David Dimbleby stiffened in his chair in the BBC studio and announced: ‘The British people have spoken: we’re out.’Â
It was the early hours of Friday, June 24, 2016, and Britain was waking up to what some saw as a terrifying new future.Â
When financial markets opened a few hours later, the FTSE 100 plummeted by 12.5% within minutes. At that time, then-Conservative MP Anna Soubry famously declared: ‘We have made a very, very, very bad mistake.’
This event marked the beginning of a narrative suggesting that Britain had inflicted harm upon itself, propelling the country towards a future of impoverishment and isolation, while the rest of Europe surged forward towards prosperity without the UK.
Among diehard Remainers, the notion that the EU symbolizes the pinnacle of human civilization and that Britain’s abrupt departure from it was a reckless act of petulance has firmly taken root.
They wear a pair of differentiated spectacles: one side has a rose-tinted lens with which they gaze longingly across the Channel, while the other has a blackened, blinkered lens through which they view their own country.
The fantasy remains among Remainers that post-Brexit Britain has been reduced to a crashing and burning satellite of a wealthy and successful EU. The fact that the whole of Europe has been underperforming is lost on those who continue to claim that there has been a calamitous collapse in the UK economy caused by Brexit.
Britain’s sluggishness is not the result of leaving the EU. Instead, it reflects what has been happening across Europe for decades. In 1960, Western Europe accounted for 26.8 per cent of global GDP; by 2018 it had fallen to only 14.7 per cent, overtaken by South and Southeast Asia. That’s the reality of the world we now live in.
A stony-faced David Dimbleby announces the projected result of the referendum in the early hours of June 24, 2016
Pro-Brexit supporters gather in Parliament Square, London, on the night of the referendum
 Not that this means all is well with the UK economy, far from it. In 2023, seven years on from the Brexit vote and three years on from Brexit itself, Britain’s economic growth was pretty stagnant, having struggled to recover from the Covid pandemic.Â
But was it worse than other European countries? The answer is no. Take the International Monetary Fund which in 2023 predicted that of all the world’s economies just one would be plunged into recession that year – the UK.Â
But when the actual figures emerged, it wasn’t Britain that came out as the laggard, it was Germany whose economy had slumped.
Overall, Brexit might be said to be a score draw – albeit a low-scoring one between two minor league sides, from which everyone wanders home with a sense of disappointment.
Five years on from Brexit, it is hard to see what the fuss was all about. It has not been a disaster, yet, at the same time, it is hard to see what Britain has really achieved. We continue to dream up new economy-crushing regulations in a number of areas. We continue to have a labour market and corporate laws that are inflexible compared with the US. We surely can – and must – do better.
I should lay my cards on the table now and admit that I was one of the 48 per cent who voted Remain in the 2016 referendum. While I was attracted to the idea of Britain trying to escape Europe’s low trajectory of growth and become a more dynamic economy – a Singapore on Thames, as it was often called – I could see that Brexit would be very disruptive, especially with the many families – including my own – who have established bonds across Europe.
I also feared a British withdrawal would break up the EU, with serious repercussions for Eastern Europe, perhaps culminating in some countries being drawn into Vladimir Putin’s sphere of influence. In the end I fell for the ‘better the devil I know’ argument.
But I accepted the result – unlike the elderly dog-walker I met on the morning of the result, who told me ominously, ‘It’ll be war now.’ It didn’t have to go quite so badly, I said in response.Â
I even started to look forward to Britain forging its own path. At no point did I feel inclined to see Brussels as a paradigm of liberal virtue, as so many Remainers laughably did.
Eight years on, it is hard for anyone to argue convincingly that Brexit has been the disaster which was widely predicted. Even the Guardian newspaper admits ‘Britain’s economic performance since 2016 has been mediocre but not the full-on horror show that was prophesied by the Remain camp’.
But it is hard to argue, either, that Britain has really seized the opportunities it presented. We have simply become a different breed of European social democracy and trotted alongside the EU.
Europe as a whole – Britain included – has lost its self-appointed place as the world’s keeper of civilisation, along with its reputation as the slightly less wealthy but more cultured and self-restrained twin of the United States of America.
Europe’s economies are stagnating, its quality of life fading, and the reputation for freedom and democracy it has tried to establish since 1945 is rapidly becoming lost.
Boris Johnson proved a far more interventionist prime minister than his history suggested, no thanks to the Covid pandemic, Ross Clark argues
Fellow Brexiteer Michael Gove failed to capitalise on being freed from the constraints of the EU, Clark suggests
Take away the noise of Brexit and you can see that Britain and the EU are both locked in the same cycle of decline. They are like a bickering couple, each moaning about the other’s inadequacies while failing to see they are themselves very little different. Both have lost their spirit of innovation, their momentum, all the qualities which once made other parts of the world emulate us.
The fact we need to face is that Europe is becoming a backwater. For innovation and scientific advancement, look to the US. For economic dynamism, look to the US or to Southeast Asia. For the highest education standards and the best healthcare, look to Southeast Asia, or to Australia. But to what would you look to Europe these days?
The freest societies on earth? Depends on your concept of freedom. Culture? Rather less than we used to. On the contrary, Europe has become a macrocosm of Athens: a place of history, but where the glories of the past tower over the tawdry reality of the present. An agreeable holiday? That is the problem. We idolise Europe because of holiday syndrome.
We think the Italians all live in villas in sumptuous countryside because that is where we stayed on holiday – we don’t see the pokey high-rise flats in crumbling concrete suburbs, which are home to far more Italians. We think the French all eat well because we found a lovely restaurant in the Dordogne; we don’t see the fast-food outlets they increasingly use.
