Ten years ago this week, Britain voted to leave the European Union. There will be no shortage of retrospectives marking the anniversary, but as the date approached I found myself returning to an essay I wrote in GQ in the months after the referendum.
At the time, Brexit felt seismic. As a British-Arab – more specifically, British-Lebanese – I had always taken Britain’s place in Europe for granted. The EU was not simply a political arrangement or trading bloc. In the essay, I argued that it formed a kind of geographic and cultural hyphen between my two identities. Britain sat at one end of the Mediterranean story I inherited from my parents, Lebanon at the other. Europe was the bridge between them.
A decade later, how do I feel about it all? The answer is more complicated than I expected. In the intervening years I left the country I called home for most of my life. London has been replaced by Dubai. Yet I remain unmistakably British in ways both obvious and absurd. I am happiest in a pub. I still gravitate towards an M&S whenever I find one. I watch Have I Got News For You every week. It turns out you can move thousands of miles away without really leaving at all.
The truth is that Brexit no longer feels like the existential crisis it appeared to be in 2016. The world has become considerably more alarming since then – a pandemic, three years of genocide, continued climate change and chronic global dysfunction are all considerably more worrying. When Britain voted to leave the EU, it seemed as though the foundations of the post-war order were beginning to crack. Looking around today, that assessment feels accurate – and perhaps that was what was always most alarming.
The institutions and assumptions that shaped much of my lifetime appear increasingly fragile. Nato is under strain. Globalisation is being questioned from all sides. Alliances once considered permanent now seem negotiable. If Brexit was a domino, it was merely the first to fall.
Has Brexit been bad for Britain? I find it difficult to argue otherwise. How much of the country’s economic stagnation can be attributed directly to Brexit, and how much to Covid-19, is a question economists will continue debating for years. But politics is often about mood as much as metrics, and the national mood has undeniably shifted.
Six prime ministers in a decade is not the hallmark of a confident nation. Britain feels less stable than it once did. The political discourse has become coarser, angrier and more fragmented. The country often seems to be arguing with itself without any clear sense of where it is heading.
The practical consequences of Brexit are perhaps less dramatic than either side predicted. The apocalyptic headlines never quite materialised. There are still avocados in the supermarkets. The ports did not descend into permanent chaos. Like most things, systems adapted and life carried on.
But the deeper loss was never really administrative. It was cultural. An entire generation of young Britons has grown up with fewer opportunities to live, study and work across Europe. Something valuable has been taken from them, even if many may not realise it. Equally, Britain now has fewer Europeans arriving to build lives there, bringing with them the ideas, perspectives and energy that have always refreshed the country.
The disconnect is not simply bureaucratic. It is about belonging. Britain is an island, with everything that an island mentality implies. At its best, that has meant independence, resilience and a distinct sense of self. At its worst, it can drift towards insularity and suspicion of the outside world.
For much of my life Britain appeared to balance those impulses. It remained proudly British while also feeling deeply connected to its neighbours. Brexit loosened that connection. The result is not isolation, exactly, but a sense of drift. And drift is rarely a comfortable condition for a nation.
My greatest fear in 2016 was not economic decline. It was that Britain would become a less welcoming place for people who looked like me. On that front, some of those concerns feel justified. The rise of Reform UK, and the mainstreaming of rhetoric that once existed on the political fringes, suggests that anxieties about immigration and identity remain potent forces in British life.
Yet Britain is rarely as simple as its politics. It remains one of the most diverse, creative and outward-looking societies in the world. The country I grew up in is still there. You can see it in its cities, its countryside, its universities, workplaces and cultural institutions. You see it in its literature, music, film and television. But it increasingly feels as though at least two competing visions of Britain are locked in a struggle over the nation’s future.
Ten years on, I do not think Brexit destroyed Britain. Nor do I think it delivered the renewal its advocates promised. Instead, it revealed something about the country that many of us had embarrassingly not fully understood. Britain was never really arguing about Europe. It was arguing about itself. A decade later, that conversation is still unresolved.
