Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney recently received a lot of acclaim for citing Czech playwright and former President Václav Havel’s “The Power of the Powerless” in his speech at the World Economic Forum, inviting the world’s nations and businesses to stop living in the lie of the rules-based international order. And that lesson applies here too: For the U.K. to finally move on, it must choose not to live in lies — especially the ones that fueled Brexit.
And yet, both of the U.K.’s main political parties, Labour and the Conservatives, are treating Brexit as a sacred cow rather than grappling with the enormity of its failure.
The Conservative leadership that oversaw the U.K.’s shambolic withdrawal from start to finish, and purged any internal dissenters in the process, are now owning its dismal results. The current Labour government, meanwhile, is taking baby steps to reintegrate the U.K. into the eminently valuable parts of Europe’s architecture, like the Erasmus program.
However, both groups are too afraid to explain why Brexit was a colossal mistake. And it leaves them vulnerable to the populist Reform UK party’s claim that the real error was opting for a departure that wasn’t sharp enough.
It’s true that on all the fronts that motivated the vote in 2016, Brexit has failed to deliver: Britain’s departure was followed by a dramatic rise in immigration, reaching over 900,000 net in 2023. There’s no indication that extricating the U.K. from the EU’s regulations has injected the country with any economic dynamism. Since 2020, the British economy has grown more slowly than both the eurozone and the EU as a whole. And with a debt-to-GDP ratio over 100 percent, its fiscal outlook is just as depressing, if not more so, than its highly indebted European neighbors.
Part of this is because during their time in power after the referendum, the Conservatives wasted precious political bandwidth on tertiary Brexit-related fights, like the Irish “backstop” protocol or the status of EU law in the British legal system. That was time that could have been used to undertake deep structural reforms, which would make the U.K. a more competitive economy. And of course, EU membership never prevented the U.K. from changing its zoning laws, cutting taxes, improving secondary education or pursuing any number of other supply-side reforms in the first place.