“Economy Shrinks as Brexit Looms” is the headline up at the London Daily Express. “No-deal Brexit draws the UK towards recession” booms the New Europe. “Recession fears grow as UK economy shrinks on back of Brexit chaos,” is how the Guardian’s headline puts it. “Recession threat hangs over UK economy ahead of Brexit,” blares the Financial Times.

The problem with all these warnings is that Britons knew they were courting a Brexit recession when they voted in the referendum of June 2016. No less a figure than Prime Minister David (“I was the future once”) Cameron told them so himself. He did so in no uncertain terms, when, two days before the vote, he addressed the nation from in front of Number 10.

“Above all, it’s about our economy,” he claimed of the vote on whether to stay in the European Union. “It will be stronger if we stay. It will be weaker if we leave.” He called Brexit a “huge risk to Britain, to British families, to British jobs.” He effused about Europe, with its “500 million customers.” Brexit, he warned, would “shrink our economy” and leave it “facing recession.”

The thing to mark at this juncture is not so much that Britain is facing the recession the Remain camp predicted. It’s that Britons — well warned of the pending turmoil in the short and medium term — voted for Brexit anyhow by a clear margin. It’s not that they failed to appreciate the risks. It’s that they wanted out of the EU despite all the turmoil that might be lurking ahead.

That’s how much Britons hated being in the European Union. The fact is that they couldn’t stand it. They couldn’t stand the regulatory meddling (right down to their tea kettles), the danger of being overruled by the European Court of Justice, and the loss of control of their borders. And the prospect of “an ever-closer union.” It was more than for what they’d bargained.

Another way to put it is that it wasn’t the economy, stupid. It was the sovereignty. Mr. Cameron tried to convince the voters that Brexit would give them but “the illusion of sovereignty.” It was the dumbest thing he said in the whole campaign. The voters must have concluded that even an illusion of sovereignty was better than what the EU was offering, i.e., no sovereignty at all.

So they left. Our own reckoning — it’s only an estimate from across the pond — is that it wasn’t just that Britons had become repelled by the EU and wanted their own sovereignty back. Brexit suddenly accelerated when Boris Johnson, along with a few sages like Nigel Lawson, Prime Minister Thatcher’s former chancellor, began talking about the opportunity costs of staying in Europe.

This was the business about the “sunny uplands” of liberty, in Mr. Johnson’s phrase — the promise that once Britain was out of Europe, it could move to a wider field, bigger things, the frontiers that freedom offers. There may well be a recession in the offing (and also for countries that were never in Europe in the first place). Giving in to the jitters now would be a step backwards from the promise of Brexit.