Why Brexit was right

It has been a decade since the British people voted to leave the European Union. Voting to leave was one of the most significant constitutional decisions taken by a democratic Western nation in a generation. We voted, in essence, to defy the previous forty years of diplomatic orthodoxy, and restore total lawmaking power to our own Parliament in an era where multilateralism, pooled sovereignty and continental decision making were the ascendant modes of government. 

At its heart this was a question of who runs Britain and how are they held accountable. Policies such as uncontrolled immigration and freedom of movement may have tipped a critical mass of British voters into voting leave, but they were potent reminders of the fact that the EU was and remains a democratically unaccountable body which extracts tax revenue from its members, especially rich countries like Britain, and imposes policies on member states over which they have no say. 

While border control is clearly the most politically sensitive of these issues, what was true for freedom of movement was true for a wide range of regulatory policies, from workplace regulation, to food standards, environmental laws, and the bulk of the rules which govern the physical economy. 

Britain’s vote to leave did not come out of nowhere. It wasn’t created in a laboratory by Dominic Cummings, Matthew Elliott and Boris Johnson. It came after decades of mounting political concern, from both the left and right, with the expansive European project, and fears that the EU was increasingly acting at odds with British national interest and British democracy. In a constitution and ancient political system based on the inviolability of parliamentary sovereignty, the growth of the EU after the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 and especially after 2005’s Lisbon Treaty was always going to collide with Britain’s distinct attitude to democracy and sovereignty. 

Combined with the decline in living standards and the explosion of immigration in the 2000s and 2010s, much of it out of control of the British people thanks to freedom of movement, it seems that the mid-2010s was perhaps the perfect era for all of these ingredients to come to a head with the rise of UKIP, the steady hardening of Euroscepticism among Conservative voters, and the declining trust in the establishment in Labour’s heartlands.

It would be wrong to say that it has been plain sailing since 23rd June 2016. Britain has endured an exceptional number of political crises, with a rapid turnover in Prime Ministers and a pervading sense of state breakdown. The various promises made by campaigners for Brexit — that immigration would be reduced, and a more business-friendly economy nurtured — were broken by those in office. Even supporters of Brexit in the pages of this magazine have said that the defining consequences of it were the Boriswave and Net Zero. 

As the decade of the referendum arrives, these failures will be pored over in detail. The Government seems likely to mark the anniversary with an attempt to realign with the EU on a range of economic policy measures, and many activists are gearing up for a campaign to rejoin. 

Putting aside the fact that advocates of rejoin are largely pursuing this because Sir Keir Starmer’s government has collapsed so spectacularly so soon after winning a general election, it is worth exploring some of these matters in a little more detail and examining whether Brexit was the cause of these problems, and how they came about. 

Did things go wrong? Certainly

As an act of restoring sovereignty and democratic accountability to Parliament, Brexit  succeeded. It was, after all, a constitutional decision above all else. This necessarily brings increased political risk for Westminster and Whitehall. If the buck stops with the MPs we elect in Parliament, there is nowhere to hide. MPs who once punted complaints from their constituents to Brussels and civil servants who copied and pasted European laws into Britain’s statute books are now responsible for governing Britain themselves, from first principles. There are no faceless bureaucrats in the Berlaymont to blame when things go wrong, nor any EU Commissioners to criticise in the press. 

Did things go wrong? Certainly. Much of our political class lack the skill and nerve required by leaders of a sovereign nation. They cannot handle the buck stopping with them and being accountable only to the electorate, and are therefore desperate to tie themselves back onto the EU’s apron strings.

Immigration is undoubtedly the great betrayal. The Boriswave was created by internal government fears that leaving the EU’s labour market would cripple the economy in an instant. Boris Johnson claimed that inviting a new wave of migrants from the third world to Britain was necessary to avoid a wage-price spiral for people stacking supermarket shelves. On all counts these assumptions were wrong. The after-effects of the pandemic left Britain with an over-generous welfare state which has remained unreformed, creating a new generation of worklessness. 

Treasury and ONS forecasts about the dangers of losing European labour were totally wrong: more than double the number of EU citizens applied for settled status in the UK than the government believed were in the country, some six million people. When the lorry driver shortage emerged in 2021 it was solved not by immigration but by domestic deregulation to make it easier for drivers to become hauliers at a time of increased demand. The Health and Care Visa, the primary driver of the low-skilled Boriswave, was designed to suppress wages in the care sector, so the government could kick the can of sectoral reform down the road. As readers will know, more dependents have arrived on this visa than workers, and many of those workers have arrived on fraudulent terms, sponsored by care homes which do not even exist. 

Brexit still offers the British people the tools to dig themselves out of this particular rut

The counterfactual is worth considering. After all, many EU countries have themselves seen a rise in unwanted immigration following the pandemic, and the reason why European lorry drivers did not flock to Britain in 2021 was because EU countries are suffering labour shortages of their own. Despite Britain being the only country to take the step to leave the EU, both Britain and Europe seem to be struggling under remarkably similar problems: high levels of debt, sluggish growth, stagnant living standards and high immigration. Europe’s leading economies, France and Germany, the most relevant comparators to the UK, have performed poorly since 2016, and Germany is undergoing deindustrialisation, driven by high energy prices. The security of EU membership has not offered voters in Europe the proceeds of much additional prosperity. 

Brexit still offers the British people the tools to dig themselves out of this particular rut. The tools themselves may be gathering dust unused, but they exist nonetheless and can enable 

Britain’s politicians have to fashion a new agenda for prosperity. By streamlining the EU’s onerous habitats regulations, Britain could build infrastructure more quickly and more cheaply. By scrapping the European carbon tax, the Emissions Trading Scheme, the UK could save British households and businesses billions of pounds in energy costs per year. Even if the EU imposed a retaliatory tariff for such a measure, the costs would be far outweighed by the benefits to the domestic economy of cheaper energy, a more efficient economy and a more competitive industrial base for investors and partners from outside Europe. By embracing a truly evidence-based approach to food regulation, Britain can nurture new crops and new food, helping farmers with innovations to improve crop yields and agricultural productivity, outside the backward-looking strictures of the EU’s precautionary principle. And of course, outside the EU, the UK has the opportunity to actually make headway in the AI race, with a pro-innovation approach to data regulation, and AI regulations which embrace risk and reward. 

These things may not have come true just yet, and it is an indictment on Britain’s politicians that so many of them shied away from using the mandate given to them by the British people a decade ago. The actions of the current government put this all under threat. The policies contained in the EU Reset run counter to the ambition that the British people are known for. However, while the political mood in Britain is low today, it would be an error to assume that the public are willing to give away the democratic rights they secured in 2016. When the EU’s hefty price tag lands on their doorstep — budget contributions, migration pacts, dynamic alignment, the works — sovereignty will certainly look like much better value for money.