The residue of Brexit

Six years on, The Guardian revisits Brexit, Britains' messy divorce via referendum from the European Common Market and the project of a united Europe. The article is long and detailed but paints a convincing picture of Brexit failure.

On 23 June 2016, Geoffrey Betts, the managing director of a small office supplies business in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, had high hopes for his firm, and the British economy, when he voted for Brexit. 

“I thought we would be like … ‘here we go, here we go. We are going to become the most competitive country in Europe and we are going to be encouraging business.’ Now I think: ‘What have we done?’” 

His firm, Stewart Superior, has survived, but not without major restructuring and huge efforts to get around obstacles that Brexit has put in the way of the export side of the business.

For a lot of people in Britain, Brexit isn't working out as they were promised and had hoped. Add in the global pandemic, and the economy became mired in doldrums.

I've been convinced that the flat out insane vote for Brexit was the product of a creaky, elitist, oblivious political system that had delivered the poisonous Iraq war and a generation defining economic crash during the 2000s, but couldn't provide constructive leadership or widely shared prosperity to many Britons. (Yes ... that has all too much in common with the conditions that elected Donald Trump in the same year.)

Six years after the referendum which took the UK out of the EU, the economic case for Brexit is proving increasingly difficult for its supporters – including inside the Conservative party – to make. 

The impression was that there would be no downside. We would thrive outside Europe’s bureaucracy which was strangling our companies with red tape. The huge benefits of the single market – trading freely across borders, with common standards – were never highlighted by Vote Leave, and rarely by the crudely alarmist Remain camp, either. 

Only now, with the worst of the pandemic (probably) behind us, and ministers unable to blame Covid, is Brexit reality being laid bare. Next year the OECD calculates that the UK will record the lowest growth in the G20 with the exception of Russia whose economy is being drained by its war on Ukraine.

Going it alone attracted a slim majority of British voters in 2016. It now seems the Boris Johnson's Conservative Party may finally pay a price for the drag that Brexit is exerting on British well-being. Last week the Tories lost two special elections in areas they had controlled.

But, as in the United States, the damage inflicted on the national edifice by an impulsive vote by frustrated people will be hard to recover from.