It's now just over 10 years since the Brexit referendum and 5 years, getting on for 6, since the official separation of Britain from the EU on 31 December 2020 - right in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Not one, but two self-isolating events, coinciding to keep people in Britain apart from each other and apart from their near-neighbours on the Continent of Europe! Of course the fi rst was entirely man-made, and the other an "act of nature" - even if the Wuhan Lab Leak "theory" and several other conspiracies did the rounds, enthusiastically assisted by Donald Trump. But that is another story...
Undoubtedly Brexit has been bad for the bosses. The economy, says the Financial Times - and it should know - "has been hammered". A recent study - published in November 2025 - by economists at Stanford University, the Bank of England, Kings College London, Deutsche Bundesbank, and Nottingham University,suggests that the economy is 6-8% smaller than it would have been had Britain remained in the EU. This is 2% more (worse!) than previous estimates. They say business investment fell by 12%-18% and, unsurprisingly, productivity and employment fell by 3% to 4%. So yes, Brexit was bad for them. But what about the rest of us?
Brexit was bad for us
The European project to create a common economic zone, a common currency and free movement of goods had, fi rst and foremost, been a project to make life easier for the capitalist class. It cut out some of the day-to-day obstacles for doing business and provided a level playing fi eld for competing companies.
That said, successive British governments had always held back from full participation in Europe, even if they agreed to be part of the common trade area. They did not sign the Schengen Agreement which opened all borders within the EU, for instance: so the free movement of people stopped at the British border, where passport controls remained, even if EU workers were allowed in without any visa requirement. Neither was the City prepared to forgo pound sterling in favour of the common currency, the euro.
In other words one could say that British EU membership was never whole-hearted in the fi rst place. But despite governments playing on the right to refuse certain EU regulations (so-called subsidiarity), British institutions and business did very well out of the EU. And the free movement of people brought a boon, given the shortage of skilled, professional workers - especially the kind needed in the National Health Service and in engineering, science and technology - which British institutions had failed to produce. What's more, if these European workers settled here, all the better, given Britain's ever-falling birthrate.
The contribution of these migrant workers was only fully comprehended when many of them left, due to the combined effect of Brexit and Covid, in 2020. In fact the sudden large defi cit of workers contributed to the collapse of the NHS and undoubtedly (although this is never admitted) to the initial high Covid death toll. In total, as many as 227,000 people lost their lives. It is true to say that the NHS has not recovered since. Free movement across borders, the right to work and retire anywhere in the EU and access to healthcare, etc., all these had been advantages for the British working class before Brexit. As were the one or two rights which were conferred on workers through EU Employment Directives - for instance the limit on the working week which the European working classes had fought for. Not that this was so great after the British bosses had succeeded in watering it down. They negotiated various opt-outs - which meant they could push workers to do almost limitless "voluntary" overtime.
Referendum? A rotten idea!
We cannot go into the long history of British governments' relations with Europe in this article. But there are similarities between what happened in 1975 when Labour's Harold Wilson organised the fi rst ever referendum in Britain - over membership of the European Common Market - and Cameron's referendum over the same issue. In 1975, the issue of continued European membership had split the Labour Party. The left, the far left and the British Communist Party all campaigned for "Leave" - just as they did in 2016, when they changed the "Brexit" slogan to "Lexit", as if that would somehow justify their adaptation to xenophobia... anti-migrant rhetoric was whipped up, this stance left little clear water between the racists and the antiracists - whether in the 1970s, or in the 2010s.
In 1975, Wilson justifi ed his referendum as an attempt to reunite the Labour Party - and in 2016 Cameron used the same reasoning - he was trying to reunite a divided Tory Party. That said, it is hard to see how an "inout", "remain-leave" referendum on such an issue could ever "heal" a division. Common sense would tell you that it can only make it worse - and that is precisely what happened. In 2016, on the eve of the referendum a far-right "patriot", shouting "England First" brutally murdered Labour MP Jo Cox outside her constituency office in West Yorkshire. She was a fi rm "Remainer" who campaigned for the rights of migrant workers. There were other attacks, less widely reported on migrant workers at the time. And of course today we are seeing what amount to pogroms against refugees and asylum-seekers - the most recent, in Northern Ireland's Belfast ghettoes.
