On the tenth anniversary of British voters’ great revolt against the crumbling order of cosmopolitan liberalism, Peter Ramsay identifies three major benefits of Brexit.
In the 10 years since the vote to leave the EU, there have been six prime ministers. One of them, David Cameron lasted less than a day following the referendum, Liz Truss lasted a few weeks, Rishi Sunak a bit more than 18 months, Keir Starmer two years, Theresa May and Boris Johnson managed roughly three years a piece. Shortly after the tenth anniversary of that historic vote, we will have a seventh; and the chances of Andy Burnham lasting longer than Starmer look slim. There has been nothing like this level of turmoil at the top of British government since way back in the 19th century.
Make no mistake, Brexit is the cause of it. Brexit may have been a macroeconomic non-event, but it has been a political earthquake.
Brexit has not been the economic catastrophe predicted by Remainers. According to the OECD, British growth since 2016 is similar to France and better than Germany or Italy. Rejoiner hypotheticals about how much higher UK GDP growth would have been if we had remained in the sclerotic EU are absurd cope. But, while Brexit has not been a catastrophe, merely doing as well as French economic performance, and better than German or Italian, over the past 10 years is nothing to write home about. Growth is still far too low, its per capita effects are eaten up by rapid immigration, and poorer voters see little or nothing of it owing to massive inequality in real incomes. In other words, the British economy after Brexit has continued on the same path of long-term stagnation and low growth that it was following while it was part of the EU’s single market.
By contrast, Britain’s old political order has been entirely unable to go on as before. The Brexit referendum has fatally undermined the illusions in it that many still clung too a decade ago. For three years following the referendum, the political class, with ever-increasing levels of absurdity, tried to evade the implications of a referendum that it had asked for. Westminster was eventually forced (by Nigel Farage’s intervention in a European election that should never have happened) into leaving the European Union. Subsequently, no government has been able to deliver on leave voters’ demand to ‘Take back control’ of the state through the assertion of national sovereignty. To be sure, Johnson took Britain out of the EU. But the return of full sovereignty to parliament means that parliament, and the governments formed from it, once again have the authority and the obligation to address the state’s economic, social and political problems. They have lost the EU to hide behind. And this has fully exposed the exhaustion of Britain’s political traditions.
Under Johnson, politicians and civil servants immediately busied themselves with lockdown, with facilitating a huge wave of immigration and with supporting a war in the far away Donbass. All of these policies reflected the priorities of cosmopolitan liberalism and its decaying global order, and none was remotely oriented to Britain’s national interest. At best, they evaded the problem of the low-growth, low-wage, deindustrialised economy with huge regional imbalances, and at worst they aggravated it. Johnson promised ‘levelling up’, but didn’t deliver. Truss promised massive tax cuts to kickstart growth, but her government disintegrated, along with her Thatcherite fantasies, in epic political incompetence. Sunak and Starmer promised they weren’t Johnson or Truss and not much more.
Ironically, Sunak and Starmer between them may actually have delivered something on one of the key demands of the 2016 Leave majority by bringing about significant reductions in legal immigration (a policy favoured by a significant number of Remain voters as well). However, it has been done years too late and without much fanfare. This is chiefly because for both governments, it was a policy change made under pressure, and didn’t really chime with their core beliefs—free market cosmopolitanism for the Tories, diversity and human rights cosmopolitanism for Labour. And this has been obvious to all. Nobody really trusts either party not to reverse course on immigration should labour costs (ie, wages) start to rise. Labour has been toying with closer ‘alignment’ with the EU, and free movement is a significant feature of that strategy.
Personalities are not the problem. The entire old order has run out of ideas. Committed to their tired globalist dogmas, the old order is unable to summon the political imagination or will to do anything with the sovereignty that Brexit returned to the British parliament. The electorate all but destroyed Labour in 2019; and then the Tories in 2024, returning Labour with a huge majority on an embarrassingly small vote share. After that, all our braindead and authoritarian elites could really do was pursue their globalist Net Zero fantasy and stoke fear and fury with divisive race equity policies, barbaric gender identity policies, deranged engagement in the deadend conflict in Israel-Palestine…you name it: anything but take responsibility for the state and its decaying political economy. Dissent is smeared as proto-fascist or the work of Vladimir Putin. This unparalleled political failure has done for Starmer’s government, with Farage’s party again delivering the coup de grace at the local elections. Now it looks likely that at the next general election, voters will put an end to the two-party system that has dominated British politics for a century.
And so here are the Brexit benefits that elite Rejoiners are always asking about. First, the British people took the lead in breaking from the decaying old order and, a decade later, very large numbers of citizens can now see the British state and its political traditions for what they really are. Both the bureaucracy and the politicians are lazy, spectacularly dim and often sleazy, their ideas are superannuated, while at the same time, and particularly among the left in both politics and the public sector, they dogmatically flaunt their overweening sense of virtue. Their vanity and uselessness is fully exposed.
Second, the electorate has, again and again, since Brexit proved willing to break with its old tribal political loyalties and use its democratic powers to humiliate those who fail to address the nation’s problems, the same problems that led to the Brexit vote a decade ago.
However, the third, and most important, Brexit benefit remains a largely unrealised potential. That is sovereignty itself. British voters forced parliament to take its sovereignty back as a constitutional matter. And that has the potential to give Britain a great advantage in the context of the accelerating collapse of the old global order. The sovereignty of parliament is a powerful political instrument for a party that wants to sweep away the constraints of the old order and do whatever is necessary to promote the national interest in a context of rapid geopolitical change: to mobilise and employ our own people in order to generate cheap energy, to build houses and infrastructure and increase productivity; to secure our democratic freedoms, revitalise the Union, develop new defence strategies and forge new international alliances.
The electorate is yet to find a party that wants to use the state’s sovereignty politically; yet to find a party has moved beyond the ideology of dying globalism in both its forms, beyond devotion either to the supremacy of the global markets, on the one hand, or to the market system’s competing vulnerable identities with their transnational human rights, on the other. At most the electorate has found the parties of populist postures that serve as thin cover for worn-out Thatcherism. These parties will probably be tested out next by the voters. What we need is a party that maintains a clear and determined focus on the national interest, and possesses both the will, the imagination and the statecraft to use parliament’s sovereignty to pursue our collective interests as a nation in the turbulent times to come.
Ten years on, the national interest lies in Brexit-maxxing; in making the most of our nation’s sovereignty, of our capacity to rule ourselves and to mobilise our collective power as a people to solve our problems. The stakes are high because without a party willing to embrace maximum Brexit, the zombified old order will stagger on and take the nation down with it.
The Northern Star 
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