Ten years on, the consequences of Brexit continue to reshape borders, identities and communities
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On the night of 23 June 2016, the United Kingdom went to bed with its future relationship with Europe hanging in the balance. I vividly recall staying up too late watching a result I had been told would not happen.
By morning Britain had voted, narrowly, to leave the European Union, and a great many people who – like me – had assumed the country thought as they did, discovered, with a jolt, that it did not.
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Brexit was the moment a lot of us realised we did not understand the place we lived in as well as we thought. The ten years that followed, in their own way, have been an extended attempt to come to terms with that.
The argument we were having with ourselves
It is tempting now to tell the story as a list of effects: trade down, movement curtailed, a border conjured in the Irish Sea. All of that is real and well-documented. But Brexit was never really an argument about tariffs. It was an argument about who we are, conducted in the language of customs unions.
The vote split along lines that were already there. Scotland and Northern Ireland leaned one way, England and Wales the other. Cities pulled against towns, and generations were divided. Researchers have since tied the Leave vote to places that felt overlooked and economically stranded, not a verdict on Europe so much as a message about home, sent by people who felt no one else was listening.
The referendum did not invent those divisions, but they were exploited by campaigners on both sides. And the vote itself simply handed everyone a microphone and asked a yes-or-no question of a country that does not think in yes or no.
What ‘control’ turned out to mean
The promise was control, and there is something poignant about how that word has aged. The decade that followed has produced seven prime ministers and a politics that rarely settles for longer than it takes to write a headline; the anniversary itself arrived in the same week Keir Starmer announced his resignation. Whatever was taken back, steadiness was not among it.
And control is a slippery thing. Immigration was the heart of the Leave case, yet net migration rose afterwards, as arrivals from outside Europe more than replaced those from within it. The places promised ‘levelling up’ often saw the opposite, because the regions that voted to leave were frequently the ones most exposed to the trade they lost. There is a hard lesson buried in these contradictions; wanting agency and getting it are not the same, and that a vote can express a grievance perfectly without fixing it at all.
Independent analysis puts UK output some six to eight per cent below where it might have been without Brexit, and trade lower than it would have been inside the bloc. It is hard to feel these things so directly, especially in a decade that also held a pandemic, an energy shock and a war in Europe. There are no clean before-and-after points of comparison.
Despite the enormity of the decision to leave Europe, its weight is mostly cumulative and quiet. It shows up in a slightly poorer country, a slightly harder journey, a passport queue that moves a little slower; small frictions that rarely announce themselves as Brexit, and so are easy to absorb and easier to forget. The change is real precisely because it stopped feeling like change.
Living with the answer
Though small, these frictions have built up into a shift in mood. Around 57 per cent now say leaving was a mistake, and the regret runs deepest among the young, who had least say and will live longest with the result. And yet there is little real appetite to reopen the debate fully. The current accommodation, rejoining a science scheme here, easing a food rule there, while holding firm against the single market and free movement is less a settled position than a country quietly deciding it does not have the energy for another argument.
That, perhaps, is the truest measure of the decade. Not anger, but tiredness. Brexit has become less an event than bad weather we have learned to dress for – a truly British skill.
What we drew
If there is something to take from ten years of this, it is humility about lines. The UK drew a line across a ballot paper and assumed it would resolve a question. Instead, it revealed how many other lines were already there between regions, generations, the heard and the unheard and made them impossible to ignore.
A border, in the end, is only ever a decision about who belongs together and who does not. The UK made one of those decisions a decade ago, on a narrow margin, in a fit of certainty most people no longer feel. The lines have held. And we have spent ten years discovering how much harder it is to unknow what they showed us about ourselves.