David Cameron first proposed an EU referendum in January 2013, during his so-called "Europe Speech" delivered at the London HQ of Bloomberg, the American fi nance and media giant. The speech is worth reading.
It is all about the freedom of British Business to "cash in" via a single market which has taken his advice on reforming itself; "a Europe shaped by Britain". However he also makes the point that the right which British people then had to move, live, work and retire, anywhere in the EU was worth holding onto and would be lost if Britain left. Interestingly, there is not one word about immigrants or immigration in the whole speech. It was not even an issue! He spoke of a Europe at peace, which, in his opinion, had to become a more prosperous Europe...
Of course at the time, and in the aftermath of the 2008 worldwide banking crash, the poorer EU members were still "recovering" and some voices (other than the usual suspects among the nationalist far-right) were raised about the extra costs of belonging to EU institutions and, perhaps, leaving. This was why Cameron did not want to organise the referendum before he was confi dent that the vote would be in favour of staying inside the EU.
In the event, the objective political and economic conditions got worse, rather than better. He was forced to call the referendum three years later, in 2016, because he was now being challenged by a new upstart anti-European UK Independence Party (UKIP), led by former Conservative Nigel Farage, who had encouraged other MPs to leave the Party and campaign against the EU. And since there was not much to complain about at the time - except maybe straight bananas - he came up with his poisonous anti-migrant fallacies.
Surprising results and perverse consequences
Cameron did not expect the "Remain" vote to lose. But as we know, lose it did, although the vote was quite close. The fi nal results were: Leave vote share, 51.9% - 17,410,742 votes. Remain vote share 48.1% - 16,141,241 votes. There was a high turnout of 72.2%, with a not negligible 26,033 rejected ballots.
On the referendum's anniversary on 23 June this year, the Financial Times newspaper which had backed the "Remain" camp, quoted the journalist Peter Kellner, a former president of the polling agency, YouGov, who had observed that "future historians may conclude that Cameron's decision to hold the Brexit referendum was a self-inflicted double-whammy - that it did not just cost him his premiership but cost his party its life".
Indeed the Leavers who are still "loyal Conservatives" and who remain in the now decimated ranks of the Tory Party, certainly must regret what they wished for - and got. The small far-right Tory rump, which was always represented on House of Commons backbenches has morphed, via UKIP and other varied iterations, into today's Reform UK, fi nanced and led by the same Nigel Farage and his fellow property millionaire, Richard Tice.
And if the pollsters are to be believed - but recent election results bear this out - Reform UK could well replace the Tories (a name derived from the old English word for cattle thief) - and their historic "Conservative and Unionist Party" - altogether.
Reform UK has already pulled into its ranks 11 former Tory cabinet ministers, including Suella Braverman, Robert Jenrick, Danny Kruger, Nadine Dorries, Nadhim Zahawi, Andrea Jenkyns, the former deputy chairman of the Party, Lee Anderson - and far too many other ex-Tory MPs to mention. It has also cut its own "splitting" teeth by producing the further right ("abolish the asylum system!") "Restore" party led by multimillionaire farmer and MP Rupert Lowe as well as "Advance UK", led by the disgruntled former Reform deputy leader, Ben Habib. So far, Lowe has had favourable reviews from the far-right, hard-done-by (and now born-again) wimp, known as "Tommy Robinson". Yes, the Tories, on refl ection, might have been a bit more careful about wishing for this referendum.
Brexit was also bad for the trees
It was a big blow to the capitalists to lose the free movement of goods in Europe - and across the sea, after Brexit. This was their biggest market. New regulations, tariffs, obstacles of all kinds suddenly arose (resulting in really dire shortages of vital necessities which were imported from Europe - including insulin for diabetics) which became a bureaucratic nightmare. Attempts to keep their profi ts fl owing despite the new barriers to trade, continued long after the fi nal "Leave" document had been signed by Boris Johnson. And these attempts continue, up to today and will carry on tomorrow too, as importers and exporters try to chip away at the obstacles to their free trading!
Perhaps one good thing was that thousands of workers had to be taken on to implement Britain's exit, whether in the civil service or company offi ces - including thousands of new custom offi cials to implement the controls. But that was not going to last. With digitisation, much of these tasks are now automated.
