‘We did regain control’: The Brexit voters with no regrets 10 years on
The UK may have squandered the freedoms it won, but leaving the EU was the right decision, say pro-Brexit Britons. Despite polls showing that most
The UK may have squandered the freedoms it won, but leaving the EU was the right decision, say pro-Brexit Britons. Despite polls showing that most Britons regret leaving the European Union, many others believe the case for quitting the bloc still holds. “The arguments for Brexit now are largely the same as they were then: sovereignty, democracy and taking back control,” University of Cambridge professor and Brexit supporter Robert Tombs told Al Jazeera. Control was a central theme of the “Leave” camp. Brexiters called for more control over migration to protect borders from foreign supranational powers, as well as wresting sovereignty back from the bloc – which they portrayed as an out-of-touch middle-class group of elites – and returning it to the people. “Britain was never especially happy in the EU, but then Greece, Italy and others do not appear to be especially happy either,” Tombs said. “One of the arguments for leaving was that Britain has always been more closely tied to countries outside the EU, especially English-speaking ones, than to countries within the bloc,” he continued. The landmark referendum 10 years ago saw Britain break its association with the EU after more than 43 years of an occasionally volatile membership. Those who remain committed to Brexit blame successive governments for failing to maximise the perceived freedoms of leaving the bloc. They also say that the negative predictions associated with “project fear”, narratives among those who campaigned to remain within the union, have failed to materialise. Troubled union From when the UK joined the European project in the 1970s through to its departure, the relationship has often been tense. There were numerous crisis points, such as the UK’s dominant Conservative Party’s fundamental divisions on the issue of its membership.
Other sore points were the financial crisis of 1992, dubbed “Black Wednesday” in the media, when the UK failed to maintain sterling in the EU’s exchange rate mechanism, and the bitter battle over the Maastricht Treaty. The issue of Europe has turned into a defining fault line in British politics, one that never fully healed and ultimately culminated in Brexit. Tombs said that the UK had an Atlanticist positioning when it joined the EU and that even the former French President Charles DeGaulle described the UK as shutting itself in. Taking back control Many pro-Brexit Britons hoped their vote would see immigration decline. In the build-up to the vote, Reform Party leader Nigel Farage, then the head of UKIP, and his campaign drew criticism for his “Breaking Point” poster featuring Syrian refugees massing near the Croatia-Slovenia border as though they were seeking entry into the UK. Nevertheless, despite the assurances offered at the time, immigration increased, ballooning in what right-wing critics called the ”Boriswave,” named after former premier and Brexit campaigner Boris Johnson. His post-Brexit administration saw net migration into the UK rise from about 224,000 people in 2019 to more than 600,000 in 2022 – increasing to 906,000 in 2023, representing an increase of 302 percent. “We did regain control over immigration,” said David Goodhart, head of demography, immigration and integration at Policy Exchange, a right-leaning think tank. “But the point is we used that freedom to expand it,” he said. He blamed the UK’s failure to align with a post-Brexit world. The country officially withdrew from the bloc on January 31, 2020, four and half years after the referendum.
The BriefWire