Going pains: A decade on, Brexit has reshaped Scotland

‘Leaving Europe was not the path I recommended,” said David Cameron.

The Conservative prime minister had been so buoyed by his 10-point win in the indyref two years earlier that he’d gambled on securing the constitutional status quo in another in-or-out vote, and this time it had all gone a bit wrong.

Cameron, the prime minister who once left his daughter in a pub, had made a miscalculation and now the UK was set to leave the European Union by the slimmest of margins. 

The Leave campaign had won by a mere four percentage points, and now he was going to be the prime minister responsible for an act of extraordinary economic vandalism. And Cameron wasn’t hanging around for any of that. “I do not think it would be right for me to try to be the captain that steers our country to its next destination,” he said. 

Confirming the date of his resignation, he turned away from reporters and approached the black door of Downing Street, mic still on, singing “do doooooo do doooooo”. As the door closed, he gave a business-like, “right”, as if he was definitely going to do something now but wasn’t really sure what that would be.

That’s Brexit all over, isn’t it? All £350m-per-week-for-the-NHS promises and repel-the-foreigners rhetoric. What was it really all about? “Brexit means Brexit,” of course. Simple. 

Theresa May probably lived to regret that particular soundbite, which in a world of meaningless declarations really manages to stand out as being particularly vapid. 

Brexit made May’s career, then broke it again. Yes, it gave her a route to power as Cameron’s successor, but she was unable to navigate cleanly through the shockwaves that followed and found herself giving her own resignation speech in spring 2019, sunk by Tory in-fighting over a troubled withdrawal agreement. She’d lost the party’s majority in the 2017 election, turning to Arlene Foster’s DUP for support.

“Our politics may be under strain, but there is so much that is good about this country,” May said as she gave the public her notice. “So much to be proud of. So much to be optimistic about.” So don’t panic, anyone. 

And here we are, six years after Brexit actually happened – ties were cut at the end of January 2020 – and a decade on from the vote itself. 

I guess whether or not you think May’s optimism was well-founded might depend on where your politics lie. For arch-Brexiteer Nigel Farage, of course, things couldn’t have gone any better. He got the outcome he wanted, masses of airtime, built a strong Cameo order book and wound up not only drinking pints on GB News, but also doing so in the Strangers Bar as an MP. Result!

But in economic terms, we’re not in a tremendous place. The pound is still way down against the US dollar, compared to where it was on referendum day, and indeed trails the euro too. The Office for Budget Responsibility reckons we’ll suffer a four per cent hit to national income over a 15-year span, and a research paper for the US National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that UK GDP per capita is now six to eight per cent lower than had Brexit never happened.

At 18 per cent and four per cent respectively, investment and productivity are both thought to be lagging behind where they could have been, had we still been part of the bloc, and the employment rate isn’t great either. Goods exports? Bads exports, more like – we buy more from Europe than it buys from us, and red tape has hampered growth in shipments out, which are lower relative to the G7.

No wonder, then, that the current Labour government is seeking stronger ties with Europe. Officials have reportedly been talking up the prospect of creating smoother trade conditions through a new UK-EU single market for goods. Brussels, for its part, has said there is “scope to deepen” work on industrial defence. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer has led us to expect new legislation this year granting ministers a fast-track process for the introduction of draft laws bringing the UK into alignment with EU standards. 

For London mayor Sadiq Khan, that’s not enough – he wants to see Labour pursue EU re-entry.

No surprise there, as the English capital voted Remain, but not quite as strongly as did Scotland, where the SNP continues to advocate for independence within Europe.

In domestic terms, Brexit has certainly made its mark. Amidst much talk of ‘taking back control’ and reasserting sovereignty, the Sewel Convention has suffered and the UK Internal Market Act has effectively stymied the ability of devolved governments to bring in new regulations to shape and control the markets they govern over. A Labour government review geared towards better intergovernmental working produced recommendations last year, the impacts of which are yet to be felt.

The recent Holyrood election may have brought two former MEPs to the chamber (Alyn Smith and Heather Anderson) but there was little said about Brexit in the contest that took them there. Has Scotland got Brexit fatigue? Either way, leaving the bloc has reshaped business and politics.