On Tuesday, it’ll be 10 years since the Brexit vote on June 23, 2016, but let me take you back to June 24, the morning after. We’ve woken up, the promises on the side of the Leave buses are glinting in the sun, Gove and Johnson are shuffling behind their podiums, surprised by what they’ve been and gone and done, and my first reaction, my first thought, the initial kick in the gut was: that’s it then, first Brexit, now Scottish independence.
Fortunately, ten years on, independence hasn’t happened, and in retrospect it’s hard to know why concern about it was my first thought. I suppose the feeling was that if a campaign as hollow, misleading and wrong as the campaign for Brexit could succeed, a campaign for Scottish independence could succeed using similar tactics. I also initially thought the line about Scotland being ripped out of the EU against its will would work for the SNP and boost their support. As I say, the morning of June 24, 2016: depressing.
But having said all that, we know what happened next, to the SNP, to the Brexiteers, to all of us. A few harsh truths have also become clearer in the decade since the vote: harsh truths that will hopefully stop us from doing something similar all over again. Here are a few.
1: Referendums are rubbish
I’m trying to think of a metaphor for what the referendums in 2014 and 2016 did to us, our public life, private lives, politics, culture, and how we feel about each other, and the best I can come up is one of those machines that shreds paper: it goes in whole and comes out in bits.
But referendums aren’t just bad for us culturally, emotionally and personally, they’re a rubbish idea. When Ted Heath was under pressure to hold one on the Common Market, he took the view that now looks elitist but was realistic: in a parliamentary democracy, it’s irresponsible to leave a decision on a critical, complex issue to a one-question vote. Is it ever a good idea to reduce complicated questions to yes or no? No.
But if we are to have more referendums, God forbid, we should at least ensure a large majority supports the proposition, which would provide some protection. The 1979 Scottish referendum is notorious for being set up to fail, with a requirement that 40% of the electorate had to vote for change, but there’s a strong argument for requiring support from two-thirds of those who vote. In the US, constitutional change also needs support from two-thirds of the Senate and House of Representatives – something similar in the UK would avoid the SNP and the Greens claiming a mandate with 30something per cent of the vote.
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2: Brexit is bad
If you want to know what’s going on now, ask an expert on what was going on then. Just after the 2016 referendum, I spoke to the historian Sir Antony Beevor about it and he summed up the problem. The EU, he said, was established as a bulwark against nationalism but he also pointed out that there’s a paradox at work with Europe, which is that the more it centralises power, the more it creates the nationalism it’s trying to get rid of. Sir Antony came up with the perfect term to describe how he felt then, how I felt, how lots of us felt: a Eurosceptic who voted Remain.
So it’s easy then to understand why so many of us felt negatively towards the EU but it was equally hard to understand why so many Tories – why so many Thatcherites – supported Brexit. Margaret Thatcher certainly became more Eurosceptic the longer she was out of office, but at the height of her powers, she spoke cold hard economic sense. The aim of the single market, she said, was to make the continent open to enterprise and that means no barriers to trade. Why would anyone expect anything different from a great champion of the free market?
So I like to think that Mrs Thatcher, if she was still around, would be horrified by what Brexit has done to the economy. If you haven’t seen them, I recommended the blogs that the thinktank, UK In A Changing Europe, have produced for the 10th anniversary. There was no economic collapse because of Brexit, they say, but there has been a gradual, cumulative drag on trade, investment and productivity. With a politeness it doesn’t deserve, they say the benefits of Brexit have been “limited”, and this Eurosceptic who voted Remain agrees.
3: Immigration isn’t fixed
We know one of the drivers for people voting Leave was immigration, “taking back control” and so forth, but the striking thing about Brexit is how much has changed and how little. Brexit has reduced EU migration, but the post-Brexit points-based system has also led to much higher non-EU migration. The overall effect is that the number of foreign-born workers in the UK is higher than it would have been had the UK remained in the EU.
If you want to know whether Leave voters are happy with this situation, you’d have to ask them, but there’s no doubt the issue is continuing to cause political and cultural tensions. This is partly because there’s a demand on governments to reduce immigration at the same time as there’s a continuing demand for migrant labour because of a population in the UK that’s ageing and relying more on welfare. Brexit has changed this very little, if at all, because it can’t.
We also know why the political and cultural tension exists: part of the picture is migrants meeting the demand for labour, but part of it is illegal migration. The number of migrants, legal or illegal, who aren’t working is becoming a bigger issue, nowhere more so than in Glasgow, where refugees make up nearly four in ten homelessness applications and the bill is expected to be around £66m in 2026. Again, Brexit has done nothing to fix any of this, but it does need fixed. I guess, before long, the man who’ll need to do it will be Andy Burnham.
4: Brexit has not been good for the SNP
The Scottish Tories may just have won their first Westminster by-election in 50 years or so, but perhaps the more striking story is that the SNP won in Arbroath and Broughty Ferry. Yes, the turnout was tiny and yes, first-past-the-post made it possible, but even so, the SNP is still winning lots of votes despite everything, most recently a picture of its former chief executive in a police van because of a camper van.
But the SNP being broadly where they were ten years ago isn’t how it was supposed to be. In the weeks and months after the Brexit vote, Nicola Sturgeon said the chaos made Scottish independence more likely and her deputy Keith Brown went further, saying Brexit made independence unstoppable, but none of it happened of course. It’s certainly remarkable that the SNP has just won a by-election a few weeks after winning a Holyrood election, but Brexit promised them it would be much better for them by now. It isn’t.
5: Scottish independence is still a bad idea
Which brings us to the reason the SNP hasn’t benefited from a Brexit bounce, the final harsh truth: Brexit has shown us that putting up barriers at borders is bad for the economy and therefore underlined what a bad idea Scottish independence is.
In fact, it’s worse than that. The UK could leave the EU without having to make decisions about currency and it didn’t have to apply to join other international organisations or sort out its foreign or defence policies. But if Scotland went independent, it would be leaving a state rather than an organisation made up of states and would have to make a lot of choices the UK didn’t face with Brexit. Scotland and rest of the UK also have shared assets (and debts) in a way the UK and the EU didn’t.
What does it mean? It means Scotland leaving the UK would be more complicated, chaotic and expensive than Brexit, and we know how complicated, chaotic and expensive Brexit has been. It also means that if someone from the SNP sidles up to you and tells you 'not to worry, it’ll all be fine', you might think of this: beware how easily the slogans of Brexiteers become the slogans of Scottish nationalists.
