Getting Brexit Wrong
I voted leave, I would still vote leave, yet Brexit has not been a success.
I was very much an outlier in the referendum on Britain leaving the European Union. I was the only member of my family who voted to leave, which being combined with the fact I’d lived in other EU member nations since 2005 made me something of an outlier. I don’t imagine many British emigrants in Europe voted to leave.
My three main objections to the EU still stand to this day. As it is the second choice for aspiring politicians (after their national systems) it tends to collect a wide array of failed and unelectable politicians. These people, and the unelected who run many of the EU institutions, tend to skew far to the statist, socially progressive wing of politics. It’s an organisation which sits far to the left of mainstream European politics and despite the political shifts of the last 20 years has remained resolutely there. It creates a mindset where the answers are always legislate, expand, tax and subsidise.
Secondly, I am a firm supporter of subsidiarity - the idea that the best way of running anything is at the smallest and most local level. The EU is by its very nature diametrically opposed to this idea. I personally taught on some EU funded programs and saw some of the budgeting. By the time I got my post-tax 13 euros an hour so many layers of bureaucracy and handouts had taken place that it was almost impossible to track. On one project I was the 8th and final piece of the delivery puzzle, and the initial cost to European funds was over 800 euros per hour - for an after school English project.
My final objection, and one I also have to most politicians in my own country, is that they simply do not like their native population.
Brexit though, has been rather a let down in action. Part of this is due to it being undertaken by a group of British politicians who were, at best, lukewarm on the idea. They were in turn supported by a civil service who were actively against the concept and negotiating with an EU which took the chance to punish Britain where possible.
The timeline since 2016 has also been rather awful for Europe with only those countries still making up ground due to 2 generations of communist rule in the 20th century really growing. We see an Italy whose economy has been stagnant since the adoption of the Euro, Spain where the civil war seems to be re-fought over every issue, France where the social contract and budget are fundamentally broken, Germany the industrial powerhouse of Europe de-industrialising and the success story of Ireland leaving a country so overpriced and inflated nobody native can afford to live there. In short, with or without the EU, western Europe has had a devastatingly bad decade.
A major reason the fine margins of the referendum were pushed in favour of leaving was the insane policy of Germany’s Merkel to invite unlimited number of non-European migrants into Europe. More than any other individual, she affected the outcome of the vote. Brexit was in many ways about British people voting to control their own borders again and stop immigration both legal and illegal. Boris Johnson clearly didn’t get the memo, and was responsible for one of the great catastrophes of British politics the “Boriswave” of immigration where a few short years saw the small island add 2 million non Europeans to its population.
Boris touches on the next reason why Brexit has not delivered on its promises - the abject nature of British governments over the last decade. We’ve had a wannabe Churchill, bearers of the poisoned chalice, a woman who didn’t understand who her real masters were and was outlasted by a lettuce, an Indian billionaire’s husband who will be remembered for wearing skin-tight trousers in the pouring rain and from Labour a man so unpopular his own party want to defenestrate him despite the massive majority they enjoy.
Much was made of how Brexit would allow the possibility of funding the NHS more, or by the remain side of how Brexit would leave a huge vacuum in research funding. This misses the main point - those are political decisions. The government could have chosen to fund research more, but hasn’t. It could have chosen to fund the NHS more, but hasn’t. Even the free movement of citizens across Europe is a political choice - it could have been continued if the government had wished it to be so. The changes, red tape, frustrations and failings are the direct result of British governmental choices.
The successes of Brexit have been writ in rather small type. Britain was able to adopt and roll-out COVID vaccines faster than its neighbours in 2020/1, but five years later that doesn’t seem much to brag about. Leaving the EU finally allowed women’s sanitary products to be free of VAT, yet any saving was quickly consumed by the nearly 3.5% official inflation rate we’ve had since 2016. Brexit freed us from the shackles of EU rules on VAT, yet rather than taking steps to cut this non-progressive and economy slowing tax the government has kept it at a very European 20%.
The generation divide played its part in the referendum, and as the years go by we now have a younger generation who see little point playing by rules of the game in Britain. They know the system is rigged against them. Millennials still believed what they were taught about work, property and education but those coming of age now know they can’t win. Add in the growing sectarianism in British politics and the general sense of hopelessness and it’s easy to see why opinion polls look back harshly on the Brexit vote.
When the whole decade is looked at, it’s hard to get away from a sense of decline and mismanagement. Leaving the EU allowed British politicians to rule Britain, but they’ve done so without any imagination or ability and leave a divided country with a moribund economy and an insane tax burden. The same arguments as in 2016 can still be had, yet I see no evidence that the political class across the channel have done any better over the last decade.
British voters chose Brexit to regain control from the EU. Sadly, since then the British political class have done an atrocious job of governing the country. The main counter argument is that nobody else has been any more successful. Hardly a great situation to be in a decade on.