International report – Brexit at 10: the promises, the costs and the search for accountability

The referendum held on 23 June 2016 remains one of the defining decisions in modern British history. Supporters promised sovereignty, control, lower red tape, new trade deals and a more dynamic “Global Britain”.

Critics are unequivocal that Brexit has left Britain poorer, weaker and less able to deal with global shocks 10 years after voters chose to leave the European Union.

Opponents argue that many of those promises have not been met. Britain is more constrained, less attractive to investors and still divided over what Brexit was supposed to mean.

Nevertheless, the vote marked the moment Britain “changed track”, Colin Hay, professor of political science at Sciences Po in Paris, tells RFI.

“Its relationship with the European Union and its relationship with the rest of the world has changed fundamentally from this moment onwards,” Hay said. “And 10 years on, we can see that very clearly now.”

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A changed Britain

Brexit is hard to judge as a normal policy decision, Hay argues, because voters were asked to choose a direction without knowing what form leaving the EU would eventually take.

“People didn’t know what the Brexit that they were voting for, if they voted for it, would turn out to be, and now they can see, and there’s a certain amount of buyer’s remorse, I think,” Hay says.

One of the strongest attacks on Brexit has come recently from Michael Heseltine, the former Conservative deputy prime minister, who called it a “self-imposed disaster” and a “con”. He also said those who sold it should “hang their heads in shame”.

For Hay, Heseltine was pointing to a real problem in British politics – especially the way Europe moved from a low-profile issue to the central question shaping political life.

“The question of Britain’s relationship to Europe was – until UKIP came along and until the Brexit referendum – a relatively low salience issue,” Hay said. “Since 2016 and since the campaign, it has been the single dominant issue, which has influenced everything else.”

That change helped Nigel Farage, UKIP and later Reform UK become powerful forces in British politics, while also damaging the Conservative Party.

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Economic costs

The economic impact of UK’s departure from the European Union is now clearer than it was at the time of the referendum, Hay tells RFI, though he adds that Brexit cannot be separated entirely from the other shocks Britain has faced over the past 10 years.

“I think it’s as clear as it could be, but there’s a caveat in that, and that is that a lot’s happened in Britain over the last 10 years, lots happened in the world over the last 10 years, and to identify and to isolate the Brexit effect is actually quite tricky,” he says.

The Bank of England has tried to measure the impact, estimating “a drop of 6 percent of GDP lost, as it were, to Brexit”.

But the wider cost may be greater because Brexit also affected Britain’s ability to deal with later crises, including Covid and the Ukraine war, he argues.

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“Britain is less well placed to deal with those shocks and challenges today than it would otherwise have been in the absence of Brexit,” Hay continues.

The idea of a newly liberated “Global Britain” was always weak, because the UK already had many favourable trade terms through its EU membership.

“I think the idea of a kind of new ‘Global Britain’ liberated from Europe was always a bit of a myth, frankly,” Hay says.

The promise of “Singapore-on-Thames” also failed to deliver. Britain was already a relatively lightly regulated European economy and had long been highly deregulated in financial services.

“There’s been a marginal move in the direction of light regulation, but it’s not really achieved any positive gain for the British economy overall,” Hay said.

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Campaign arguments

However, the Leave campaign was highly effective in attacking warnings from economists, diplomats, businesses and officials with “Project Fear”.

That tactic weakened the role of evidence in the debate, while the Leave side also used the promise that Brexit would free up money for the National Health Service.

“I think the Brexit campaign was most effective in a sense, because it was able to discredit and disable any evidence, any expertise that was brought on the remain side of the debate to the table,” Hay says.

The campaign, led in part by Farage and his populist message, encouraged voters to reject not only the EU but also “the form of expert technocratic governance associated with that”, he argues.

At the same time, Leave campaigners used a simple financial promise.

“They plastered a big number on big red buses and implied that a vote for Brexit would liberate the public finances and allow high levels of investment in the NHS, amongst other things,” Hay says.

The result did not match that promise, he adds.

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“Anyone who’s tried to be treated in a British hospital in the 10 years since 2016 knows that that didn’t turn out very well,” Hay says.

Brexit supporters often argue that the vote was not mainly about economics but about sovereignty and control. Farage and others have also claimed that Brexit failed because it was never properly implemented.

Hay explains that argument was easy to make and had been repeated since Theresa May’s time as prime minister, when she faced pressure to deliver a harder and more economically costly form of Brexit.

But public opinion has shifted over the past decade.

“I think the argument that Brexit was not properly implemented, and that’s why it’s not turned out as well as it could have done, has not particularly been accepted by the public,” says Hay.

Around 20 to 30 percent of those who voted for Brexit would now vote remain if given the chance again, he estimates.

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Uncertain future

Meanwhile, Keir Starmer’s government has been trying to rebuild bridges with the EU while avoiding a return to the divisions of the Brexit years.

The debate inside Labour is also becoming more complex, with questions over how far any future leader could go in rebuilding Britain’s relationship with the EU.

For Hay, Britain’s uncertainty 10 years after Brexit is closely tied to economic weakness.

“It’s much easier to be confident about Britain if it has a stronger economy,” he says.

“The Labour administration assumed it would have more fiscal space to do positive things every single time it looks at the books,” Hay said. “It finds there’s no money in the coffer, and if there’s no money in the coffer there’s not much you can do.”

Ten years after the vote, Brexit remains more than a question of treaties, borders and trade. It is also a question of what Britain was promised, what was delivered and how much control the country really gained.