One Star Short: Ten Years of Brexit, and the Case for Asking Again

I arrived in Britain in 2017 — a year after the referendum, and a year before anyone could honestly tell you what leaving would mean in practice. I left in 2025. So I spent almost the whole of the Brexit decade living inside it: not the campaign or the slogans painted on the side of a bus, but the slow working-out of the thing afterwards — the part where an abstraction hardens into a queue, an unfilled vacancy, a price tag, a closed door. This June marks ten years since the vote of 23 June 2016. It feels like a fair moment to add up the bill.

I'll say where I stand at the outset, because feigning a neutrality I don't feel would be its own small dishonesty. I think Brexit has been a slow, comprehensive failure for Britain. Not a single catastrophe — the lights stayed on, the pound survived, the sky did not fall — but something more corrosive: a standing charge on the country's prosperity, its openness and its standing in the world, debited a little at a time, every year, so quietly that you can almost forget it is leaving your account. And I think that, ten years on, the evidence is finally heavy enough that the question deserves to be put to the country again.

Let me make the case with the numbers — and, because the honest version of an argument is the one that names its own weak points, with the caveats too.

The ledger

Start with money, since that is where the promises were loudest. The cleanest figure doesn't come from Brussels or from Remain campaigners; it comes from the Office for Budget Responsibility, the government's own independent forecaster, which assumes Brexit will reduce the UK's long-run productivity by around 4% and cut both exports and imports by around 15% compared with staying in — and which, reviewing the evidence years later, judges that assumption "broadly on track." Four percent of productivity is not a rounding error. It is, roughly, the difference between the country Britain is and a visibly richer one.

You can see it in the trade data. Researchers at the LSE's Centre for Economic Performance found that the new trade deal cut UK goods exports by about £27 billion in 2022 alone, and that some 16,400 firms — overwhelmingly small ones — simply stopped exporting to the EU rather than wrestle with the new paperwork. You can see it at the till, too: the same centre estimated Brexit added almost £7 billion to British food bills — about £250 per household — and drove roughly a third of the food inflation that followed, as new checks and red tape pushed up the cost of importing from Europe.

Honesty requires two caveats here. First, the total hit to GDP is genuinely hard to isolate, because the pandemic and the 2022 energy shock landed on top of Brexit; credible estimates of the cumulative loss range from about 4% to 8%, which is a range, not a single hard number, and anyone quoting the top of it as gospel is overselling. Second, a dissenting minority of economists argues the OBR overstates the damage. I find them unpersuasive — the trade divergence is too clear, and the forecaster has had years to revise its assumption and hasn't — but the argument exists, and pretending it doesn't would be the cheap move. Even at the cautious end, though, the direction is not in dispute. Brexit made Britain poorer than it would otherwise have been.

The staff who never came back

The number I felt before I ever read it was the one about hospitality. When free movement ended in January 2021, the sector that depended on it most lost its workforce fastest: the Migration Observatory at Oxford counts just over 98,000 EU-citizen jobs lost in hospitality in the two years to mid-2021 — the hardest-hit corner of the whole labour market. The EU share of the hospitality workforce fell from 18% to 12% in four years.

If you lived in Britain in those years, you didn't need the report. You saw it at the hotel front desk that was unstaffed at check-in, in the restaurant that had quietly stopped serving lunch because it couldn't crew the kitchen, in the "we're hiring" signs that hung in the same windows for a year. And it wasn't only restaurants and hotels. A shortfall of more than 100,000 lorry drivers helped tip the country into the fuel crisis of autumn 2021 — dry forecourts, panic-buying, and eventually army drivers behind the wheel of tanker trucks. Vacancies across the economy hit a record 1.3 million in the spring of 2022. Social care, already fragile, had to be propped up with a new visa route that opened in 2022, peaked at around 108,000 care-worker visas in 2023, and was then cut back by roughly 90% once the rules tightened in 2024 — a perfect little parable of a policy lurching between shortage and clampdown without ever finding its feet.

The promise that inverted

Here is the part that should give even committed Leavers pause. Brexit was sold, above all, as a way to take back control of immigration and bring the numbers down. The numbers went up — to levels never seen before. Net migration reached a record 944,000 in the year to March 2023, and the rise was driven entirely by arrivals from outside the EU, even as net migration from the EU itself turned negative. Free movement ended; total immigration roughly doubled. Whatever you believe Brexit was for, it did not do the one thing its own campaign placed at the centre of the table. It changed the colour of the passports in the arrivals hall, not the length of the queue.

Doors that close both ways

What Brexit did do, unambiguously, was take away rights — from Europeans in Britain and from Britons in Europe, in both directions at once.

For Britons, free movement is simply gone. A UK passport now buys you 90 days in any 180 across the Schengen area and no more — no working, no settling, no spending half the year at the place in France without a national visa from the country itself. From late 2025 the EU's new biometric Entry/Exit System began logging every crossing and counting those days automatically, and from late 2026 Britons will need to buy an ETIAS travel authorisation before they go. The automatic recognition of professional qualifications ended, and no replacement deal has been agreed, so a British architect or accountant can no longer assume their credentials travel with them. Even the dog needs fresh paperwork for every trip. The right a generation grew up taking for granted — to live, love, work, study or retire anywhere across a continent — was withdrawn from 67 million people who, as individuals, had done nothing.

