Ten years. A decade of hand-wringing, of economists’ models crumbling against reality, of Cassandra-like predictions that never quite arrived. The latest figures confirm what some of us have insisted all along: Brexit has been a net positive for the British economy. Not in the simplistic, spreadsheet-flattening terms that Remainers demand, but in the deeper arithmetic of national resilience and democratic self-rule.
Let us first dispatch the ghost of Project Fear. The Treasury’s 2016 forecast of a 6.2% GDP hit by 2030 is now, by its own standards, laughable. Growth has been slower than the counterfactual—the UK’s GDP is perhaps 2-4% smaller than if we had stayed in the sclerotic, German-dominated EU. But this is the accounting of a miser, not a statesman. We are not a corporation maximising shareholder value. We are a nation reclaiming its agency.
Consider the trade numbers. UK exports to the EU have dipped, yes, but trade with the rest of the world has surged by 10% since 2020. Our services sector—the true engine of the modern economy—has seen a 15% rise in non-EU deals. The much-feared Dover queues? A bureaucratic hiccup, now smoothed. The ‘horror’ of customs checks? A minor inconvenience for a sovereign customs border, as every other independent nation on earth manages.
And then there is the matter of regulation. The EU’s mania for harmonisation—from the shape of bananas to the acidity of vinegar—was a millstone. Since Brexit, the UK has diverged on gene editing, on financial services reform, on data protection. We have slashed red tape for small businesses. We have forged trade deals with Australia, New Zealand, and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. Each of these is a brick in the edifice of a truly global Britain, not a provincial appendage to Brussels.
But the real dividend is not on a balance sheet. It is the intangible asset of sovereignty: the ability to decide who enters our borders, how our laws are made, and whose courts have the final say. The Northern Ireland Protocol, once a Gordian knot, has been untangled by the Windsor Framework. The European Court of Justice no longer rules on British matters. Our fishing grounds, those symbols of national identity, are again ours to negotiate.
Critics will point to inflation, to labour shortages, to the 4.5% fall in business investment since the 2016 vote. But these are symptoms of a global pandemic and a war in Ukraine, not of Brexit. The eurozone has fared worse. Germany, the EU’s locomotive, has seen its economy stagnate. France’s debt-to-GDP ratio is a horror show. Meanwhile, the UK’s unemployment rate is near historic lows, and our fiscal position, while strained, is no worse than our peers.
What the Remainers cannot forgive is that Brexit has not brought ruin. They cannot bear the thought that self-government, messy and quarrelsome as it is, is worth more than a slight dip in GDP per capita. They mistake prosperity for meaning. The Victorian age understood this: a nation’s greatness is not measured by its trade surplus but by its spirit. Brexit is the spirit of a people who would rather be poor and free than rich and servile.
The economic impact is confirmed. The dividends are real: sovereignty, regulatory flexibility, global orientation. Ten years on, the question is no longer whether Brexit worked. It is whether we have the courage to use the power we reclaimed.
