On 31 January 2020 Britain left the European Union. This is the list of what we left behind — sixty-six things, itemised. Almost none of it has been recovered.
What we were
1. Membership of the European Union. Held by Britain since 1973. Voted away on 23 June 2016 by 51.9 percent.
2. The Single Market. A trading area of 450 million consumers, built substantially to a British design. We left it.
3. The Customs Union. Frictionless trade across 27 countries. Now requires customs declarations and rules-of-origin paperwork on every shipment.
4. EU citizenship. Held automatically by every UK passport holder. Surrendered.
5. Free movement of people. The right to live, work, study and retire across the EU and EEA. Replaced with visa requirements and 90-day stay limits.
6. Freedom of establishment. The right to set up a company in any member state on the same terms as a national. Gone.
7. Financial services passporting. The right for a firm authorised in London to sell across the whole bloc. Replaced with a patchwork of equivalence decisions the EU can withdraw at will.
Our seats at the table
8. Seats in the European Parliament. 73 British MEPs. Removed.
9. A seat at the European Council. The Prime Minister no longer attends the summits where the direction of the continent is set.
10. A vote in the Council of the EU. Every single-market rule that still shapes what British exporters can sell is now written in rooms we are not in.
11. A British European Commissioner. Britain held the post continuously from 1973. Now none.
12. A British judge at the Court of Justice of the European Union. Removed.
13. A British member of the European Court of Auditors. Removed.
14. The rotating presidency of the Council of the EU. Britain last held it in 2005. The next British turn was due in the second half of 2017. It was handed to Estonia instead.
15. British members of the Committee of the Regions. Twenty-four seats representing English councils, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Removed.
16. British members of the European Economic and Social Committee. The seats held by UK trade unions, employers and civil society. Removed.
The agencies
17. European Medicines Agency. Headquartered in Canary Wharf since 1995. Relocated to Amsterdam in 2019. Around 900 jobs went with it.
18. European Banking Authority. Headquartered in London. Relocated to Paris.
19. European Aviation Safety Agency. UK was a leading member. Now governed by the domestic Civil Aviation Authority, duplicating certification work at British expense.
20. European Chemicals Agency. UK firms registered their products under REACH. Now they register them again under UK REACH. The same product. Twice.
21. European Food Safety Authority. British scientists sat on its panels. Now they don't.
22. European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. Shared surveillance across a continent, on a continent where diseases do not stop at Dover.
23. European Environment Agency. Left. Air and water do not check passports either.
24. European Defence Agency. Downgraded to third-country status, on the same continent as a land war.
25. Membership of more than forty EU agencies in total. Two of them were headquartered here. The rest we simply stopped belonging to.
The money
26. European Regional Development Fund. €5.8 billion allocated to the UK for 2014–20 alone. Replaced with the Shared Prosperity Fund, which is smaller.
27. European Social Fund. €5.1 billion for employment and skills training over the same period. Also replaced with less.
28. European Investment Bank. UK was a founding shareholder. We withdrew our capital. UK infrastructure projects no longer qualify for lending.
29. European Investment Fund. The venture arm that backed British startups. Gone with it.
30. Common Agricultural Policy. Subsidy regime for British farmers since 1973. Replaced with the Environmental Land Management scheme. Smaller. Slower. Less.
31. Common Fisheries Policy. The thing the whole thing was supposedly about. Replaced with annual quota negotiations. Total catches and fleet size have both fallen.
The programmes
32. Erasmus+. The student exchange programme that sent UK students to European universities for over thirty years. Replaced with the Turing Scheme, which does not fund incoming students.
33. Euratom. The nuclear research and safeguards community. The UK declined to associate and went it alone.
34. ITER. The European component of the international fusion project. We helped build the field. We left the consortium.
35. Creative Europe. Funding for film, television, publishing and the arts. Non-associated third country.
36. EU4Health. The bloc's health programme, created in the middle of a pandemic. We are not in it.
37. LIFE. The EU's environment and climate action fund. Not in it.
38. Digital Europe. Supercomputing, AI, cybersecurity and digital skills funding. Not in it.
39. The Justice Programme. Judicial cooperation and training across borders. Not in it.
40. Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values. The programme funding civil society and equality work. Not in it.
41. European Defence Fund. Joint procurement and defence research. Not in it.
42. European Solidarity Corps. Funded volunteering across Europe for 18 to 30 year olds. Not in it.
43. Galileo's encrypted signal. We helped design it. We helped pay for it. We lost access to the Public Regulated Service — the military-grade channel.
Policing and justice
44. Schengen Information System II. Real-time access to around 90 million European alerts on wanted people, missing children and stolen property. UK police lost access at 23.00 on 31 December 2020.
45. European Arrest Warrant. Suspects extradited within days. Replaced with a slower bilateral process, and several member states are constitutionally barred from surrendering their own nationals to us at all.
46. Europol full membership. Downgraded to third-country status. No seat on the management board.
47. Eurojust full membership. Downgraded to third-country status.
48. ECRIS. The European Criminal Records Information System. UK police can no longer query EU convictions directly.
49. The Dublin III Regulation. The mechanism that let Britain return asylum seekers to the first EU country they entered. Replaced with nothing. Read that one twice.
Rights and law
50. The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. The one piece of EU law deliberately not copied into retained UK law. Deleted outright by the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018.
51. Direct effect. The right of an individual to rely on EU law rights in a British court. Gone.
52. The Court of Justice as a final court. Whatever you think of it, British citizens no longer have that route.
53. Voting rights abroad. Britons living in the EU lost their vote in European elections and, in most member states, in local ones too.
54. The European Citizens' Initiative. One million signatures obliged the Commission to respond. No longer available to us.