For Europeans in Britain, the mirror image. The EU Settlement Scheme processed around 8.6 million applications — the largest documentation exercise in modern British history — to convert people who had arrived as fellow citizens into migrants who now hold a status proven only by an online share-code, with no physical document to show a landlord or a border guard. Hundreds of thousands on temporary "pre-settled" status nearly lost it on a technicality until the courts intervened. And for any European wanting to come now, the welcome mat is gone: the skilled-worker salary threshold jumped from £26,200 to £38,700 in 2024 and higher since, and the annual health surcharge rose to over £1,000 a year per person. The neighbour who would once have come for a season now faces a five-figure bill.

Northern Ireland, the unhappy laboratory

Nowhere is the contradiction at the heart of Brexit clearer than in Northern Ireland, where the only way to leave the EU without rebuilding a hard border on the island of Ireland was to build a softer one down the Irish Sea instead. Northern Ireland stayed inside the EU single market for goods; Great Britain left; and so a customs frontier now runs through the United Kingdom's own internal waters. The politics were poisonous — the DUP collapsed power-sharing at Stormont for two years in protest, restored only in February 2024, when, for the first time in Northern Ireland's history, an Irish nationalist took the post of First Minister.

But the economics are the quiet tell. Because Northern Ireland alone kept its access to the single market, it became an accidental controlled experiment in what that access is worth. The answer, from the region's own statisticians: its sales to the Republic of Ireland rose almost 20% in 2024 while its purchases from Great Britain fell. The part of the UK that was allowed to keep one foot in Europe is the part now trading best. That is not a coincidence. It is the case for the single market, written in Britain's own ledgers.

The view from the other shore

It would be wrong to pretend Brexit was costless for the EU. Losing Britain cost it around €10 billion a year in net budget contributions — roughly a tenth of its spending — along with its second-largest economy, its biggest military power, and a great deal of diplomatic weight. The EU is smaller and a little poorer for the divorce.

And yet the contrast in how the two sides absorbed it is itself an argument. The thing Brexit's champions predicted most confidently — that Britain would be the first domino, that others would follow — simply did not happen. No member has left, or seriously moved to. Eurosceptic parties across the continent quietly dropped their own exit pledges once they saw the British example up close. Support for EU membership across the bloc reached its highest level in over forty years by 2025. Brexit was meant to be the crack that broke the union. Instead it became the cautionary tale that holds it together. Britain didn't lead an exodus; it ran the experiment so that no one else would have to.

A country changing its mind

Which brings me to the present, and to the reason this is worth writing rather than merely lamenting. The British public has changed its mind — slowly, but unmistakably. YouGov's long-running tracker now finds Britons calling the decision to leave wrong over right by roughly 57% to 30%, a gap that has held continuously since the summer of 2022. Around 61% now say Brexit has been more a failure than a success. Asked directly, a clear majority say they would now vote to apply to rejoin — Ipsos and King's College London put it at 52% to 33% this spring.

I want to be careful here, because this is where it's easiest to overclaim, and I would rather lose a rhetorical point than make a dishonest one. Most of the shift is not Leave voters recanting — most of them have stuck to their guns. It is generational: the young break for Europe by enormous margins, two to one and more, and as the electorate turns over, the balance tips. And while a majority say they'd like to rejoin in the abstract, that support softens once you spell out the terms — Britain would not get its old rebate back, would face pressure to adopt the euro and join Schengen, and might have to ask for what it once simply had. Support for actually holding another referendum is real, but more a narrow plurality than a landslide.

None of that undoes the basic fact. A decade on, the country does not believe the thing it was sold, and the generation now coming of age never got to vote on the deal that shapes their lives.

The case for asking again

The current government's answer is a "reset" — a veterinary deal to ease food checks, a return to the Erasmus student programme, a defence partnership, alignment at the edges. It is sensible, and it is welcome, and it is nowhere near enough, because it is built on a red line that rules out rejoining the single market, the customs union or free movement. It smooths the smaller frictions while leaving the large mistake in place.

I don't think you reverse a decision like Brexit by stealth, through technical fixes no one voted for. You reverse it — if you reverse it — the way it was made: by asking the country, honestly. And an honest second referendum would have to be honest in both directions. It would have to tell Leave voters that the warnings were, on the whole, borne out. And it would have to tell Rejoiners that going back would not be a homecoming to the comfortable membership of 2016 — that the terms would be harder, the rebate gone, the euro on the table — and ask whether the country wants it anyway.

I think it might. I think a Britain that has lived for a decade inside the consequences, and watched a younger generation grow up locked out of a continent, has earned the right to be asked the question a second time, with the evidence in front of it that it didn't have the first. Consent is not a thing you grant once in 2016 and are bound by forever. It should be living. The star that drifted out of the ring is still out there. The least a democracy can do, ten years on, is ask whether it wants to come back.