Ten years ago this week, Britain threw away its geopolitical compass and voted to quit the club of European nations it had been a part of for more than 40 years.
Leaving the European Union was supposed to allow Britain to “take back control” of its destiny. The word that really mattered in that campaign slogan was “back” — the trick was to look backward to reimagine the future. (Not for nothing has Donald Trump’s promise of the past decade been to “Make America Great Again.”)
Brexit, as Britain’s exit from the European Union came to be known, was supposed to be the vessel in which Britain could return to the decades after World War II, when Winston Churchill could pretend, just about, that Britain still counted as a global power.
Boris Johnson, the most prominent face of the campaign to leave and later the prime minister who would negotiate the terms of Brexit, declared that breaking with Brussels would once more open the door to a dynamic, cosmopolitan and global Britain. All Britain had to do was walk through it. “We can see the sunlit meadows beyond,” he said in a speech a few weeks before the vote.
A decade later, the cost of that freedom — of the return, as Mr. Johnson repeatedly put it, of precious national sovereignty — is blindingly apparent. The vote to leave the European Union was a real cry of pain from a large section of the electorate that thought itself left behind by economic progress. The desperation remains. The “sunlit meadows” were a mirage.
For a moment in the summer of 2016, the Brexiteers persuaded a small majority — the vote was 52 percent to 48 percent — that Britain could throw out the austerity that had followed the 2008 global financial crash, reverse the hollowing out of well-paid manufacturing jobs and trade freely and profitably on international markets. Immigrants who had flocked to Britain from Eastern and Central Europe would be sent home. Europe merely held Britain back, and to choose to leave was to believe, as Britons had before, that the nation was meant for more.
The language of the Leave side echoed the arguments of leaders in the 1950s. Rather than joining the new Coal and Steel Community and Common Market — the beginning of the new supranational structures that would create the European Union — Britain reached for past glory.
As the six founding members — Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands — were preparing to sign the Treaty of Rome in the spring of 1957, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, a Conservative, was in Bermuda with President Dwight D. Eisenhower in an attempt to rekindle the special relationship forged during the war by Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
There was a reluctance to admit that Britain was becoming a regional rather than global power. As a Conservative foreign secretary in the early 1950s, Anthony Eden had spoken for the political establishment when he said that “Britain’s story and her interests lie far beyond the continent of Europe.” Europe was simply too small an arena for British engagement.
In fact, the retreat had begun in 1947 with the end of British colonial rule in India and continued through the 1950s as former Asian and African colonies sought independence, and the failure, in 1956, of the Anglo-French military expedition to seize control of the Suez Canal was a watershed. But while Mr. Macmillan spoke of the “wind of change” blowing through the British Empire, the nation’s political elites struggled to adjust to any lesser role for Britain in the world. Public opinion pointed in the same direction. Britain, voters were told, had won the war, and heads of state from all around the world had flocked to London for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. Why should it sign up to a European enterprise of defeated nations?
The 21st century’s Brexiteers were every bit as insouciant in their rhetorical disregard of Britain’s relative decline. Nearly four years after the vote to leave, Mr. Johnson, by then prime minister, chose the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, once a hub of the British Empire’s maritime power, to mark the conclusion of negotiations on the terms of Brexit. That 2020 speech, “Unleashing Britain’s Potential,” sought to again conjure an earlier age of swashbuckling adventurism. His secretary of state for trade, Liz Truss, he said, had her teams in place to strike new global trade deals. “This is the moment for us to think of our past and go up a gear again,” he said. “To recapture the spirit of those seafaring ancestors immortalized above us whose exploits brought not just riches but something even more important than that — and that was a global perspective.” Britain was on the threshold of a new golden age.
It was, of course, a fantasy. Mr. Johnson got Brexit through, but as the Conservative pro-European Michael Heseltine has often put it, this is the sovereignty of the man in the desert. The economy has stalled and trade has shrunk. Britain is poorer than it might have been. Its gross domestic product is at least 4 percent — but could be as much as 8 percent — lower, according to independent calculations, while business investment is more than 10 percent lower. It added new frictions to the lives of Britons: new border checks when traveling to E.U. countries, stricter residency rules for living in Europe, fewer opportunities for students to study abroad. Even just using a cellphone while “roaming” often costs more than it used to.
There have been other costs, one of them a weakening of the glue between the nations of the United Kingdom itself. The referendum result was more a statement of English than of British nationalism — majorities in Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain. Forced to leave, Scottish nationalists claimed stronger cause to promote their case for full independence from England, and the complex political arrangements for Northern Ireland needed to protect the Good Friday peace agreement between Irish nationalists and British unionists in the province have weakened the cause of the unionists.
Rather than a newly independent Britain cutting a swath on the international stage, economic realities forced cuts in spending on foreign aid and diplomacy. The hopes among Brexiteers for a new Anglosphere, adding the English-speaking Commonwealth nations of Canada, Australia and New Zealand to Britain’s “special relationship” with the United States, turned to dust, and Britain’s privileged place in Washington was lost to Mr. Trump’s disdain for traditional alliances.
