On the morning of 23 June 2016, Nigel Farage stood before cameras and declared independence day. A decade on, he is still in British politics — his Reform UK party having swept local elections in May and driven Keir Starmer from Downing Street — and the independence he celebrated has produced something that neither the Leave campaign nor its opponents quite predicted: not disaster, not triumph, but a slow, structural diminishment that has become the background noise of British life.
The tenth anniversary passed with a notable absence of ceremony on either side of the argument. The people of Blackpool, whose constituency returned one of the largest Leave majorities in northwestern England, were not celebrating. Nor were those who had marched through London carrying EU flags. A YouGov survey conducted this month to mark the occasion found that just 29 percent of the British electorate now believes the country was right to leave the EU — the lowest figure recorded, and the first time support has fallen below 30 percent. Fifty-eight percent say it was wrong to do so.
The economic reckoning is by now well established, if contested in its precise dimensions. The Office for Budget Responsibility estimates that Brexit has reduced UK productivity by around four percent and will lower trade with the EU by roughly fifteen percent over the long run. The Confederation of British Industry puts the economy’s total contraction since the vote at around eight percent against a counterfactual in which Britain remained. Real-terms average wages have not increased since 2008 after accounting for inflation. Business investment fell sharply after 2016 and has never fully recovered, with some studies placing the shortfall against a non-Brexit baseline at between twelve and eighteen percent. These are not the figures of a country that got a good deal.
What is harder to measure, but perhaps more consequential, is the political cost. Starmer’s resignation on 22 June — the day before the anniversary — made him the sixth prime minister to leave office in the decade since the referendum, and cleared the path for a seventh. David Cameron went the morning after the vote. Theresa May failed to get her deal through Parliament. Boris Johnson, who had made Brexit possible, was eventually destroyed by the accumulated wreckage of his own conduct in office. Liz Truss lasted 49 days. Rishi Sunak presided over the Conservatives’ worst electoral defeat in parliamentary history. And now Starmer, who had won a landslide just two years earlier, found that a sluggish economy, global energy shocks, and the rise of Farage’s Reform UK had consumed his political capital before any durable reform could take hold. The seventh prime minister in a decade is expected to be Andy Burnham.
From Brussels, the view of this political carousel is marked less by satisfaction than by a kind of weary clarity. The EU’s position has not changed since the week after the referendum, when its leaders agreed there would be no negotiations of any kind until Article 50 had been triggered, and that access to the single market required acceptance of all four freedoms. That principle still holds. Ten years later, it is simply no longer contested. What has changed is the level of attention Brussels affords to the question. The war in Ukraine, the management of relations with Washington and Beijing, the competitiveness of the single market, the MFF negotiations — these have long replaced Brexit at the top of the European Council’s agenda. The UK, for the EU, has become a medium-weight third country with which closer relations are desirable but not urgent.
The second UK-EU summit, which had been scheduled for 22 July in Brussels — a centrepiece of Starmer’s ‘reset’ strategy and a signal that the two sides had moved past the bitterest phase of the post-Brexit relationship — was thrown into immediate doubt by the resignation announcement. The European Commission said it was “reassessing” the encounter with European Council President António Costa. Costa himself said the summit would need to be postponed. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen paid warm tribute to Starmer, saying that European and Ukrainian security were stronger because of his premiership. The tribute was genuine. It was also, in its way, a measure of how much the reset had depended on personal trust between specific leaders, rather than on the durable institutional architecture that makes relationships between states weatherproof.
Burnham arrives as the likeliest successor carrying pro-European instincts that he has been careful not to parade too loudly. He has said he would like to see the UK back in the EU within his lifetime, then stepped back from those comments while campaigning in the Leave-voting Makerfield constituency, pledging instead not to “re-run” the arguments of 2016. The arithmetic of British public opinion has shifted substantially in the direction of closer ties — an Ipsos survey this month found 52 percent would support rejoining against 33 percent opposed — but the political economy of how to get there, across a fractured Parliament and against a Reform party that treats any movement toward Brussels as treachery, remains formidable.
The EU, for its part, is watching carefully, but without the urgency it once brought to the question. As the analyst Jannike Wachowiak at UK in a Changing Europe wrote this week, the EU remains wary of offering the UK conditions that could appear more lenient than those available to member states, and the Trade and Cooperation Agreement is assessed in Brussels as a “very good” arrangement from the EU’s perspective. Conspicuously absent from the Commission’s list of priorities for the UK relationship is the word “trade”. What Brussels wants is energy cooperation, defence coordination, security alignment and people-to-people contacts. The single market question — the thing that would most directly address Britain’s structural economic problems — is the thing the EU is least eager to reopen.
There is also a longer European question that the tenth anniversary surfaces, and which Wachowiak’s analysis makes explicit: the EU that the UK might eventually seek to rejoin, or move closer to, may look quite different from the one it left. French presidential elections are due in April 2027. The Rassemblement National is on track for the final runoff. The Alternative für Deutschland and the Confederation of the Polish Crown are leading in their respective polls. The paradox is one that British progressives have not fully confronted: the EU is not standing still, and the direction in which parts of it are moving is not the direction that motivates the rejoin argument in Britain.
Outside No. 10 on Monday, as Starmer made his resignation statement, protesters nearby played Beethoven’s Ode to Joy — the anthem of the European Union. It was a small gesture, more rueful than triumphant. A decade on, Britain is not a country that has resolved what Brexit was for or where it leads. The academic Chris Grey, who has studied the fallout from the departure more closely than most, said that until British politicians are willing to face the legacy honestly, the country faces what he called an “undertow of low-grade crisis.” The seventh prime minister in ten years will inherit that undertow, along with everything else.In Brussels, the mood is not gloating. It is, if anything, more practical than that: a mild hope that Burnham will have the political room to advance the reset, a clear-eyed awareness that the structural constraints on him are considerable, and an institutional willingness to wait. The EU has learnt, in ten years, that the UK’s relationship with Europe is not a problem to be solved at a summit. It is a condition to be managed across prime ministers.
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