You can tell a lot about a project by who still defends it. Ten years on, Brexit is defended by roughly 30 per cent of the country, a shrinking rota of newspaper columnists and almost nobody who has to explain the trade figures for a living. This is no longer an argument. It is a waiting room. Here is why the waiting is nearly over and why every extra year of it is the most expensive furniture Britain has ever bought.
Nobody is defending it any more. Not even the professionals.
Ask the country whether leaving was right and 30 per cent say yes. Ask whether Brexit has been more of a success than a failure and 13 per cent manage it. Ask Reform voters (the people for whom this was the whole point) and even they cannot produce a majority willing to call it a success. A plurality of them say it made the cost of living worse.
The man who spent thirty years campaigning for it went on Newsnight in May 2023 and said, in three words, "Brexit has failed." He has since decided it was betrayed rather than dead, which is what you say about a horse when you have already sold tickets to the race.
Projects this unpopular do not usually survive. This one only looks alive because everyone in Westminster has agreed to speak about it quietly, like a relative who is not doing well.
The arithmetic has stopped being polite.
Here is the part nobody in politics wants to say into a microphone. Since 2016, around five million of the people who voted in the referendum have died. About 3.2 million of them voted Leave and about 1.8 million voted Remain. On deaths alone, with not a single person changing their mind, the majority that won the referendum no longer exists.
Meanwhile roughly six million people have reached voting age. Among those who would actually turn out, they break about five to one for rejoining. Add the Leave voters who have changed their minds (29 per cent of them, against 8 per cent moving the other way) and the former pollster Peter Kellner puts the current rejoin majority at 8.1 million. The Leave majority in 2016 was 1.3 million.
Nobody was persuaded by a clever campaign. Nothing was won. The electorate simply changed, one funeral and one eighteenth birthday at a time. It is still changing in the same direction every single week. You can argue with a voter. There is no known method for arguing with a calendar.
The people who will live in it longest have already decided.
Among 18 to 24 year olds, polling puts support for rejoining as high as 86 per cent. A separate poll of 16 to 24 year olds found 83 per cent. Different pollsters get different numbers, but none of them gets a number that offers the slightest comfort to the other side.
These are the people who will pay taxes into the 2080s. They did not lose the referendum. Most of them were at primary school when it happened. They have simply looked at the queue at passport control, the price of everything and the size of their world, then reached a verdict. Every year, another cohort of them starts voting and another cohort of the 2016 majority stops.
You do not need to be a strategist to see where this goes. You need to be able to count.
The damage has been counted. Repeatedly. By everyone with a calculator.
The Office for Budget Responsibility puts the long-run hit at 4 per cent of productivity, with trade 15 per cent lower than it would have been. Goldman Sachs, marking Brexit's tenth birthday in June 2026, put output at around 6 per cent below where it should be and noted that its earlier estimate of 5 per cent had been too kind. Academic work puts business investment 12 to 18 per cent below the no-Brexit path. Cambridge Econometrics found an economy £140 billion smaller and the average Briton about £2,000 worse off.
These studies disagree with each other only about the size of the hole. The argument over whether Brexit damaged the economy is now over in the way the argument over smoking is over. There is a gentleman at the end of the bar who still disputes it. He is welcome to. The doctors have moved on.
The benefits are not hypothetical. They are itemised.
Goldman's analysts estimate that single market membership alone would add 1 to 2 per cent to GDP. Students get Erasmus back in 2027. A food and veterinary deal now being negotiated would remove most border checks on food, the ones we invented for ourselves as a treat. British science is already back in Horizon because even the government could not think of a reason not to be.
Notice the pattern. Each of these is something Britain already had, given away for nothing, now being negotiated back one item at a time and announced as a diplomatic triumph. We are rejoining the EU the way you reassemble a wardrobe you smashed up in a temper. Slowly, at your own expense and with the neighbours watching through the fence.
Shirt: Still European · £25.95
Every year of waiting has a price tag.
If output is 6 per cent below where it should be, the cost of staying out runs to roughly £160 billion a year. That is the stabling fee. The horse is dead, the vet has signed the certificate and Britain is paying for hay, bedding and a man to stand outside the stable telling passers-by the horse is resting.
Which is why the politics has started moving even while the politicians insist it has not. There was a summit in May 2025, a bill through Parliament in January 2026 and a Health Secretary calling Brexit "a catastrophic mistake" while his colleagues floated a customs union. The Spanish prime minister says he would "absolutely" support Britain rejoining. The Prime Minister says rejoining is years down the line, which you will notice is a statement about timing rather than direction. Half the country now wants another referendum within five years.
Every step of the reset makes the next step easier and the remaining distance more absurd. At some point a government will look at paying full price for four fifths of the furniture and decide to buy the house.
Shirt: The Further Right, The Further Wrong · £25.95
The honest bit.
Rejoining means Article 49, the agreement of all 27 members and almost certainly no return of the old opt-outs. The EU has moved on since 2016 and the terms would be negotiated, not restored. Polling suggests the public still balks at membership without the old exceptions. Anyone who tells you this is simple is selling something.
But inevitability was never about it being simple. It is about a 30 per cent project defended by nobody serious, opposed by the overwhelming majority of the people who will inherit it, costing something like £160 billion a year and already being dismantled by instalments. None of that makes rejoining quick. It makes it slow and certain, which is the most British combination there is.
In the meantime, dress for the country you are becoming rather than the one you were promised.
Shirt: Better Together · £25.95
Sources: YouGov, Ipsos, Deltapoll, Savanta, Peter Kellner, Office for Budget Responsibility, Goldman Sachs, Cambridge Econometrics, Centre for European Reform, House of Commons Library.
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5 comments
This article, brilliant stuff, every point hitting hard!
We should never have left. The sooner we rejoin the better
Not disputing the content but this reads like the AI voiced videos Youtube likes me to watch. Same style. Same headlines. Same cadence. But this is the bit nobody notices. It’s annoying as fudge.
I used to think that until I started reading comments from other countries’ leaders saying that the door is open. However, as the article notes, joining the EU would be a negotiation of revised terms, not simply "Hi, we went away for a bit but we’re back’. We have almost certainly thrown away all the opt-out an special terms we used to have.
As much as I dearly want to rejoin the EU, who says they would have us back? Remember De Gaulle…