10 Years Later - Brexit is a Catastrophe

[00:00:00]The Brexit vote was has been followed by 10 10 years of the most extreme political instability in modern British history.

[00:00:08]Since the vote, Britain has had six prime ministers. David Cameron, who was the prime minister at the time of the vote and resigned a month later, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, who was prime minister for 50 days, the shortest tenure in British history, Rishi Sunak until July 2024, then there was an election, the conservatives were crushingly repudiated, and Keir Starmer was elected with one of the largest majorities in British history, 412 MPs, a majority of 170, but that didn't last either. Keir Starmer now faces a leadership crisis. Almost 100 members of his own party have called on him to resign, and so very soon there may be a seventh British prime minister in a span of a decade.

[00:00:47]Now, um British history goes back a long time, and there've been revolutions and wars, but since the coming of parliamentary government to Britain, Britain has not seen anything like this.

[00:00:56]The only thing comparable is the immediate aftermath of the First World War, when again there was a lot of turnover, changes in the party system, as Britain tried to digest that that appalling crisis.

[00:01:07]The idea that you would compare Brexit to the shock of the First World War, one of the greatest shocks of all of British history, gives you an idea of what Britain is going through.

[00:01:17]Some thoughts on why this has been so turbulent and painful.

[00:01:21]Now, as like most North Americans, I was baffled by Brexit and opposed it. I was in Britain on the day of the vote, and it always seemed to me that it just didn't make sense to widen the distance between a country, a mid-sized economy, and its nearest neighbors and closest trading partners.

[00:01:37]But there was an argument for it that I could respect, and it was summed up to me by a friend who took me on a walking trip through the British countryside shortly before, a few months before the Brexit vote. We walked over hills and ridges to a very high point overlooking a network of um irregularly shaped fields.

[00:01:54]My friend pointed out the these fields with their um hedgerows separating them into strange shapes and said, "These fields have had the same shape since more or less the Black Death.

[00:02:06]This is a very old country. We've governed ourselves for a long time.

[00:02:10]We're good at it and we want to keep on doing it."

[00:02:13]Well, how do you argue with that? You have to respect it.

[00:02:17]The only thing that you can ask is to say, "All right, but just make clear to people. Just all all you have to do, that's a very legitimate position. I understand it. National sovereignty is a precious thing. And if you're willing to pay the price for it, by all means pay it. Just make sure the voters know that there will be a price. That cutting yourself off, making from your neighbors, making more difficult for goods and services and people to move between Britain and France and Denmark and Germany, that that will have a cost.

[00:02:43]Just make that clear. Um but of course that's not what Britain British people were told. They were told that Brexit would mean more more money for services, more uh lower taxes, fewer foreigners.

[00:02:55]When in fact it has meant meant less.

[00:02:58]A recent study has made clear the cost of Brexit to the British economy. Um according to this authoritative study, in 2025, British GDP per capita was 6 to 8% lower than it would have been without Brexit. Investment was 12 to 18% lower, employment 3 to 4% lower, and productivity 3.3 3 to 4% lower. What these economists were who made this important study were surprised to discover is most economists in 2016 would have imagined Brexit as a one-time shock. It would have been expensive. The British would have digested it. They would have started at a lower level and then resumed their growth path. But that's not what happened. What happened instead was Brexit has been a permanent tax on British growth because it's contributed to all kinds of uncertainty.

[00:03:39]It's above all discouraged investment, not only foreign investment, but even British investment. This is a weighed on the economy's trajectory trajectory for a decade and looks fair to continue to weigh on the economy's trajectory going forward.

[00:03:52]That discovery that Brexit meant not more, not more money for the NHS, not more growth, not more freedom, but less, working more for less result. That has disillusioned British voters and and to a great extent radicalized them and pushed them away from the traditional big parties, Labour and Conservatives, to new and more radical parties, Reform, Greens, and others. They They're in a trap. They can't quite admit that they locked themselves into it. Nobody is quite No No working politician is quite prepared to go on record and say Brexit was a costly mistake and we have to undo it. Um the Everyone says we must work within it. We must try to make it a success. But there's no way to make it a success. And working within Brexit means accepting we're all going to have to work harder and longer and get less and pay for the national independence that my friend praised to me very movingly. Unable to cope with that, British voters are casting about blaming the politicians.

