{"id":415762,"date":"2026-02-09T05:11:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-09T05:11:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/415762\/"},"modified":"2026-02-09T05:11:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-09T05:11:11","slug":"time-for-a-brexit-reckoning-politico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/415762\/","title":{"rendered":"Time for a Brexit reckoning \u2013 POLITICO"},"content":{"rendered":"

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney recently received a lot of acclaim for citing Czech playwright and former President V\u00e1clav Havel\u2019s \u201cThe Power of the Powerless<\/a>\u201d in his speech at the World Economic Forum, inviting the world\u2019s nations and businesses to stop living in the lie of the rules-based international order. And that lesson applies here too: For the U.K. to finally move on, it must choose not to live in lies \u2014 especially the ones that fueled Brexit.<\/p>\n

And yet, both of the U.K.\u2019s main political parties, Labour and the Conservatives, are treating Brexit as a sacred cow rather than grappling with the enormity of its failure.<\/p>\n

The Conservative leadership that oversaw the U.K.\u2019s shambolic withdrawal from start to finish, and purged any internal dissenters in the process, are now owning its dismal results. The current Labour government, meanwhile, is taking baby steps to reintegrate the U.K. into the eminently valuable parts of Europe\u2019s architecture, like the Erasmus program<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"Mark Carney recently received a lot of acclaim for citing Czech playwright and former President V\u00e1clav Havel\u2019s \u201cThe Power of the Powerless\u201d in his speech at the World Economic Forum, inviting the world\u2019s nations and businesses to stop living in the lie of the rules-based international order. | Fabrice Coffrini\/AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n

However, both groups are too afraid to explain why Brexit was a colossal mistake. And it leaves them vulnerable to the populist Reform UK party\u2019s claim that the real error was opting for a departure that wasn\u2019t sharp enough.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that on all the fronts that motivated the vote in 2016, Brexit has failed to deliver: Britain\u2019s departure was followed by a dramatic rise in immigration, reaching<\/a> over 900,000 net in 2023. There\u2019s no indication that extricating the U.K. from the EU\u2019s regulations has injected the country with any economic dynamism. Since 2020, the British economy has grown more slowly than both the eurozone and the EU as a whole.\u00a0And with a debt-to-GDP ratio over 100 percent, its fiscal outlook is just as depressing, if not more so, than its highly indebted European neighbors.<\/p>\n

Part of this is because during their time in power after the referendum, the Conservatives wasted precious political bandwidth on tertiary Brexit-related fights, like the Irish \u201cbackstop\u201d protocol or the status of EU law in the British legal system. That was time that could have been used to undertake deep structural reforms, which would make the U.K. a more competitive economy. And of course, EU membership never prevented the U.K. from changing its zoning laws, cutting taxes, improving secondary education or pursuing any number of other supply-side reforms in the first place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney recently received a lot of acclaim for citing Czech playwright and former President…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":415763,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[5754,934,625,891,460,140,141,13931,21131,2955,59,57,58,2795,2363,50,633,151257,1351,156,2366,15732,56,146566,54,55],"class_list":["post-415762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-asia-economy","tag-brexit","tag-british-politics","tag-china","tag-debt","tag-defense","tag-donald-trump","tag-economic-performance","tag-eu27","tag-far-right","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-immigration","tag-negotiations","tag-news","tag-nigel-farage","tag-roberta-metsola","tag-security","tag-tariffs","tag-trade-agreements","tag-u-k-trade","tag-uk","tag-uk-defense","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=415762"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415762\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/415763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=415762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=415762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=415762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}