We think it’s always sunny in Benidorm because that’s how it was in August; we don’t see the lashing wind and rain at other times of year. We think Bulgaria is deliciously cheap because our spending money went a long way; without stopping to think how the locals get by on much lower incomes.
In Greece, we read novels, guidebooks or even Homer; we don’t read the local paper to hear of the road accidents. In Germany, we see beer and bratwurst, not idle factories. We might take a peek at the ordered seediness put on for the tourists in Amsterdam, but we don’t see the misery and crime which go with drug addiction and prostitution.
That is holiday syndrome – obliviousness to what is really going on beneath our noses, and a lack of curiosity to find out. We don’t want to because we have gone away on a holiday from reality. Then we come home and the multiple problems of our own country reassert themselves in our consciousness.
That is why some think Britain is wrecked, a miserable and impoverished isle which, in a fit of madness, chose to cast itself away from civilisation.
However, it isn’t true. There is much wrong with Britain. But whatever you think is bad this side of the Channel, you can almost always find worse on the other side. The more you look at the rest of Europe through the same lens as you view Britain, the more you start to challenge the notion that Britain is some embittered divorcee reduced to living in a tawdry bedsit after marching out of the family home in a fit of pique.
The challenge now is to derive some advantage from Brexit – and this will not be achieved by emulating the EU and by turning Britain into its endlessly orbiting satellite. It will require Britain to achieve escape velocity, to break away from its regulatory pull. But, so far, we have made little effort to do so.
Even some of those who, during the Brexit referendum campaign, seemed to be advocating the model of Britain as ‘Singapore-on-Thames’ seemed reluctant to bring a less regulatory climate about when they found themselves in political office following Brexit.
Boris Johnson proved a far more interventionist prime minister than his history suggested, quickly resorting to big government during Covid and expanding the state markedly.Â
Michael Gove also proved to be no deregulator. Not only was he one of the chief advocates for vaccine passports, he also introduced new planning requirements and extra taxation for holiday lets in an unashamed effort to reduce their number, despite their being a vital part of the tourist industry.
When even the avowed advocates of a low tax, low regulation post-Brexit Britain turn out to not really believe in it, what hope is there for achieving that vision?
Nevertheless, at some point, a UK government is going to have to make a priority of economic growth – and to begin by asking: what is it that helped faster-growing economies such as the US outstrip Europe in recent decades?
If Britain wants to grow like America, it is going to have to free up its labour market and sweep away the more restrictive labour laws which were imposed on it during its membership of the EU.
What the US also does brilliantly is, rather than showering public money on companies, it creates the conditions in which start-up companies can raise capital, find premises, hire and fire staff without having regulators breathing down their necks.
US employment law is far less geared towards protecting particular jobs and far more towards incentivising businesses to create jobs. Easy to hire and easy to fire, if you like.
Most start-ups will fail – and there is no point in propping them up – but that doesn’t matter if just a handful of companies manage to clamber out of the economic primordial soup and prosper.
The culture of US business accepts and celebrates the ‘creative destruction’ – which allows good ideas to feast on the entrails of the bad.
The European approach – to try to preserve every last factory for fear of what will happen to the workers if it closes – is a recipe for misallocation of resources.
We will get a lot further if we change the relationship between government and business, stop the former trying to decide which are the promising ideas, to be showered with public money and ministerial lobbying, and instead limit government’s role to creating the right environment in which ideas can battle it out between themselves.
Britain is not without good ideas but we have to find some way of encouraging entrepreneurs to grow their companies rather than selling out at the earliest opportunity. Again and again, companies that show promise of becoming engines of growth choose to sell out to foreign competitors before they have had chance to reach anything like the size of America’s tech giants.
It doesn’t help either that would-be tech giants struggle to raise capital in Britain. The City of London is one of the world’s great financial centres, and yet it does not seem to be serving UK industry well.
Then there is the matter of energy prices. You can’t really expect European industries to prosper when they are paying four times as much for their gas and electricity than their US competitors. And neither can you blame that huge differential entirely on Vladimir Putin.
For years, while Europe has been setting unrealistic net zero targets, the US has put energy security and affordability before all else.
While European countries all but banned fracking, the US embraced it, with the result that the US is now the world’s largest producer of oil and gas.
Yet we continue to run towards a cliff edge created by unrealistic targets. While Europe deprives itself of affordable, reliable energy, the US and China are using their far cheaper energy to help collar the market in green technologies.Â
The emphasis is on giving green technologies the space and time to prove themselves, in the hope that they will naturally displace their dirtier forebears without having to curtail lifestyles and compromise economic growth.
The problem of carbon emissions will be solved when technologies emerge that are not only cleaner but genuinely cheaper, too. They will then sell themselves; they will not have to be forced on an unwilling population.
What this post-Brexit Britain has the chance to do is to combine the energy, individualism and love of freedom of America with the discipline and sense of purpose of Singapore. I am not sure how much of this is saleable to a UK public at the moment, given the misplaced admiration for the European Union and the attraction that the comfort blanket of protectionism and closed borders still holds for many Brexit voters.
But I am sure that such a hypothetical country would be a winner. And of one other thing I am certain too: the upheaval of Brexit will have been in vain if we don’t at least try to do something different to the rest of sclerotic Europe.
Adapted from Far from Eutopia by Ross Clark (Abacus, £22). © Ross Clark 2025. To order a copy for £19.80 (offer valid to 15/02/25; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.
