Brexit 10 years on: What has changed in the UK explained in maps and charts
Brexit promised a better Britain. A decade on, the numbers tell a different story. Al Jazeera breaks it down. On June 23, 2016, exactly 10
Brexit promised a better Britain. A decade on, the numbers tell a different story. Al Jazeera breaks it down. On June 23, 2016, exactly 10 years ago, a close referendum saw just over half of Britons vote to leave the European Union (EU) after years of campaigning that Britain would be better off outside the bloc. A decade on, the promises made during the referendum campaign have largely failed to materialise. Research suggests the UK economy is smaller than it would have been, migration is higher, and compared to its peers, the UK is falling behind. Here are seven charts to explain Brexit and how it has played out. What was Brexit? To understand Brexit, you have to go back long before the vote and trace how the UK’s relationship with Europe evolved. In 1973, driven by sluggish economic growth, Britain joined the European Economic Community (EEC), a si member economic trading bloc. According to data from the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), Britain’s GDP per capita was almost 30 percent higher than that of the EEC nations in 1950, yet by 1973 it was roughly 10 percent lower. Scepticism about deeper integration with Europe never went away in the decades that followed – and it was never confined to the right. Labour’s 1983 general election manifesto had called for withdrawal from the EEC, reflecting a left-wing view of the bloc as a barrier to socialism, before the party reversed course after its landslide defeat that year. By the early 2010s, pressure from Eurosceptic MPs within Prime Minister David Cameron’s own Conservative Party, amplified by the rising electoral threat of Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party (UKIP), pushed Cameron into a political gamble: a promise to hold a referendum on EU membership if he were re-elected. On June 23, 2016, the vote was held, but the result did not go as planned. The results were as follows Overall: 51.9 percent voted to leave, 48.1 percent voted to remain 51.9 percent voted to leave, 48.1 percent voted to remain England: 53 percent leave 53 percent leave Wales: 53 percent leave 53 percent leave Northern Ireland: 44 percent leave 44 percent leave Scotland: 38 percent leave Smaller towns and rural areas tended to vote Leave, while major cities tended to vote Remain.
Who supported it, and who opposed it? The referendum split British politics down the middle, and visibly within Cameron’s own cabinet. Cameron led the Remain campaign alongside Chancellor George Osborne, backed by most of the Conservative Party, the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish Party. On the Leave campaign, senior Conservative members such as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, both cabinet ministers, backed the Brexit vote. Nigel Farage, whose party had pushed for the referendum in the first place, campaigned heavily for Brexit and later founded the Brexit Party, now Reform UK, in 2018. After the Leave vote, Cameron resigned, and Theresa May took over the task of delivering Brexit, but failed to get her withdrawal deal through parliament in 2019. Boris Johnson succeeded her and oversaw the UK’s departure from the EU on January 31, 2020. What happened to the economy? Over the past decade, real GDP per capita – the total value of all goods and services produced in the UK, adjusted for inflation, per person – has lagged that of the EU’s 27 members. By 2025, the UK was running five index points behind the bloc on the same 2016 baseline. Economists project average annual growth of just 1.3 percent between 2026 and 2030, reflecting the ongoing drag of trade barriers and structural change. Business investment in the UK also paints a similar picture. UK companies pulled back sharply after the 2016 vote, with some studies putting the investment shortfall compared to a non-Brexit scenario at 12 to 18 percent – a gap driven largely by years of political and regulatory uncertainty that delayed corporate decision-making. According to the Office for Budget Responsibility, Brexit has made the country less productive by about four percent. Does the UK have better trade? According to the Office for Budget Responsibility, trade with Europe is on course to be about 15 percent lower in the long run, with trade deals with non-EU countries not making a meaningful difference. Leaving the EU meant leaving a system in which goods moved freely across borders without checks, certificates or delays.
The BriefWire