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Chapter 1: What legacy did Brexit leave on Britain a decade later?
This is The Guardian.
Today, it's not EU, it's me. Brexit. I know what you're thinking. No thanks, let me out. But stay with me.
The total number of votes cast in favour of leave was 17 million.
This week marks 10 years since half the UK decided that the best direction the country could take would be to leave the European Union.
This means that the UK has voted to leave the European Union.
A four-decade project terminated by the public. But how did that actually go? And how has the last decade shaped the way we live now?
I think the political and the economic world we're living in is hugely shaped by Brexit. It's cast a really long shadow over both the major political parties in this country, which are now at risk of not being the major political parties for much longer, over the sort of general tenor of debate, I think, and the extent to which we're polarised.
So I think it's been really, really significant and we're still feeling the impact of it 10 years on.
With the departure of yet another prime minister and the likely arrival of Andy Burnham in number 10, the heat is back in the relationship between the EU and the UK. 58% of Britons now say they would vote to rejoin given the chance. If you ask Gen Z, that goes up to three in five. Are we really going there again?
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Chapter 2: How has public opinion shifted regarding rejoining the EU?
And then with Brussels.
There's lots of talk about banks leaving and lots of big companies moving their HQs from London.
Yeah, I mean, do you know what? I don't think the city has suffered as there were fears it might. I think, you know, if you go down to Canary Wharf or whatever, there's not much sign of a downturn, although there's an argument that perhaps it would have done even better had we not had Brexit. But the other impact is exports.
You know, lots of companies, small to large, will tell you it's just become more difficult. You know, there are more checks. There is tariff-free trade, but only if you can comply with particular rules. There are complexities about VAT and so on. So it just isn't as easy to export to the EU as it was. It's not as frictionless as it once was.
And it's our biggest market because it's right on our doorstep. And we've done some other trade deals, but there's no evidence so far in the data that those have, by any stretch of the imagination, started to offset the weakness in trade with the EU.
And I guess that doesn't even take into account the European workforce, the number of people who lived here and worked here in hospitality and all kinds of different parts of the sectors that have since left. And all you constantly hear is that there's not enough workers. We don't have enough people to do these jobs.
Migration is a really interesting one, right? Because migration was one of the key issues on which the campaign was fought, right? And not only by Vote Leave, who talked about an Australian-style points migration system, which I'm not even sure anyone knew what that was, but Australians, it sounded good, right?
Yeah.
I mean, we've just taken their social media ban, so, you know. Right, exactly, exactly. Sounded good. And leave.eu, which, of course, was the more extreme, Nigel Farage's version of the Brexit campaign, which was not attached to Vote Leave, which was the formal campaign.
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Chapter 3: What were the significant consequences of the Brexit referendum?
The conscious decision made was to let a lot of people in. I mean, I think it is ironic that we had a campaign that absolutely, as you said, had kind of racist undertones to it. It wasn't. It wasn't the only reason. It's unfair to say it was the only reason people voted Brexit. There was also a sort of sovereignty argument, wasn't there, about we don't want our rules to be made in Brussels.
We want to make our own decisions, all of that. But there was that strand of anti-migration feeling. And so it's ironic that then that handed the reins of government to a bunch of people who decided the right thing for the economy and for the health service was to let a large number of people in.
I guess the other irony is that when we talk about how Brexit has affected our current political landscape, it feels like the conversation around immigration is sort of cyclical and the debate, you know, you can't say anything anymore stuff comes around every few years. And right now it's a fever pitch.
How do you think Brexit and the decision to vote leave has shaped some of the attitudes and feelings that we're seeing today?
Well, it's difficult, right, because you can't lay all of it on Brexit. You know, if you think about J.D. Vance and Donald Trump and the, you know, Deutschland in Germany and some of these questions about migration and how you deal with it and how you integrate people or don't and what it means culturally. are very, very strong in lots of countries, unfortunately.
But I do think it was a moment where some of those, thinking about those breaking point posters, which actually would probably look quite tame compared to some of the really toxic stuff that we're drowned in now.
But covering some of that stuff at the time, that felt to me like taboos were being broken in the UK debate and that there was a line in the UK debate that maybe it started to be crossed in Brexit and it continued to be crossed. Although, as I say, we are far from the only country where there is a very polarised and toxic debate about migration.
Heather, we've talked about the Boris wave and how net migration hit almost a million, but those numbers have dramatically come down now, right?
They've absolutely plunged. So some controls were put in place in 2024 by the Conservatives. More tightening took place under Labour when Yvette Cooper was Home Secretary. And that involved, for example, shutting down the route by which social care workers could come into the country from overseas. That's just not a thing now. and tightening quite a few other aspects of the regime.
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