Today, June 23 marks ten years since 17,410,742 people decided the United Kingdom’s future should lie outside its greatest trading partner, the European Union.
Since then, we’ve had a decade of chaos which has resulted in an almost-universal consensus that Brexit has been a disaster.
A majority of people now think this and many want another referendum on the matter.
There were a myriad of arguments and issues that made up the 2016 Brexit referendum, but all arguments effectively boiled down two points: leaving the EU would be fantastic for the British economy and give us more control over immigration, which we all know basically meant lowering immigration.
Now, ten years on, there can be absolutely no doubt that Brexit has not only failed to deliver on both of these fronts, but has also made things drastically worse.
Let’s look at the economy first.
A decade of economic malaise
Experts did their best to warn everyone that Brexit would have a disastrous impact on the British economy, but we all remember Michael Gove’s words – people have had enough of experts.
So, they were ignored and people were promised that sunlit uplands awaited the UK, an economy that was to be unleashed from the red tape of the EU and allowed to freely roam across the globe, picking up lucrative trade deals left, right and centre.
The outcome ten years down the line? The UK’s GDP is up to 8% lower than what it would have been had we remained in the EU, according to research earlier this year from the National Bureau for Economic Research.
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Furthermore, investment into the country is estimated to have dropped by roughly 12-18% and employment and productivity have been reduced by 3-4% from previous projections.
Brexit has had an actively negative impact on the British economy, making Britain a rare modern case study: a rich country that deliberately raised barriers to trade and cooperation and paid the price. The result is clear and inescapable – lower growth, lower productivity, lower wages and permanent relative decline.
The likes of Nigel Farage will try and tell you this was because the Tories’s butchered the Brexit process, and perhaps there’s a small degree of truth to this. But whichever way you spin it, Brexit failed for those who cheered it on.
The economic cost of Brexit is no longer theoretical. It’s measurable, compounding – and devastating.
Lost control of immigration
If the economic failure of Brexit highlights its failure, the topic of immigrations lays bare the lies that were sold.
Again, Brexit hasn’t just failed to deliver more control over immigration, it has managed to actively do the opposite.
Earlier this year, several graphs were doing the rounds on social media which showed that immigration had boomed since Britain left the EU.
Although migration from within the EU fell off a cliff, non-EU net migration increased by almost FIVE-FOLD between 2019 to 2022.
Brexit was sold with the explicit promise that Britain would be able to take a firm grip of its own border security. This was arguably the number one issue of the entire referendum.
Instead, numbers have increased year-on-year, and the only material difference is just how few of the people coming into the UK are from Europe.
This resulted in a boom in overall net migration, something that the Labour government is only just managing to get control of.
Whatever your views on immigration, it is perhaps this stat that demonstrates most the lies sold by Brexit proponents, and the tragedy of those who believed them.
Conversations about the control Britain should have over its borders and the levels of immigration that are sustainable are perfectly valid, whichever side of the debate you sit on.
But these are political debates that need to happen in a sensible manner with all facts made clear and all angles looked at.
The Brexit debate peddled blatant lies about what control we would have over immigration outside of the EU – and people were conned by it, just as they were with arguments about the economic benefits leaving the EU would have.
In the same way you’d feel sympathy for a pensioner who fell victim to a scam online, we should acknowledge the sadness here.
Millions put their faith in snake-oil salesmen, who managed to sell them lies, preying on the simple hope people had that their lives would be improved by Brexit.
As Lord Heseltine put it earlier this month, those who sold Brexit are guilty of a heinous crime.