[00:04:49]Keir Starmer, when you ask British people, why is he so unpopular? Well, they'll tell you a story about how he chose an ambassador to the United States who was not forthcoming about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. There are a bunch of other mini things, too. But the reaction to Starmer is too extreme to be explained as just the result of things he did, especially because the same forces brought down half a dozen of his predecessors before him and probably will bring down his successor, too, whenever that successor arrives.

[00:05:15]Britain is is is struggling with a burden.

[00:05:19]And Americans have to understand that Britain got into this burden in part because of the bad influence of the United States. The United States is not blameless here.

[00:05:27]When Britain voted in June of 2016 to leave the European Union, that vote was not automatically binding. It was an advisory vote. It gave It told the government of the day what the people wished it to do. It didn't tell the government of the day how to do it. And in fact, leaving the European Union is not a single choice. There are many There were many, many versions of Brexit imaginable. Um Britain could have tried to renegotiate. Britain could have left the single market part of the European Union, but stayed within the customs union. Um that's that's the way Norway, for example, has a relationship with the European Union. It's It's not in the single market. It has its own currency, but it's part of a customs union.

[00:06:04]But the Trump administration pressed Britain again and again and again to choose the most radical versions of Brexit.

[00:06:12]President Trump repeatedly warned British voters, no most notably in an interview with the Sun newspaper in the summer of 2018, that if Britain chose any of the softer forms of Brexit, that would doom any hope of a US-UK trade agreement. But the the promise of it, or the threat that it wouldn't materialize if Britain made other choices, pushed British politicians, the conservative politicians, into choosing the most radical form of Brexit, the most expensive form, the most painful form, and the form that has been most destabilizing to them.

[00:06:41]Now, someday Britain may revisit this decision.

[00:06:45]In the meantime, we all all of us who care about Britain, every American who values this the long-standing US-UK alliance and relationship, has to hope that Britain will find some way to make a better success of it than it has made to date. But that's going to be the but the best success means less prosperity than it had before, or less prosperity than it was on the way to having before. Um Britain is more isolated, more alone. Um it is It is a incurred many, many costs. Um and it I most ironically of all, while Brit- British people voted for Brexit in hopes of reducing immigration from Europe, what they got instead was even higher levels of of immigration from the rest of the world, while European immigration dropped off. And not only do they do they have even higher levels of immigration from the rest of the world, but there is now steep and rising emigration of native-born Britons out of Britain looking for economic opportunity in other places of the world that they can't find at home.

[00:07:40]You know, one of the themes of this whole discussion today from uh Brexit at the beginning to 1873 at the end is the refusal of English-speaking people in these two great economic powerhouses, in the British economic powerhouse of the 19th century, the American economic powerhouse of the 20th century and 21st century, to accept that we live in a planetary economy. Always have, always will. We can't exclude We can't exempt ourselves from that rule. We are bound by the same global eco- economy that smaller and weaker societies also are bound by. It's just less visible to us, and we have more temptation to believe that if we simply isolate ourselves, that we can somehow stop the flow of gravity from affecting inside the borders of these great economies as it affects everybody outside.

[00:08:29]That wasn't That is always an illusion.

[00:08:31]We are all part of a single world. Um it will affect us whether we like it or not. We cannot regain the slogan of the Brexiteers in 2016 was regain control or take control.

[00:08:43]But the control was an illusion. We You can't mass You cannot um You cannot exempt yourself. You cannot control events. You can only steer your country's way forward through them as best you can. And that means beginning by understanding the laws of economics really are binding on everybody. There's no escape.

[00:09:01]Um you can only make better choices or worse choices, but you cannot bear yourself the need to make the choices.

[00:09:07]Britain tried to do that in June of 2016.

[00:09:10]The Trump experiment and many parts of the Biden experiment, too, have been American versions of the same error.

[00:09:15]We're all paying the price for them.

[00:09:18]The most important question for the next decade of politics is will we ever learn our lesson?