“We have taken back control”: Brexit voters have no regrets, 10 years later | Political news

Although polls show that most Britons regret leaving the European Union, many others say the case for leaving the bloc is still valid.

“The arguments for Brexit today are largely the same as they were then: sovereignty, democracy and regaining control,” Robert Tombs, a professor at Cambridge University and a Brexit supporter, told Al Jazeera.

Control was a central theme of the Leave camp.

Brexit supporters have called for more controls on migration to protect borders from foreign supranational powers, as well as wresting sovereignty from the bloc – which they described as a group of middle-class elites out of touch with reality – and returning it to the people.

“Britain has never been particularly happy in the EU, but Greece, Italy and others don’t seem particularly happy either,” Tombs said. “One of the arguments in favor of leaving was that Britain has always been more closely linked to countries outside the EU, particularly English-speaking ones, than to countries within the bloc,” he continued.

The historic referendum a decade ago saw Britain break its association with the EU after more than 43 years of sometimes volatile membership.

Those who remain committed to Brexit criticize successive governments for failing to maximize the freedoms perceived by leaving the bloc. They also say the negative predictions associated with “draft fear,” the stories of those who campaigned to stay in the union, have not come to pass.

A union in difficulty

From the UK’s joining the European project in the 1970s until its departure, relations were often strained.

There have been many crisis points, such as the fundamental divisions in the UK’s dominant Conservative party over the question of its membership.

Other flashpoints were the 1992 financial crisis, dubbed “Black Wednesday” in the media, when the UK failed to keep the pound sterling in the EU’s exchange rate mechanism, and the bitter battle over the Maastricht Treaty.

The European question became a defining fault line in British politics, one that was never fully healed and ultimately resulted in Brexit.

Tombs said the UK had an Atlanticist stance when it joined the EU and even former French President Charles DeGaulle described the UK as locking itself in.

Take Back Control

Many pro-Brexit Britons hoped their vote would lead to a drop in immigration.

In the run-up to the vote, Reform Party leader Nigel Farage, then head of UKIP, and his campaign attracted criticism for his “Breaking Point” poster showing Syrian refugees massing near the Croatia-Slovenia border as if seeking entry into the UK.

Nevertheless, despite reassurances offered at the time, immigration increased, exploding in what right-wing critics called “Boriswave”, named after former Prime Minister and Brexit campaigner Boris Johnson. His post-Brexit administration saw net migration to the UK increase from around 224,000 people in 2019 to more than 600,000 in 2022 – rising to 906,000 in 2023, an increase of 302%.

“We have regained control of immigration,” said David Goodhart, head of demographics, immigration and integration at Policy Exchange, a right-wing think tank. “But the fact is we used that freedom to expand it,” he said.

He blamed the UK’s failure to align with the post-Brexit world. The country officially withdrew from the bloc on January 31, 2020, four and a half years after the referendum.

“We spent years arguing about what kind of Brexit we wanted,” Goodhart continued. “[Boris] Johnson came in saying he was going to get Brexit done and he blew it.”

People who felt abandoned by the British political system before the Brexit referendum no longer feel included now, Goodhart said, adding that the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and political chaos in the country have also fueled social anxiety.

Missed opportunities

While Brexit may have failed to revive the British economy, some predictions from the Remain camp have also not come true.

It had been predicted that the Brexit vote would immediately plunge the UK economy into recession, lead to job losses on an unprecedented scale and lead to an exodus of talent from the UK’s crucial financial services sector. There were also fears that this departure would break the constitutional order in the United Kingdom and even in Europe.

“Brexit has not been the economic disaster that many made it out to be,” Goodhart said. “In fact, it has had a remarkably small impact,” he added, pointing to the slowdown in global economies.

“The fact that the UK broke free from the EU, which is by nature quite conservative and regulatory, has also brought benefits. If you look at the progress being made in the UK in areas such as fintech and gene editing, it’s hard to imagine UK industries doing the same in the EU.”

Elsewhere, while growth on the scale promised by Brexit supporters has yet to materialize, some argue that the fault lies with the failure of successive British governments to sufficiently reduce regulation and free up the British economy rather than Brexit itself.

According to Kristian Niemietz, editorial director of the Institute of Economic Affairs, many of whose members were strong supporters of the Brexit vote, “Brexit supporters thought Brexit was likely to be followed by liberalizations. Free-market supporters thought a liberalizing Brexit was possible, but unlikely.”

He told Al Jazeera that a decade later there have been some liberalisations, but the UK has been “too timid to reverse the disruption caused by Brexit”.

“The UK has signed additional trade deals that it would not have been able to do as an EU member. There have also been some light deregulatory measures, such as on gene editing, which would not have happened in the EU,” he said, adding that while these were relatively modest measures, they gave some indication of opportunities that, ten years after the vote, had yet to be seized.

“Free trade and light regulation are the way to make Brexit a belated success.”

The fact is that, for many Brexit campaigners, ten years on, the UK has survived in the face of those who predicted failure.

In the future, could other European countries envy Brexit?

“The main difference [between the UK and other EU states] is that we had the right to vote,” Tombs said, citing a recent television appearance by current French President Emmanuel Macron, conceding that if the French public had the chance to leave the EU, they might well take it.

“No one else in Europe had a choice,” he added. “We were.”