Was Brexit a Failure?

The question may seem like a strange one – after all, Boris Johnson succeeded in delivering Brexit — but beyond the legal and technical implications of triggering article 50 of the Treaty on European Union, to truly answer the question ‘was Brexit a failure?’, you first need to ask, “what was Brexit trying to achieve?”

When you scrutinise that question it becomes clearer why the UK burned through five prime ministers in six years. The main reason that Brexit was such a headache — for Theresa May in particular, but also for the successive Brexit ministers and negotiators (whose average term was 14 months) — was that there was no clear mandate for Brexit. First of all because only 17.4 million people voted ‘Leave’ (51.9% of voters but only 26% of the overall population), but more importantly because there was no consensus, even among ‘Leavers’, of what they were seeking to achieve.

The Brexit campaign was an unholy alliance of free-market conservatives, protectionist nationalists, and anti-establishment protest voters; not only were their objectives not aligned, they were fundamentally opposed on many issues. On the one hand, the Thatcherite core of the Conservative party was pursuing the dream of creating a ‘Singapore-on-Thames’ where, no longer under the yoke of Brussels, they would be free to strike up trade agreements with the Chinese and the Americans and develop the financial sector, while also pursuing a more liberal immigration policy. On the other hand, the protectionist/nationalist wing — although also critical of EU bureaucracy — is vehemently opposed to free-trade agreements and immigration; indeed, regaining control over immigration was the primary reason given by ‘Leavers’ for voting, whereas net migration is now at an all-time high. The (admittedly more marginal) protest voters — already sceptical of the Conservative party elite — have been further alienated by reports of senior conservative MPs favouring friends in the allocation of government contracts and cynically profiting from the harm to the UK economy they themselves caused.

A final spanner in the works was the Conservative party’s coalition with the Democratic Unionist Party — a historically Eurosceptical Northern Irish party that has consistently voted against the government’s proposals on Brexit, from Theresa May’s EU Withdrawal Agreement to Rishi Sunak’s Windsor framework, out of concerns about Northern Ireland’s status as part of the UK.

So, there is an inherent paradox at the heart of the Brexit movement, as well as the complexity of the issue, which meant its leaders could only make vague promises of “minimising EU red tape” and “taking back control” rather than specific claims. Indeed, the UK government didn’t publish its ‘Benefits of Brexit’ white paper until a year after the UK had formally left the EU, enabling the authors to argue that what was achieved was its goal all along.

That said, had there been a positive effect on the economy, it would have been difficult to argue that Brexit was a failure, despite the elimination of free movement and the ensuing damage to scientific programmes and universities. Unfortunately, the Brexit referendum coincided with a backlash against globalisation and the renewal of protectionist sentiment worldwide culminating in the election of Donald Trump. This trend was exacerbated by the Covid pandemic and has made the liberal argument for Brexit even more untenable; now more than ever, Britain would have benefited from being part of a major trade bloc rather than isolated. Moreover, far from being freed from EU bureaucracy, customs duties are higher and export checks are more restrictive, which harms exports to the EU (by far the UK’s leading export market), endangers UK businesses, and increases the cost of living for ordinary people.

It remains to be seen whether the UK will rue leaving the EU in the long term; many have argued that leaving the EU was folly from a geopolitical standpoint, but historical counterfactuals are difficult to justify, and the pandemic and the energy crisis make it hard to separate the effect of Brexit from the wider context. That said, it is instructive to learn that the UK is the only G20 economy (apart from Russia, which is under the grip of devastating sanctions) not to expect growth in 2023.

According to the Centre for European Reform, which uses an algorithm that compares the UK to a group of 40 comparable countries that had seen similar growth in the previous years, GDP in 2022 was 5.5% lower than it would have been had the UK stayed in the EU. Likewise, goods trade is 7% lower than it otherwise would have been, and investment is 11% lower. If that low growth continues for several years, the lost compounding returns could have knock-on effects on wages and the living standards of millions of British people for generations to come.

Although the fears of the UK breaking up seem to have been overblown and a positive solution has been found for the Northern Ireland border (namely access to the EU single market, i.e. what the UK had before Brexit, which Tory ministers are unironically hailing as a huge victory for Northern Ireland), Brexit polarised British society, damaged the country’s international reputation and seems to have caused material harm to the UK economy. Moreover, it has not even achieved what most Leavers thought they were voting for. Free-market liberals are frustrated by the UK’s inability to strike ‘juicy trade deals’, sovereigntists are exasperated by the reality that the UK is actually dependent on the EU as a trade partner, nationalists are upset at rising immigration, and those who believed the Brexit benefits hype are confronted with the fact that a poorer nation simply can’t afford to spend more on public services. In that sense, Brexit must surely be viewed as an unmitigated failure, and it is unsurprising that 65% of the UK population now want a new referendum.