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In a 15 May BBC television presentation, Nigel Farage said, “Brexit has failed.”
Farage was leader of the U.K.’s Brexit Party from 2019 into 2021, leader of Britain’s Independence Party from 2006 through 2016, and is a former member of the European Parliament. He is now a broadcaster.
The U.K. voted to leave Europe in 2016 and severed the tie in 2020.
During the Brexit campaign to take the U.K. out of the European Union (EU), Farage and other Brexit backers pledged it would bring an economic boom to the nation, freeing it from the stifling EU bureaucracy.
However, Brexit brought its own version of red tape as British businesses struggled with the complexities of importing from, and exporting to, Europe, a mess we noted in “U.K. Trade With Europe Tangled in Bureaucracy” (16 Feb 2021).
Partly as a result, Britain has the worst-performing economy in the European region and is predicted to rank 20th among G20 nations this year, underperforming even Russia burdened by Western sanctions, according to the International Monetary Fund.
Automakers Ford, Jaguar Land Rover, and Vauxhall are publicly urging the government to renegotiate its trade arrangement with the EU, claiming the current deal threatens the existence of Britain’s vehicle industry.
In June, a thousand businesses, with representatives of the farming and fishing industries, are scheduled to convene the Trade Unlocked conference, which was organized to strategize about a post-Brexit trade landscape “that most say has made commercial life infinitely harder and more bureaucratic,” The Guardian newspaper wrote.
Farage and Brexit’s champions also pledged that leaving the EU would reduce the number of immigrants coming to Britain.
Instead, net immigration has risen by 700,000 to a million, according to government figures reported by the Guardian and due to be released this week. However, instead of immigrants coming easily from Europe, they now come from countries farther away, the newspaper noted.
In his televised comments, Farage maintained that Brexit itself was not a flawed concept but that its failure was due to blundering politicians who had “mismanaged this totally”.
Pundits pointed out that the final Brexit deal was negotiated and signed by prime minister Boris Johnson, a diehard Brexiteer, and supported by Rishi Sunak, Johnson’s most recent successor.
Some frustrated Brexit backers blame Sunak for the flubbed deal after he called a halt to dismantling hundreds of regulations related to the U.K.’s EU membership.
Others have pointed fingers of blame at civil servants, pundits, academics, and unions for Brexit’s failure.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE: Everyone, especially politicians, wants to attach themselves to success and run from failure.
The causes for Brexit’s failure are many. One of them is that it was indeed a flawed concept, as economists, think tanks, and other analysts warned before the country voted to cut itself off from Europe’s economic union.
TREND FORECAST: Pressure is growing in Britain for the government to find a way back into the EU. That process will not begin until the conservative government is defeated and replaced by a liberal majority in parliament—and might not begin even then.
It is unclear whether, or on what terms, Europe would want Britain back.