This month will mark a decade since the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union. The referendum decision, taken on 23rd June 2016, seemed like an egregious act of self-harm even then, when the world seemed a marginally safer place than today. For our country to have taken that decision only a week before marking the centenary of the battle of the Somme beggared belief. For many of us it was both an historical misstep, and a moment of internal emotional rupture.
Ten years on, world events are seen to have compounded the error. Reassuring statements that Britain outside the European Union would be able to make its way in the world, unencumbered by the rules of one of the largest trading blocks in the world, have been exposed for their facile emptiness. It should not have needed the actions of America’s rogue president to underline the point. Brexit was an astonishing act of self-harm that seemed to indicate a country not at ease with itself.
The unravelling begins
After initial post-war hesitancy – aided by the touchiness of President de Gaulle, who vetoed UK applications in 1963 and 1967 – we finally joined in 1973, presaging 53 years of membership of the European Economic Community that, in 1993, became the European Union.
For the country as a whole, membership brought us an increase in continental trade and a means of leveraging anew our steadily declining global influence. For British citizens it presaged a level of peacetime continental familiarity unprecedented in our history; for many of our young people an equally unprecedented level of mutual engagement through the Erasmus exchange scheme; and for our artists and arts organisations the funds and mind-enlarging opportunities of Creative Europe.
A decade on from the referendum our manufacturers – strongly represented in Wales – and other businesses are still damaged and daunted by the new barriers. At the same time, we are struggling to negotiate participation in European educational and cultural networks and staff and student study programmes. The only chink of light – albeit an important one – is that in 2024 we rejoined the Horizon research programme that should allow our universities to begin to repair a decade’s damage.
For many years the UK’s performance in research was underpinned by the EU, masking the low level of investment by the UK itself. Until Brexit UK universities were second only to Germany in winning EU research funding – Germany taking 17% and the UK 16% of the total pot. The UK’s share was the equivalent of around one third of the competitive funding given out by the UK’s own research councils. For Welsh universities it was the equivalent of two-thirds.
The economic cost comes into view
It was only in the aftermath of a referendum – where the fact of our deep engagement with Europe was trounced by brazen falsehoods – that we began to count the loss. The mendacious simplicity of ‘Take back control’ contrasts with a mountain of data that continues to tell a very different story. Let these conclusions from the National Bureau of Economic Research suffice:
- Brexit had a large and persistent negative impact on GDP, output and productivity.
- By 2025 UK GDP per capita was 6-8% lower than it would have been without Brexit.
- By 2025, business investment was 12-18% below the level of comparator economies.
And do not be lulled by any hand-picked data that feeds complacency. As Professor Jonathan Portes, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at King’s College, London concludes:
“The UK economy has continued to grow, unemployment remains relatively low, and many firms have adapted. But adaptation is the not the same as absence of cost. The more relevant counterfactual is not whether the economy is still functioning but how much better it might have performed. On that question the evidence is increasingly settled.”
Wales pays a higher price
If the UK has suffered from Brexit, Wales has been even harder hit. In 2025 the Welsh Government reported that between 2019 and 2024 Welsh exports to the EU dropped by 31%, while imports from the EU dropped by 21%. The GDP per head data continue to tell a chastening story: England £40,382; Scotland £37,192; Northern Ireland 32,944; Wales £29,316.
Brexit entailed another loss that is more difficult to measure. When the UK was a full member of EU, it gave Wales direct access not only to European institutions and their staff but also to its many funding pots, including the EU’s ever-developing regional policies. It was a level of access that also encouraged a direct relationship between Cardiff and Brussels. Organisations that dealt with Brussels often felt that EU officials were more instinctively sympathetic to the claims of UK nations and than the UK Government itself. Brexit broke that link. The Irish were particularly sympathetic.
The strain on devolution
During the period of deepening engagement with the EU, the countervailing trend of devolution also gained momentum. On the surface this might have seemed paradoxical, but the two were in fact complementary. The EU’s engagement with the new devolved administrations was swift. It was not only that the governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were flattered by the keen interest of EU officials in Brussels, but also that conversations with Brussels often felt less hierarchical than those with Whitehall and its ingrained centralism. Brexit’s removal of this balancing force has actually worsened our own internal relationships.
The truth is that UK governments of all political persuasions over many decades have struggled with the concept of devolution. That is just as true within England, which is feeling its way towards a patchwork of relationships and powers that has little constitutional coherence. That said, it would be perverse if an improving relationship between London and a handful of English regions were to coincide with a pricklier attitude by London towards Wales – arguably, the devolved administration that, uncomfortably to some, has most in common with English regions.
Whatever happens in the Makerfield by-election and any ensuing Labour leadership contest, one can but hope that the UK Government will seek to create better relationships both with the devolved administrations in the UK and between them and the EU administration in Brussels – hopefully as a prelude to an early ending to our counter-productive sojourn outside the European fold. A return to a single market would be transformative – and transformation is what this country needs. That the government’s attention is split between countering domestic decline and attending to a widely troubled world should not be an excuse.
A harsher world, a clearer choice
In retrospect, the world of 2016’s referendum might be described as calm compared with the scene we grapple with today. In that year the Middle East, while not wholly at peace, had not collapsed into the brutal onslaught that we now witness every day in Gaza and Lebanon. Although the War in Ukraine had started in February 2014 – when Russia annexed Crimea – Russia’s escalation into full scale invasion waited until February 2020.
In today’s even more febrile world, where local wars are set against the ever-larger tectonic plates of world contest and diplomacy, does anyone have certain control of anything? As Putin attacks Ukraine and threatens NATO countries along Russia’s border, as China grows, as America goes rogue, and as the Middle East implodes, it is surely clearer than ever that our interests lie with Europe – with the rest of our own continent – with its proximity, and with the history and cultural and democratic norms that we share.
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