Denis MacShane / Jun 2025
Photo: Shutterstock
In England there is a very muted celebration of the 9th anniversary of the Brexit plebiscite vote in 2016 when 37% of the Britain’s registered voters opted to break links with Europe.
Social media has its share of posts proclaiming Britain’s liberation from the tyrants of Brussels but on the whole the principals are now retired, have taken their peerages, and the number one cheerleader, Nigel Farage - who always had a reserved seat on the Today programme and Question Time so keen were the BBC to promote him as the coming man of British politics - is now focusing on turning his eccentric followers into the governing party of 21st century Britain.
There may be more than 500 MPs elected last year who think Brexit was a mistake but the governing elites prefer not to discuss what cutting links to Europe has done to Britain.
Sir Keir Starmer’s chosen slogan was that he was the man who would “Make Brexit Work.” Alas as with invoking Enoch Powell’s famous 1968 speech that an old lady in his Wolverhampton constituency felt “a stranger in her own country” the No 10 soundbite forgers had forgotten that it was Theresa May, our first Brexit prime minister who proclaimed that she “would make Brexit work.”
She didn’t and Sir Keir can’t. Much more ferocious anti-Europeans like Boris Johnson who began fabulating about the horrors of Europe for Sir Max Hasting’s Daily Telegraph four decades ago or Liz Truss have all tried to turn Brexit into a positive.
They are taking advantage of the 9th anniversary as the 10 years of Brexit next summer are unlikely to show our trade, political and people isolation from Europe is winning new supporters.
Everyone knows the stats – GDP down by 4 per cent as nothing kills growth quicker than reducing trade, something that the world’s greatest trading nation might expect to have in its political DNA. Joining the Asia-Pacific CPTPP would add 0.08% to UK trade and Donald Trump has made British products more expensive to sell in the US. In 2016 Britain had around 300,000 workers from Europe from the same culture, often the same religions as ourselves, doing all sorts of work which the sturdy white English worker was not trained to do or unwilling to do at the pay British bosses offered.
Last year British governments, Tory, then Labour, imported more than 900,000 workers from Pakistan, India, Nigeria, the Philippines, and Ghana to swell our immigrant population thus fuelling the rise of ethnonationalist “White British” politics.
Not a single politician in Europe has followed Britain’s example. Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni, Gert Wilders and other populist nationalists have dropped all talk of a referendum on Europe or ditching the Euro as they see the effects of Brexit. The Tory party which gave us the 2016 vote is now on life support as every opinion polls says Brexit was a mistake and there is even now a majority for rejoin.
Refighting the 25 year Brexit war from the 1992 Treaty of Maastricht to the 2016 plebiscite is pointless. The only winner today is Nigel Farage. If Tories, Labour and LibDems want to see him in Downing Street their omertà on Brexit serves his purpose.
