Brexit Needs To Beat the Elite, Again

Future historians may well come to define 2016 as the year that democracy beat the elite. For that was when Donald Trump won his first American presidential election, while in Great Britain a majority of voters, in a landmark referendum, elected to leave the European Union. The June 23, 2016, vote to leave the EU attracted more votes than any other single democratic option in British political history. Today marks the 10th anniversary of the referendum. Yet the rancor and division in respect of Brexit abide. This is due primarily to the timidity and incompetence of the British political ruling class that had a collective nervous breakdown over the democratic outcome, taking more than three years to leave the EU, and then refusing to shed its economic straitjacket once Britain had won new-found freedom from a Brussels-based ship headed for the rocks.The alleged economic damage from Brexit has been vastly exaggerated by its opponents, who cannot even agree on the hit they speculate Britain has taken. Britain’s was the fastest-growing economy in the G7 for the first quarter of 2026. Yet like an inebriated host at his own divorce party telling anyone who’ll listen about the supposed inadequacies of his ex-spouse, EU apologists — and their allies in the press — are blind to the benefits of Brexit. They overlook that the UK tech sector is thriving from being able to pursue an independent economic course, unbound by the EU’s burdensome Digital Services Act and AI Act; or that Britain was able to approve a Covid-19 vaccine more quickly than its neighbors because it was outside the EU; or the trade deals that have already been struck from being a sovereign nation, liberated from what is becoming a political and economic protectionist racket.“The parts of our economy which have grown the fastest are ones where we have pulled away from EU red tape the most,” as the chief executive of the Vote Leave Campaign, Lord Elliott, who has written a new book “Ten Years On,” recently noted in the UK Sun. Yet the drumbeat to rejoin the EU grows louder. Feature the call to reverse the vote for Brexit by Labour’s leader between 1983 and 1992, Neil Kinnock, at a political rally last weekend.The British political elite persists in regarding sovereignty and self-governance as inessential and inconsequential for the “little people” over whom they rule. Suitably therefore, the pithiest comment concerning Brexit should have come not from a politician, but from an English actor, Michael Caine. A decade ago, Mr. Caine told Sky News he would “rather be a poor master than a rich servant.”It is to be hoped that the leader of Reform UK and a principal architect of Brexit, Nigel Farage, and the Conservative Party leader, Kemi Badenoch, make Britain more affluent “masters” outside the European Union and resist the Labour government’s present desire to rejoin the EU. Otherwise, it would fall to the next generation of UK politicians to fulfill Brexit’s potential. On the evidence, that could prove too much to ask. But not too much to try.

Brexit Needs To Beat the Elite, Again

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