This 23 June 2026, it will be ten years since the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum — ten years since the United Kingdom made one of the most consequential and, it must now be said plainly, one of the most misguided decisions in its modern history.
This was not some overwhelming democratic mandate. It was a narrow result — 51.9% to 48.1% — secured in a campaign environment saturated with distortion, exaggeration, and promises that could not withstand even minimal scrutiny.

A decision of immense complexity was reduced to slogans. Voters were not equipped with clarity; they were fed certainty where none existed.
For those in London and other major cities, the result felt like a rupture with reality. The shock was not simply that Leave had won, but that it had done so on a basis so detached from the practical consequences that would inevitably follow. What emerged was not unity, but a fracture — within families, within communities, and across the country as a whole. Even with my own relatives and friends there were ruptures that time has hardly managed to heal.
The referendum may have been advisory, but it was treated as irreversible dogma. Parliament, fearful of the political consequences, chose compliance over scrutiny. Under Theresa May, the government triggered the Article 50 withdrawal process, and the country entered years of paralysis dressed up as process. This was not the execution of a clear plan; it was the slow exposure of the fact that no workable plan had ever truly existed.
The central claims of the Leave campaign have not survived contact with reality. The promise of regained control masked the loss of influence. The assurance of economic benefit gave way to increased friction and diminished ease of trade. The suggestion that public services would be enriched has not been borne out in any meaningful sense. What was presented as liberation has, in practice, often resembled self-imposed complication.
Perhaps most revealing was the behaviour of some British citizens living in Europe. Beneficiaries of EU rights — freedom of movement, ease of residence, reciprocal protections — they nevertheless voted to dismantle the very framework that sustained their lives. This was not rational calculation; it was identity politics in its purest form. Sovereignty was elevated above circumstance, sentiment above self-interest.

Ten years on, the consequences are no longer hypothetical. Freedom of movement is gone. Trade is more cumbersome. Barriers — bureaucratic, economic, and cultural — have multiplied. And yet the supposed compensations remain elusive. The gains that were promised have not materialised in any clear or convincing way.
Even legislative independence, so often invoked, has proved hollow in practice. Vast amounts of EU-derived law were retained because removing them would have caused chaos. The reality is stark: the United Kingdom has spent much of the past decade managing the damage of departure rather than enjoying its supposed freedoms.
Public opinion has shifted — and with good reason. There is now a growing recognition that Brexit was not a triumph of democratic will, but a failure of democratic judgement. While not unanimous, the movement of opinion is unmistakable: many who were promised certainty now see the cost of that illusion.

There is a broader lesson here, and it is an uncomfortable one. Democracies are not immune to manipulation. When complex issues are reduced to binary choices, when emotional appeal overrides factual grounding, the result is not empowerment but distortion. The comparison is not equivalence, but the mechanism is familiar — as seen, in very different and far more extreme circumstances, in moments like the 1933 German federal election, where rhetoric outpaced reality with catastrophic consequences.
Brexit is not that. But it belongs to the same category of error: a decision taken in confidence, sustained by belief, and later reconsidered in the light of experience.
The enduring problem is not simply that the decision was made, but that it has proved so difficult to question. A vote, once cast, acquired an almost untouchable status, as though democracy required not only that it be respected, but that it never be revisited — no matter how flawed the premises on which it rested.
Ten years later, the United Kingdom has not collapsed. But neither has it advanced in the way that was promised. Instead, it has been left navigating a more constrained, more complicated, and more uncertain position than before.
To say that Brexit was a mistake is no longer a controversial statement. It is an evidence-based one.
And the real indictment is this: it was a mistake that did not have to happen.