55. Petitioning the European Parliament and the European Ombudsman. Both closed to UK citizens.
The everyday things
56. European Health Insurance Card. Free emergency healthcare across the EU and EEA. Replaced with the GHIC. Narrower coverage, fewer countries.
57. Pet passports. Replaced with Animal Health Certificates. Issued by a vet. Each trip. Roughly £100 a time.
58. The EU passports lane at European airports. We now queue with the rest of the world.
59. Guaranteed surcharge-free mobile roaming. The obligation ended on 1 January 2021 and the price caps expired in June 2022. Most networks brought the charges back.
60. Mutual recognition of professional qualifications. Doctors, architects, vets, lawyers, accountants and lorry drivers now requalify country by country.
61. Visa-free touring for musicians and crews. Artistic work was left out of the trade deal entirely. One survey of British musicians found nearly half had fewer EU opportunities and 39 percent had turned work down over visa and carnet costs.
62. .eu domain names. UK registrants were suspended on 1 January 2021 and their domains withdrawn on 1 July 2021. Tens of thousands of British websites simply stopped resolving.
63. Bringing food into Europe. No meat, no milk, no cheese, no most plants. The ham sandwich confiscated at Hoek van Holland was not a myth.
64. Unlimited time in Europe. Now 90 days in any 180. Second homes in France and Spain became holiday homes with a stopwatch.
65. The burgundy passport. Replaced with a blue one printed in Poland.
66. The EU flag. Lowered from every British public building on 31 January 2020.
What we have got back
Two things, and it took years. Britain rejoined Horizon Europe, the €95.5 billion research programme, in January 2024 — three years late, on a bespoke deal, having lost a generation of grant applications in the gap. It rejoined Copernicus, the earth observation programme, at the same time.
Two back. Sixty-six still gone. And both of the two were things we helped build in the first place.
Six years on, the country has changed its mind.
YouGov polled the UK in February 2026. 63 percent of Britons would now vote to rejoin the European Union. 37 percent would stay out.
Among 18 to 25 year olds, 86 percent would rejoin. Among the retired, 60 percent would rejoin. The cohort that delivered Brexit has reversed.
Every region of the UK now backs rejoin. Scotland leads at 73 percent. London follows at 65. Even the Midlands and the North, the regions written about as Leave heartlands, are now majority rejoin.
Brexit won by 51.9 percent on 23 June 2016. Rejoin has led every credible poll since 2022. Each new cohort entering the electorate backs it by margins above 80 percent. The Leave coalition is dying. The Rejoin coalition is coming of age.
This is not a campaign. This is arithmetic and the arithmetic only moves in one direction.
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Read more →Sources: House of Commons Library, Institute for Government, YouGov, Savanta for ITV/Peston, Deltapoll, UK Government, European Commission, UK in a Changing Europe.
13 comments
As ex pats we were left hung out to dry . Many thousands of us lost a lot of rights and had to jump through so many hoops just to stay in our homes . Get us back in !!!!!
It was a cataclysmic mistake, at every level that matters, and many, many, more that the people who voted Leave had zero clue about, and couldn’t have cared less if you told them. And, in that, I include members of my own family. It was 51.9% of collective insanity – driven by ego, bigotry, fear and loathing, and a LOT of influence from those versed in the old saying, “never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake”. Leavers won in 2016 and 10 years on, just look at what that “win” has cost our nation, our businesses, our economy. It was a travesty with no equal.
F**k you, Boris.
At official level, the UK was well respected (says this retired career civil servant): we were well briefed, we consulted our stakeholders, we negotiated firmly but wisely. But at the political level, the UK was viewed with exasperation at best, contempt at worst, endlessly demanding exemptions from this and opt-outs from that and derogations from the other. Some Member States were happy to see the UK leave, and will vigorously reject any future application to rejoin.
It was a mistake and the changes in the worlds security,economies and trading conditions have made the consequences even more damaging. If UK does not fully rejoin it will continue to decline economically, geopolitically and culturally, Politically the nation is broken and needs the stability that the EU provides,
It was a mistake and the changes in the worlds security,economies and trading conditions have made the consequences even more damaging. If UK does not fully rejoin it will continue to decline economically, geopolitically and culturally, Politically the nation is broken and needs the stability that the EU provides,
The EU has made it very clear that they want us back. Brexit hurt everyone, though the EU was less damaged by it than us. They have offered us a return on the original terms (opt outs from the Euro and Schengen). After all, what better vote of confidence (and counter argument to other eurosceptic movements of the far right) than for Britain to admit brexit was a disaster and to return and thrive.
It was just an acrimony when England was part of the EU. They had cherry picked what they wanted in the union and enjoyed a splendid privileged status. But the press and every politician there simply enjoyed European bashing, on and on… What always strikes me when i see those debates is the same flaw… it’s always the same nationalistic ego… We want to leave… We want to come back.. Never it seems does an English voter stops to think "Hey but would they want us back in the EU ?? " To this you can bet the general vote in the EU would be "Stay out and good riddance "
I never wanted Brexit, I didn’t believe Johnson and Farage about the numbers of ££££. Which would go into the NHS and elsewhere. No due diligence was done before the vote to correctly inform people. Cameron is a traitor and let his ego get in the way. To me the greatest injustice of them and their egos is that they did not look at the opportunities of current and next generations work opportunities and a wealth of other benefits for everyone of all ages. They should have never allowed this to happen!!
Ummmm, well, I think a referéndum Is needed un other european countries to accept the UK black un the EU. And I will vote yes in that if the total support for rejoining in the UK will reach 80%. With no “British rebate” and with accepting of the Euro.