Don’t Blame Brexit
Even before Britain left the European Union, and certainly after it finally did in 2020, half the country warned of impending doom. And now the country is in the grip of an economic crisis. The pound is falling. The prime minister is a joke. Europe must be the answer!
No, in fact: The extraordinary political and economic crisis unfolding in Britain is not Brexit’s fault. But neither is Brexit entirely innocent. This is the unpalatable truth that Britain’s pro- and anti-Brexit tribes both need to face up to, if the country is to stand any chance of climbing out of the extraordinarily deep hole it has dug for itself. Given Britain’s postwar history, I’m not holding my breath.
Put simply, things were bad in Britain the economy. They were bad before Boris Johnson came to power and bad before Theresa May took charge. And they were bad long before the country voted to leave the EU in June 2016. Indeed, one of the reasons people voted to leave the EU was things weren’t very good. The truth is that Britain’s economy has been struggling to recover from the global financial crisis that began in 2008—and with it, the political settlement that underpinned the country’s apparently golden years of Tony Blair’s premiership. From that point on, wages stagnated, public services deteriorated, and voters—understandably—got ever more angry.
