{"id":657914,"date":"2026-06-25T18:06:26","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T18:06:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/657914\/"},"modified":"2026-06-25T18:06:26","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T18:06:26","slug":"we-did-regain-control-the-brexit-voters-with-no-regrets-10-years-on-politics-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/657914\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018We did regain control\u2019: The Brexit voters with no regrets 10 years on | Politics News"},"content":{"rendered":"

Despite polls showing<\/a> that most Britons regret leaving the European Union, many others believe the case for quitting the bloc still holds.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe arguments for Brexit now are largely the same as they were then: sovereignty, democracy and taking back control,\u201d University of Cambridge professor and Brexit supporter Robert Tombs told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of list<\/p>\n

Control was a central theme of the \u201cLeave\u201d camp.<\/p>\n

Brexiters called for more control over migration to protect borders from foreign supranational powers, as well as wresting sovereignty back from the bloc \u2013 which they portrayed as an out-of-touch middle-class group of elites \u2013 and returning it to the people.<\/p>\n

\u201cBritain was never especially happy in the EU, but then Greece, Italy and others do not appear to be especially happy either,\u201d Tombs said. \u201cOne 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,\u201d he continued.<\/p>\n

The landmark referendum 10 years ago saw Britain break its association with the EU after more than 43 years of an occasionally volatile membership.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cproject fear\u201d, narratives among those who campaigned to remain within the union, have failed to materialise.<\/p>\n

\"RobertNoted Brexit supporter, Robert Tombs [Courtesy of Creative Commons]Troubled union<\/p>\n

From when the UK joined the European project in the 1970s through to its departure, the relationship has often been tense.<\/p>\n

There were numerous crisis points, such as the UK\u2019s dominant Conservative Party\u2019s fundamental divisions on the issue of its membership.<\/p>\n

Other sore points were the financial crisis of 1992, dubbed \u201cBlack Wednesday\u201d in the media, when the UK failed to maintain sterling in the EU\u2019s exchange rate mechanism, and the bitter battle over the Maastricht Treaty.<\/p>\n

The issue of Europe has turned into a defining fault line in British politics, one that never fully healed and ultimately culminated in Brexit.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Taking back control<\/p>\n

Many pro-Brexit Britons hoped their vote would see immigration decline.<\/p>\n

In the build-up to the vote, Reform Party leader Nigel Farage, then the head of UKIP, and his campaign drew criticism for his \u201cBreaking Point\u201d poster featuring Syrian refugees massing near the Croatia-Slovenia border as though they were seeking entry into the UK.<\/p>\n

\"LeaderLeader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) Nigel Farage poses during a media launch for a \u2018Leave\u2019 EU referendum poster in London, Britain, on June 16, 2016 [Stefan Wermuth\/Reuters]<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, despite the assurances offered at the time, immigration increased, ballooning in what right-wing critics called the \u201dBoriswave,\u201d 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 \u2013 increasing to 906,000 in 2023, representing an increase of 302 percent.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe did regain control over immigration,\u201d said David Goodhart, head of demography, immigration and integration at Policy Exchange, a right-leaning think tank. \u201cBut the point is we used that freedom to expand it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

He blamed the UK\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe spent years arguing over what kind of Brexit we wanted,\u201d Goodhart continued. \u201c[Boris] Johnson came in, saying he\u2019d get Brexit done and blew it.\u201d<\/p>\n

People who felt abandoned by the British political system before the Brexit referendum feel no more included now, Goodhart said, adding that the COVID-19 pandemic, war in Ukraine and political chaos at home have also fuelled social anxiety.<\/p>\n

Missed opportunities<\/p>\n

While Brexit may have failed<\/a> to ignite the UK economy, some of the \u201cRemain\u201d camp\u2019s predictions have not come true, either.<\/p>\n

It had been forecast that the vote to leave would immediately tip the UK economy into recession, that it would trigger job losses on an unprecedented scale and see an exodus of talent from the UK\u2019s critical financial services sector. The departure was also feared to break down constitutional rule in the UK and even Europe.<\/p>\n

\u201cBrexit has not been the economic disaster many claimed,\u201d Goodhart said. \u201cIn fact, it\u2019s actually had remarkably little impact,\u201d he added, pointing to a downturn in global economies.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere have also been gains from the UK breaking free from the EU, which is quite conservative and regulatory by nature. If you look at the advances in areas like fintech and gene editing that have been made in the UK, it\u2019s hard to imagine British industries doing the same in the EU.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elsewhere, if growth on the scale promised by leave campaigners has yet to materialise, some say that the fault lies with the successive UK governments\u2019 failure to sufficiently reduce regulation and free up the British economy rather than in Brexit itself.<\/p>\n

According to Kristian Niemietz, the editorial director at the Institute of Economic Affairs, many of whose members had been keen advocates of the vote to leave, \u201cfree-market Brexiteers thought that Brexit was likely to be followed by liberalisations. Free-market remainers thought that a liberalising Brexit was possible, but unlikely.\u201d<\/p>\n

He told Al Jazeera that a decade on, there have been some liberalisations, but the UK has been \u201ctoo timid to cancel out the disruptions caused by Brexit\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe UK has signed up to some additional trade deals that it could not have concluded as an EU member. There have also been some mild deregulation measures, such as on gene editing, which would not have happened in the EU,\u201d he said, adding that, while these were relatively small steps, they provided some indication of the opportunities that, 10 years after the vote, had yet to be seized.<\/p>\n

\u201cFree trade and light-touch regulation are the way to make Brexit a belated success.\u201d<\/p>\n

The point, for many of those Brexit campaigners 10 years on, is that the UK has survived in the face of those who predicted failure.<\/p>\n

Looking ahead, might other European countries have Brexit envy?<\/p>\n

\u201cThe main difference [between the UK and other EU states] is that we were given the vote,\u201d Tombs said, citing a recent television appearance by the current French President Emmanuel Macron, conceding that, were the French public to be given an opportunity to leave the EU, it was one they may well take.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo one else in Europe has been given the choice,\u201d he added. \u201cWe were.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Despite polls showing that most Britons regret leaving the European Union, many others believe the case for quitting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":657915,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[934,2411,591,59,57,58,50,229,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-657914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-brexit","tag-business-and-economy","tag-europe","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657914","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=657914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657914\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/657915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=657914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=657914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=657914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}