By Shashi P.B.B. Malla

It has been ten years since Britain left the European Union.

Philip Stephens, a contributing editor of the Financial Times of London writes in an opinion piece in The New York Times:

“Ten years ago this week, Britain threw away its geographical compass and voted to quit the club of European nations it had been part of for more than 40 years” (NYT, June 25).

Brexit, as Britain’s exit from the European Union came to be known, was supposed to allow the country to “take back control” of its own destiny.

The key word that really mattered in the campaign slogan to leave the EU was “back”.

The magic trick was to look backward to reimagine the future.”

Thus, very much later in the United States also, Trump’s promise of the past decade has been to “Make America Great Again” (MAGA).

Brexit was supposed to be the vessel in which Britain could return to the decades after World War II, when wartime prime minister Winston Churchill could pretend that Britain still counted

and ‘Britannia still ruled the waves’.

Britain was after all a permanent member of the exclusive UN Security Council – the esoteric club of world powers.

Boris Johnson, the most prominent face of the campaign to leave the EU and also later the prime minister who would negotiate the terms of Brexit, assured his countrymen that breaking up with Brussels (the capital of the EU), would once more open the doors to a dynamic, cosmopolitan and global Britain.

Britain had just to walk through the process.

Johnson’s vision was astounding: “We can see the sunlit meadow beyond.” He said this just a few weeks before the referendum.

Just a decade later, the cost of that freedom as Johnson repeatedly insisted, of precious national sovereignty – is blindingly apparent.

No doubt, the vote to leave the EU was a real cry of pain from a large section of the electorate that thought itself left behind by economic progress (Stephens).

However, this desperation has not dissipated.

It turns out that the “sunlit meadow” was a mirage.

Brexit did not only have a heavy economic cost, “the divisions over it ushered a new era of fragmentation and volatility into British politics” (Stephens).

Witness the recent resignation of Labour Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. He was the sixth occupant of the office during the turbulent past decade.

In the previous two decades, there had been just three prime ministers.

Somehow for a moment in the summer of 2016, the Brexit rabble-rousers managed to persuade a small majority – the vote was 52 percent to 48 percent – that Britain could throw out the austerity that had followed the 2008 global financial crash by going it alone.

That it could reverse the hollowing out of well-paid manufacturing jobs and trade freely and profitably on international markets. Immigrants that had flocked to Britain from Eastern and Central Europe would be sent home.

Those supporting Brexit believed that Europe merely held Britain back.

To choose to leave was to believe that the nation was destined for greater things.

The language of the Brexit leaders – not so surprisingly – echoed the arguments of British leaders in the 1950s.

As the victors of WW II, rather than joining the new Coal and Steel Community and Common Market – the beginning of the new supranational structures that would create the European Union – Britain reached for past glory.

At a time, as the six founding members – Belgium, France, West Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands – were preparing to sign the Treaty of Rome in the spring of 1957, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, a Conservative, was in Bermuda with President Dwight D. Eisenhower in an attempt to rekindle the special relationship forged by Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

British leaders were just reluctant to admit that their country was becoming a regional rather than global power.

This led to the misadventure to seize the Suez Canal in 1956.

The 21^st Century’s Brexiteers were every bit as untroubled in their rhetorical disregard of Britain’s relative decline.

Johnson’s secretary of state for trade, Liz Truss claimed that Britain was on the threshold of a new golden age.

This turned out to be wishful thinking and a fantasy.

Johnson did get his heart’s desire Brexit through, but as the Conservative pro-European Michael Heseltine has succinctly expressed, his British sovereignty is the sovereignty of the man in the desert.

The economy has since stalled and trade has shrunk.

Britain is poorer than it might have been.

Its gross domestic product is at least 4 percent – but it could be as much as 8 percent.

Business investment is more than 10 percent lower.

Brexit has also added new frictions to the lives of Britons.

There are new border checks when travelling to EU countries, stricter residency rules for living there, fewer opportunities for students to study abroad.

Then there were other costs.

There was a weakening of the togetherness among the constituent nations of the United Kingdom itself.

The referendum result was more a statement of English than of British nationalism, since majorities in Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU.

After Brexit, Britain was not able to impress on the international stage as economic realities forced cuts in spending on foreign aid and diplomacy.

The hope that Britain could build a new Anglosphere by adding the English-speaking Commonwealth nations of Canada, Australia and New Zealand to Britain’s “special relationship” with the United States was dashed.

Trump was not interested in Britain’s previous privileged place in Washington. His disdain for America’s traditional alliances was total. 

John Major, Conservative prime minister in the 1990s had fought off his party’s anti-Europeans with success.

He has been scathing in his conclusions.

Brexit has left Britain poorer, weaker and locked out of the richest free market in history.

“The UK once reveled in being the leading member of an EU with half a billion citizens and the undoubted first ally of the United States – the world’s most eminent superpower,” Major said last year.

“Today, we know we are neither – and so does the world” (NYT).

The writer can be reached at: shashimalla125@gmail.com