Brexit’s fifth anniversary is prompting one question to be asked (Image: PA)
Has Brexit failed? It’s the patently stupid question that people won’t stop asking.
Anniversaries lend themselves to reflection, so exactly five years on from Britain formally leaving the EU it shouldn’t really come as a surprise that people are assessing the wisdom of the decision. I just thought people were brighter than that.
The question ‘has failed?’ demonstrates a total misunderstanding of the vote’s gravity. It also fails to grasp what it was actually about.
We were told prior to the referendum that it was a once-in-a-generation vote with complex and widespread ramifications. It was one of the few things Brexiteers and Remainers agreed upon. Why then are we being asked to draw conclusions on those ramifications before most of them have come to pass?
Take the economic arguments. The benefits, the Leave side argued, would be realised as and when Britain reoriented itself towards the areas of the world that were actually growing – America and Asia, not the moribund European economy.
The UK left the EU five years ago today (Image: Getty)
Notwithstanding the odd deal with the likes of Japan and Australia, and a clunkily named Asia-Pacific trade bloc the UK joined in December, we are yet to align ourselves with the global economic powerhouses of today and tomorrow – the United States and India. But thanks to these deals – which the Europeans have failed to make – can be struck, and successive Governments have been working on getting them done.
In November last year the PM held talks with India’s Prime Minister Modi on thrashing out a bespoke trade deal, and with a staunch anglophile in the White House, a UK-US trade deal feels closer than ever.
Even a foaming-at-the-mouth Remain economist would accept that such deals, if they were reached, would be seismic for Britain.
None of this takes into account the continued decline of the European economy. In 2008, the eurozone and the US were comparable when it came to GDP: £11.4tn played £12.3tn. This year, the eurozone’s GDP is projected to be £13.7tn. And US GDP? £24tn. The US economy is the present and the future; the overregulated European economy is the distant past.
Where will Europe be in another 15 years when the virile, dynamic economies of Asia really come to prominence? The truth is we don’t know, but most people in command of their faculties don’t expect Paris, Berlin and Brussels to be the drivers of global growth. Britain is surely best served pursuing closer trade ties with the countries that will shape this century rather than the last.
So what’s the point of all this? The point is, the seismic decision that was taken on June 23 2016 and carried out on January 31 2020 will have long-lasting consequences and we have no idea yet what those are. To ask whether has been a success after five years is a bit like asking whether a film is any good based only on the opening shot.
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The Union flag is taken down from outside the European Parliament (Image: Getty)
Those that ask whether has failed also fail to latch on to what was about. Of course, there was a slate of reasons people voted Leave. But they all boiled down to the same thing: we wanted to be able to control our own affairs. We wanted the people we elected to be able to set the rules of our lives, nobody else.
Whether people voted Leave because they wanted to reduce migration, improve hospitals, de-regulate industry, or cut taxes, voting for has given our elected politicians the power to do that.
The failure of those same politicians to deliver those policy ambitions is a failure of those politicians, not . has given successive governments the necessary powers to satisfy the whims of the electorate. Those governments have failed. Blame them, not the vote that empowered them.
So, on its fifth birthday, if someone asks you whether or not has been a success or failure, tell them they’ll find out when it’s all grown up.