregard of Britain’s
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’s maritime power, to mark the conclusion of negotiations on
the terms of Brexit. That 2020 speech, “Unleashing Britain’s Potential,” sought
to again conjure an earlier age of swashbuckling adventurism. . . . . Britain
was on the threshold of a new golden age.
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 — but could be as much as 8 percent — 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 in Europe, fewer opportunities
for students to study abroad.
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 — majorities in Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain.
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’s “special relationship” with the United
States, turned to dust, and Britain’s privileged place in Washington was lost
to Mr. Trump’s disdain for traditional alliances.
John Major, who as a
Conservative prime minister in the 1990s fought off his party’s 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. “The 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 — the world’s most eminent superpower,” Mr. Major said in a speech last year. “Today, we know we are neither — and so
does the world.”
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.
Since becoming prime minister
in 2024, Mr. Starmer has scrambled to rebuild bridges with Britain’s erstwhile
European Union partners. He has made some progress. . . . Together with
European partners, Mr. Starmer has also acted as a brake on the White House’s
attempts to insist on a peace deal that would, in effect, hand Mr. Putin
victory.
On the economic front, the
prime minister is negotiating with Brussels to strip away some of the more
nonsensical obstacles thrown up by Brexit to free trade, student exchanges and
energy cooperation. He is also seeking to participate in the E.U.’s burgeoning
program for collective defense procurement.
There is an irony here. Many in
the Brexit camp saw Britain’s 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.
In any case, there is no
certainty of an easy route back in. 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 — particularly
since, after the unwanted upheaval of Brexit, Britain’s former partners would
have their own conditions for resuming the relationship.
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.
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.
History’s dismal verdict on Brexit has been written:
Untrammeled sovereignty can end up looking like lonely isolation.
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.
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.
