The Brexiteers Were Right

I voted remain, but I wouldn't vote to rejoin.

BREXIT TEN YEARS ON (Part II)

Last week I explained why I voted in 2016 for Britain to remain in the EU. This week I explain why, if there were another referendum, I’d vote to stay out.

I

Ten years after Brexit, it is clear that it didn’t usher in the End of the World, although a certain ‘progressive’, post-nationalist vision of the future has suffered a shocking blow. And deservedly so. In the immediate wake of the referendum result, I was very struck by how viscerally some Remainers responded, and how inarticulate their response was. I remember one incipient Twitter-spat with a former student of mine, who was apoplectic over Brexit. I kept pressing him to explain what belonging to ‘Europe’ meant to him, because I wanted to understand what was so precious that he thought he had lost. Eventually he abruptly declared that he was not obliged to tell me, and the line went dead. This, from a man with an Oxford University education.

I have been struck, too, by the lack of honest—no matter, generous—curiosity on the part of Remainers about why so many of their fellow-citizens voted to leave the EU. Too often, like Richard Drayton and Vince Cable, they reach for prefabricated tropes, such as ‘imperial nostalgia’—for which there is no empirical evidence at all. They don’t care to look or listen. Neither the frothing inarticulacy nor the bigoted dismissiveness of Remainers have done anything to warm me to their cause.

II

Nor have their prophesies of economic disaster. On the economic effects of Brexit, I am certainly no expert, but I read a lot. My settled impression is that the immediate economic effects of Brexit have been negative, but not severely so. Disruptions to trade with the EU in goods, especially by smaller British producers, have contributed to a lowering of the rate of economic growth. But then, so has Covid, the war in Ukraine, and President Trump’s tariffs. Quite what Brexit’s particular contribution has been, is hard to isolate and consequently controversial. As for the City of London, apart from losing a few thousand employees and some business to Paris and Frankfurt, it has maintained its position of European leadership. The advantages of English language and corporate law, and the attractiveness of the city’s multicultural life, all remain. According to Wolfgang Munchau, formerly of the Financial Times, Brexit has been an economic “non-event”.^[1]

It seems entirely plausible to me that Britain could make up for its loss of European trade in the course of time. Its freedom to make independent trade-deals has already enabled it to join, in March 2024, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam in theComprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). Then, in July 2025, there was the signing of a comprehensive Free Trade Agreement with India, which promises to give British service businesses entry to an economy on course to become the world’s second largest.

Moreover, Brexit is now enabling Britain to take a significantly less cautious and more venturesome stance toward AI than the EU. With a tech sector valued the third highest globally (after the US and China) and some of the world’s best research universities, Britain is well placed to exploit the next technological revolution that could treble global wealth. And Brexit gives it much greater freedom to do so.^[2] Even a still convinced Remainer such as Rohan Silva finds himself forced to admit that “the EU’s AI laws are … astonishingly bureaucratic” and “that the EU’s lamentably awful new tech regulations do materially increase the costs and downsides of some day rejoining”.^[3]