John Major, who as a Conservative prime minister in the 1990s fought off his party’s anti-Europeans, has been blunt in his conclusion. Brexit has left Britain poorer, weaker and locked out of the richest free trade market in history. “The U.K. once reveled in being a leading member of an E.U. with half a billion citizens and the undoubted first ally of the United States — the world’s most eminent superpower,” Mr. Major said in a speech last year. “Today, we know we are neither — and so does the world.”
Mr. Johnson’s moment in the sun was also short-lived. Even as he spoke that day in Greenwich, the first cases of the new coronavirus were appearing in Britain. Within a little over two years, he would have resigned in disgrace for partying during the lockdowns that his government imposed. Ms. Truss would become prime minister for less than 50 days, and, in July 2024, the Conservatives would be wiped out in a general election, replaced by Keir Starmer’s Labour government.
When President Vladimir Putin of Russia launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it was a salutary reminder of the lesson of several centuries of European history. An island Britain may be, but it cannot escape the facts of its geography. Its security is inextricably bound to that of its neighbors.
Since becoming prime minister in 2024, Mr. Starmer has scrambled to rebuild bridges with Britain’s erstwhile European Union partners. He has made some progress. Alongside Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany and President Emmanuel Macron of France, Mr. Starmer has been a leader in the coalition of the willing buttressing President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine’s government as the Trump administration has drastically cut American military aid to Kyiv. Together with European partners, Mr. Starmer has also acted as a brake on the White House’s attempts to insist on a peace deal that would, in effect, hand Mr. Putin victory.
On the economic front, the prime minister is negotiating with Brussels to strip away some of the more nonsensical obstacles thrown up by Brexit to free trade, student exchanges and energy cooperation. He is also seeking to participate in the E.U.’s burgeoning program for collective defense procurement.
There is an irony here. Many in the Brexit camp saw Britain’s close relationship with the United States as an alternative to its European connections. But Mr. Trump has turned away from all of his trans-Atlantic partners, Britain included. One senior adviser to Mr. Starmer told me that Mr. Trump is pushing Mr. Starmer further toward Europe. The prime minister seemed to say as much himself in April, saying at a news conference that renewing closer relations with Europe would mean “a partnership for the dangerous world that we must navigate together.” A summit with E.U. leaders, part of this reset, is planned for July.
With public sentiment now fairly firmly settled in “Bregret,” some pro-European politicians have started to make a case for rejoining. But Mr. Starmer, loath to lose more voters to Nigel Farage’s anti-immigrant Reform Party, which consistently tops voting intention polls, has continued to tread warily.
In any case, there is no certainty of an easy route back in. Opinion polls point to a majority of Britons believing Brexit was a mistake but do not yet point to a public clamor to overturn the result. Leaving the European Union took four years of intense, often acrimonious, negotiation. Rejoining could well take longer — particularly since, after the unwanted upheaval of Brexit, Britain’s former partners would have their own conditions for resuming the relationship. And many of the popular resentments toward elites at the heart of Brexit still fester, finding new expression in Reform and Mr. Farage, who blames the split’s failures on its implementation.
The Brexiteers found an opportunity in 2016 in significant part because of the failure of successive governments to address the fundamental economic and social issues that lay at the heart of popular discontent or to tell the hard truths about the inevitable, and difficult, political trade-offs that would be necessary to restore a vibrant economy and begin the rebuilding of decaying public services.
Those who said leaving the European Union was the answer were peddling a nostalgic delusion, but for those who considered themselves left behind, it was an attractive one. A reversal would force the profound psychological shift that Britain has tried so resolutely to avoid since the dissolution of its empire: that Britain can still count itself a great nation, but it is no longer a great power.
The Macmillan government had grasped the reality when it eventually lodged an application for British membership of the common market in 1961. Mr. Macmillan may have first thought a special relationship with Washington was the answer — as Greece to America’s Rome — but by the early 1960s he had acknowledged that in a world of new power blocs Britain could not stand apart from its closest allies and trading partners. Europe’s continental economies, rebuilt from the ashes, were flourishing. Britain was struggling. It could not sit on the sidelines as the rest of Europe pooled its strengths.
But Britain never became a comfortable member of the European Union. Other nations saw advantage in the enterprise — France and Germany in avoiding another war, and Spain, Portugal and Greece in buttressing their transitions to democracy. Britain signed up not with enthusiasm but because it saw no other choice. It managed the bumps in the road and profited; before the 2016 vote, it had a serious voice in both Brussels and Washington. It has lost both.
History’s dismal verdict on Brexit has been written: Untrammeled sovereignty can end up looking like lonely isolation.
A few months after the Brexit referendum, when the United States selected Mr. Trump as its president and read the rites over Pax Americana, America chose exceptionalism, too.
As different as the circumstances and characters on either side of the Atlantic were, there was a shared story in these epochal statements of national independence. Both were populist revolts against ruling elites. Stop the world, voters declared, we want to get off.
America is not Britain. Even if American power is now contested by China and other rising nations in the global south, the occupant of the White House still leads the world’s pre-eminent nation and has at his disposal unparalleled military might. But Mr. Trump in his second term, watching America’s old allies desert it in the war against Iran, is beginning to count the costs of his disdain for the international order established by the United States after World War II.
“Taking back control” left Britain alone. “Making America Great Again” may yet come to mean the same to America.
Philip Stephens is a contributing editor for The Financial Times and the author, most recently, of “These Divided Isles, Britain and Ireland, Past and Future.”
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