The most remarkable thing about Britain’s Brexit pessimists is not that they were wrong. It is that, after nearly a decade of failed predictions, they still refuse to admit it.
Britain did not collapse after leaving the European Union. The economy did not implode. The City did not empty. Investment did not vanish. Exports did not crater. The central claims of Project Fear were simply false.
Wes Streeting’s latest declaration that Brexit was a “catastrophic mistake” is merely the newest instalment in a long-running national psychodrama, one in which a significant chunk of the British establishment remains emotionally incapable of accepting that the public rejected the political project to which they had devoted their lives.
Tim Wallace’s superb analysis in The Telegraph exposes the hollowness of Streeting’s argument with devastating clarity.
Because the facts are stubborn things.
Britain did not collapse after Brexit. Britain did not become poorer than pre-industrial England, despite Streeting’s absurd hyperbole. Britain did not descend into mass unemployment. Exports did not implode. Investment did not vanish. London did not cease to matter. The City did not empty. The economy adapted, precisely as resilient economies do.
More importantly, Brexit exposed something even bigger, the extraordinary intellectual laziness at the heart of Britain’s governing class.
For years, the country was told that prosperity depended on political integration with Brussels, as though British ingenuity, commerce, science, law, finance and enterprise were somehow impossible outside the machinery of the European Union. What nonsense.
Britain was a global trading power centuries before the European Commission existed. London was a financial capital before most EU institutions had even been imagined. English became the language of commerce not because of directives from Brussels, but because Britain built institutions the world trusted.
And today, the sectors in which Britain truly excels are precisely those least dependent on EU membership. This is the great unspoken truth of the Brexit debate.
The modern British economy is not primarily a manufacturing economy. Politicians still talk as though Britain’s future depends entirely on containers of machine parts crossing the Channel. But manufacturing represents a relatively modest share of UK economic output. Services dominate the British economy, and Britain is exceptionally good at them.
Legal services. Financial services. Insurance. AI. Research. Software. Engineering consultancy. Media. Higher education. Intellectual property. Design. Pharmaceuticals. Fintech.
These are the industries driving twenty-first century wealth creation.
And crucially, the EU’s so-called Single Market remains remarkably incomplete when it comes to services. There is no fully integrated single market in services remotely comparable to the one that exists for goods.
That matters enormously.
While Remainers fixate endlessly on customs paperwork for widgets and sausages, Britain’s service exports have surged. Exports to the EU have grown. Global services exports have exploded. British legal services alone have seen extraordinary growth since the referendum. Insurance and pension exports have soared. Information services continue expanding aggressively across the world.
This is not the profile of a failed economy. It is the profile of an economy reorienting itself toward its natural strengths.
And let us be frank, the European Union itself increasingly resembles a slow-moving museum of twentieth-century economic assumptions. Overregulated, ageing, energy constrained, innovation averse and structurally incapable of rapid reform, much of continental Europe is struggling to compete with the dynamism of the United States and the emerging economies of Asia.
Why exactly would Britain wish to reattach itself politically to that model? The answer, usually, is nostalgia.
Brexit horrifies sections of Britain’s elite because it represented democratic disobedience. It shattered the assumption that integration into supranational institutions was inevitable and irreversible. It reminded millions of people that nations can still choose self-government.
That is why the argument over Brexit never truly ended.
Yet the economic case for rejoining grows weaker by the year.
Britain now has independent trade policy. It joined the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, connecting itself to one of the fastest-growing economic regions in the world. It has secured agreements with Australia, New Zealand and numerous other trading partners. It negotiated independently with the United States during tariff disputes in ways impossible inside the EU system.
The strategic logic is obvious.
The future global economy will not be dominated exclusively by the European continent. Growth is increasingly concentrated in the Indo-Pacific, North America and emerging markets. Britain positioned itself to engage with that future, rather than remaining locked inside an increasingly protectionist European bloc designed primarily around the industrial priorities of France and Germany.
And yet, Britain still has not fully exploited Brexit’s possibilities. That is the real frustration.
Brexit was not supposed to be merely an administrative rearrangement. It was supposed to be a national renewal.
A chance to slash regulatory burdens. A chance to accelerate infrastructure. A chance to become the most innovative economy in Europe. A chance to embrace AI, biotech, nuclear energy and digital finance without waiting for Brussels committees to finish translating policy documents into 24 languages.
Instead, too much of the political class treated Brexit as an embarrassing accident to be quietly managed rather than energetically deployed.
The country voted for sovereignty, but sovereignty is only useful if exercised boldly.
Britain should now become unapologetically pro-growth, pro-enterprise and pro-innovation. It should build faster, regulate smarter, tax more competitively and think globally. It should stop apologising for wanting economic flexibility in a century defined by technological disruption.
Above all, Britain should stop listening to the professional declinists who have been wrong about almost everything.
They were wrong about recession. Wrong about unemployment. Wrong about exports. Wrong about investment. Wrong about the City. Wrong about trade. Wrong about Britain’s resilience.
And perhaps most importantly, they were wrong about the British people themselves.
Brexit was not Britain turning inward. It was Britain refusing to become small minded about its own future.
The referendum was not an act of national self-harm. It was an act of national self-belief.
Now all Britain needs is a government capable of matching it.
Claire Bullivant