The latest post-Brexit "adjustments" concern the UK-EU Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) agreement, the postponement of medium-risk fruit and vegetable checks and fi nal phases of Northern Ireland retail labelling... It's an indicative bureaucratic mouthful. And they are only expected to take full effect by mid-2027. That will not be the end of it, either. Now the priority is to try to reduce the red tape which lengthened exponentially after Brexit. Officials want to remove export health certifi cates and routine border checks for dairy, fi sh, cheese, eggs, and fresh red meat.
But also to ease movement of goods from Britain to Northern Ireland under the "Windsor Framework". Some goods have to bear a "not for EU" label for instance, so that they don't have to be checked when they pass between Britain and Northern Ireland and back. In theory, this is to avoid them entering the Irish Republic, which is part of the EU...
Indeed, this so-called Windsor Framework had to be created from scratch in order to manage the (apparently unforeseen by the Brexiteers) complication of the 6 counties of Northern Ireland leaving the EU, while remaining inextricably attached to the 26-County Irish Republic!
Brexit had the (fortunately short-lived) consequence of re-igniting the fl ames of the "Troubles" which everyone thought the 1998 Northern Ireland Peace Agreement had put out. However the only sure way to ensure future "Peace" would be to unite Ireland once and for all - and end, once and for all, the 6 Counties' status as a colonial vestige "belonging" to the British Crown. Indeed that much-vaunted "Peace Agreement" can never achieve the full closure it promised. But that is also another story...
Anyway, for now, the border between the Six Counties of the North and the Republic of the South remains open and uncontrolled. In fact, it constitutes a hidden loophole in EU-British regulations which cannot really be closed, so for the politicians concerned, it's best not dwelt upon!
The Confederation of British Industry was (obviously) opposed to Brexit in 2016. At the time it warned that leaving the EU could lead to almost a million job losses and leave the average household £3,700 worse off by 2020. This was not quite what happened of course, and since Covid intervened and the Government took out huge loans to pay wages and keep businesses afl oat (via Sunak's "Employment Support Scheme"), the real impact has been slow but sure. Today those who say the CBI got it wrong, do not explain why for instance, today there are one million NEETs under the age of 25 - on top of all the "older" unemployed.
Rejoiners? Not likely!
It's not just the Remaining former Tories and exasperated, somewhat poorer businessmen and women who regret Brexit. Opinion polls show that 55% of those asked - and 79% of Labour voters - say they would vote to rejoin the EU. The Liberal Democrats, always vociferously pro-EU as well as the Greens, have a policy to rejoin. And Andy Burnham has said that he would like Britain to rejoin at some point in the future. The only problem is, that within the bounds of this absurd capitalist system - both local and global - reversing Brexit is likely to be just as complicated, if not even more complicated, than it has been to put into train.
This is why the Confederation of British Industry, which shed so many tears over the loss of Britain's largest market for goods - and which it cannot replace - has said it doesn't want to rejoin. No way do the bosses want to repeat the bureaucratic nightmare in reverse - when they haven't even completed all the reams of paperwork on the 2020 deal yet!
For most of the bosses and the political establishment - Brexit has brought nothing but diffi culties. Some say it has also been responsible for disrupting the two-party system of British politics, given that a third party - Reform - has appeared on the scene.
This is what one Financial Times Journalist wrote about the situation: "the forces of Leave have coalesced around Reform; those of Remain populate the Lib Dems and the Greens. With fi ve parties vying for power in an electoral system designed for two, the probable legacy of the referendum is more instability". However it seems more likely that Farage, who is desperate to gain respectability and "win", will turn Reform into a Tory Party Mark 2 - just with a new name. He might even revert to using the word "Conservative". It's possible that the two-party system will thus return, given that it's supposed to offer stability... But it's also possible that Burnham or his successor will decide to adopt a new voting system - like proportional representation.
Anyway this is not really our concern as revolutionary Communists since we know that change is never going to come through a ballot box but through revolution. And in conclusion we should remind readers of what we argued at the time of the referendum in 2016. We said there was no stake for the working class - that Cameron's "Remain" campaign proposed new restrictions on immigration and Freedom of Movement as an adaptation to the right in his party and to UKIP. And that no way at all could anyone who stood for a "world without borders" as we do, cast a vote for Brexit - an overtly nationalistic and reactionary choice. And today we continue to use every opportunity to oppose all divisions of our class, which is an international class: workers have no country - our country is the world!
30 July 2026