Ten years on Brexit’s economic and political costs still haunt Britain |
In 2026, the United Kingdom will quietly pass a milestone that few of its political architects once imagined would be marked by such widespread regret: the tenth anniversary of the Brexit referendum. What was sold to the British public in 2016 as a bold reclamation of sovereignty, prosperity, and national control has, a decade on, come to symbolize economic disruption, political paralysis, and a prolonged sense of national drift. Far from delivering the promised dividends, Brexit has left the UK still grappling with its consequences, struggling to define its place in a world it once helped shape from the inside.
The original referendum was approved by a narrow margin that immediately exposed deep fractures within British society. Despite this lack of consensus, successive governments treated the result as an unquestionable mandate for a hard rupture with the European Union. The decision to leave not only the EU itself but also the single market and customs union ensured that Brexit would be one of the most economically disruptive policy choices in modern British history. Five years after formally exiting those frameworks, and nearly a decade after the vote, the aftershocks are still being felt across almost every sector of the economy.
Supporters of Brexit continue to argue that the policy was merely the victim of unfortunate timing. They point to the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s war in Ukraine, global inflation, supply chain disruptions, and shifts in US trade policy as external shocks that would have hurt Britain regardless of its relationship with the EU. Yet this argument increasingly fails to convince. Other G7 economies faced the same global crises and recovered more quickly. The UK, by contrast, experienced a slower post-pandemic rebound, weaker investment, and more persistent labor shortages-problems that many economists trace directly to Brexit.
Another common defense is that Brexit itself was sound in principle but fatally undermined by poor execution. The Conservative governments that negotiated and implemented the withdrawal agreement........