How Bad an Idea Was Brexit?
The former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in his current iteration, travels around American university campuses lecturing about the fate of “the West.” Last October, at Yale, he condemned pro-Palestinian protesters and “the moaning of the liberal media,” which, he claimed, was too harsh on President Donald Trump and not alert enough to the dangers of real autocrats in China and Russia. At the University of Miami, in February, he championed the West’s defense of Ukraine as a “free country” in the face of Russian invasion. And at Cornell, in April, he urged Western societies to look beyond their political polarization, in a talk titled “The West Is Worth Saving.” “When we stand together and when we unite, and when we correctly identify our foes and the foes of freedom,” Johnson said, “I promise you, there is absolutely no power on earth that can prevail against us.”
There’s a strange irony—though, perhaps, little surprise—that this is how the bombastic Tory politico is now spending his time. For all his calls for unity, Johnson was one of the key architects of what’s arguably the biggest rupture in Western politics in a generation: Brexit—Britain’s decision to quit the European Union and, in doing so, to turn its back on an institution that seemed to represent the apex of post-Cold War liberalism. This week marks a decade since the shock referendum that saw a narrow majority of Britons vote in favor of leaving. Johnson, then the mayor of London, was a leading Leave campaigner, calling on his compatriots to “take back control” from perfidious technocrats in Brussels and unleash new “freedom” across the United Kingdom, while hawking misleading claims about Britain’s sending three hundred and fifty million pounds a week to the E.U. Johnson and other Leave boosters conjured visions of a liberated “global Britain” striding confidently on the world stage, of a “Singapore-upon-Thames” emerging in Brexit’s wake, of surging prosperity in a low-tax, deregulated Britain, where migration would be checked and business investment abundant. Ten years on, little of what Johnson and the others envisioned has come to pass. Britain has experienced major blows to investment and productivity, a historic surge in annual net migration, and—shorn of the diplomatic heft of a united Europe and subject to the whims of a bullying Trump—a geopolitical humbling. More than half of voters in the 2016 referendum opted to leave; a poll this month revealed that only about a third of Britons still think that it was a good idea to have quit the E.U.
Still, the move toward Brexit channelled populist passions that now shape politics on both sides of the Atlantic: a contempt for experts and mainstream institutions; a hatred of liberal cosmopolitan idealism; a shameless embrace and proliferation of misinformation by political opportunists; and agendas anchored more in antipathy for a perceived enemy than in a positive vision for everyone. Trump, early on, understood the British referendum’s significance for his own journey to power: “They will soon be calling me MR. BREXIT!” he tweeted in August, 2016, ahead of a Presidential election that few thought he would win. Brexit confirmed the end of the “end of history,” the political philosopher Francis Fukuyama’s oft-cited thesis that imagined Western capitalist, liberal democracy as the “final form of human government”; Brexit showed how voters in a major Western democracy could break with liberalism—in Britain’s case, with the values inherent in the project of European integration, and, in the case of Trump’s victory, with the very principles that grounded the postwar order. You could hear an echo of Brexit when the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, went to Normandy earlier this month and deployed a curious analogy, warning of the “dangerous ideologies” and migrant invaders supposedly now landing on Europe’s beaches, even as he stood at a monument that honored an antifascist invasion eighty-two years ago. Brexit prefigured further crises of confidence in Western democracies that have led to the steady advance of the far right.
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 2016, 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 2019 to 2022, 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 2016 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 2022, 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.
The E.U.’s allure has not diminished in the aftermath of Brexit, but its politics have changed. Ultranationalist factions, once allied with Britain’s Euroskeptics, have come to the fore across the Continent. In 2027, elections in France could result in a far-right candidate finally winning a Presidential runoff after some two decades of defeat. Both Germany and the U.K. must hold elections before the end of 2029. In the former, the far-right Alternative for Germany, which is already the largest opposition party in the Bundestag, could conceivably shoulder its way into a ruling coalition. Britain, meanwhile, could see its own far-right takeover in the form of the Reform Party of Nigel Farage, an inveterate Brexiteer and close Trump ally, who, instead of campaigning on Brexit, is, like Trump, vowing more deregulation, more deportations, and more anti-establishment theatrics, including DOGE-style purges of the British bureaucracy. Johnson, for his part, continues to shill for the slumping Tories, while trying to salvage Brexit’s legacy. He posted a video on social media ahead of the tenth anniversary, where he told his compatriots to “stop fearing that freedom and make use of it,” rather than trying to undo Brexit. “Above all,” he asked, “do you want to spend ten more miserable years arguing about it?” ♦