Brexit Ten Years On (part 1)

22:57Alex Forsyth:So this is one of those areas where it's actually quite difficult to make snap assessments. Because if you were to just look at the levels, trade with the European Union has gone up. Overall? Overall. For goods and services? It's Brexit. So just slightly, but more so on services. But the issue here is that the question isn't, has it gone up or not? Because you would generally expect trade in total to go up because population levels increase and also because wealth levels increase over time and also because of inflation. So it's gone up. But the question is, has it gone up less than it would have done had the UK remained?

23:31Alex Forsyth:And this is why you get all of these arguments around the impact of Brexit, because you can never experience that counterfactual. So trade has gone up. I don't think it's gone up as much as it would have done otherwise. But I think the more interesting thing within this is the compositional aspect of that trade, particularly for goods, where both anecdotally, and this is starting to come through in the data, you're seeing that lots of smaller companies have just exited the EU market. I mean, there's some absurd examples from early on in post-Brexit when the TCA first came in, where you'd have people turning up at border control posts, and they'd filled in the CHED or the Export Health Certificate in a blue pen rather than a black pen, or it might have been a black pen rather than a blue pen and being turned away.

24:12Alex Forsyth:That sort of thing puts off a small seller. You just sort of think, I can't be bothered with this anymore. On services, I mean, we've seen UK services exports sort of roar ahead in recent years. Some of that, I would say, is around inflation, so it's just prices going up. Some of it is the type of services the UK was selling, particularly during COVID, where actually consulting services, legal services, we're doing really well and we're good at that. And also the other reason for that is that many of the services the UK exports aren't what we consider regulated services. They're not necessarily as impacted by the UK's exit from the European Union because, for example, consultancy services.

24:51Alex Forsyth:I'm a consultant. We're not regulated to the same extent that banks are. So my ability to sell services internationally is generally fairly free. I don't have to do too much. So I think in part that explains why services hasn't been hit as much. A final thought. It is 10 years since the Brexit referendum, but it's only 2020 that the UK actually left the EU single market. Has this still got a way to run? Can we possibly make a true assessment at this point of what the impact has been on our trade and trading relationships? Or could we still see that change, given how much of an active political debate there is right now about the UK's relationship with the EU?

25:30Economists are always going to say we need more data. But as time goes on, the harder it is to know that it's really Brexit causing any differences and not something else. And so I worry that actually the level of uncertainty that we have now is going to persist. There's never going to be the one true number that tells us exactly what Brexit did. As Sam said, it hurt trade. I'll have fun arguing about for a while.

25:55Alex Forsyth:To Samaya's point, I mean, even immediately post-Brexit, we had COVID. We then had Ukraine. We then had Donald Trump twice in that period. So there have been lots of exogenous shocks that have damaged the UK economy in different ways. And pulling out the precise Brexit impact from that was always going to be difficult. I suppose the point I would make is that it's never going to be a fixed constant insofar as the UK's relationship with the European Union will evolve for better or worse over time. At the moment, we are talking about some limited reintegration. But we could then have a government that wants to extricate the UK even further.

26:30Alex Forsyth:So actually, we're never going to have that one number, A, because it's going to be difficult to quantify and there's too much noise in the data, but also because the relationship with the European Union is going to keep changing over and over and over again. Brexit is a process, not an event. That was my catchphrase for the last 10 years. How did I know?

26:52And the process is still unfolding. The current government's attempt to negotiate closer relations with the EU, in part to ease trade friction, could involve trade-offs. And that is the central choice that's faced policymakers since Brexit, whether the benefits of looking beyond the EU to other trading partners could ever outweigh leaving the single market and the customs union. It's been 10 years since the referendum, but only five years since the UK officially left the EU, during which time there's been a global pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and war in the Middle East, which complicates efforts to quantify the effect of Brexit itself.

27:34What is not contested is that it's had a significant impact on trade and the choices current and future governments make about trading relations will have consequences too. Part three. Immigration was a central issue in the Brexit debate, with the take-back-control slogan of the Leave campaign widely applied to the country's borders, leaving the EU would, campaigners argued, allow the UK to end the free movement of people that was a condition of EU membership, with the clear implication that immigration numbers would fall. In fact, the opposite happened. To understand why, I spoke to James Bowes, a data analyst at the University of Warwick, and Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, who started by explaining immigration trends in the years running up to the Brexit referendum.

28:29Well, before the referendum, net migration to the UK, which is the main measure that gets used in the political debate, so that's the number of people immigrating, minus the number of people emigrating, had been going up. It was fluctuating around two to three hundred thousand. And the majority of people coming and staying in the UK were EU citizens. There was a point just before the referendum, where if you look at the net figure, it was around three quarters of people were EU citizens. So there was very much an expectation that if the UK voted to leave the European Union and ended free movement of EU citizens, there would be a dramatic reduction in immigration.

29:06James, why was that? Why did we see such a lot of immigration from the EU in that period leading up to the 2016 referendum? So until 2011, most net migration to the UK was actually from non-EU countries. But when the Conservatives got elected as part of the coalition, they heavily restricted non-EU immigration. They thought this would reduce overall net migration. However, it didn't lead to an overall fall in net migration because employers instead recruited from the EU. This was at a time when we had the euro crisis. And a couple of years later, transitional protections for immigration from Romania and Bulgaria ended in 2014, which meant anyone could come.

29:53So as a result of this, we saw net migration from EU countries increase from about 100 ,000 to about 250 ,000. and in fact net migration overall slightly increased. But Madeleine, around this time people might have remembered David Cameron talking about getting net migration down to the tens of thousands but presumably because of EU membership that wasn't in his gift. That's right. I mean when that announcement was made policy wonks scratched their heads and wondered how that could happen because of the fact that the UK had no control over EU migration under free movement. So take us to the Brexit referendum, the referendum itself.

30:36This slogan, take back control. Part of that, I think, was widely thought to mean take back control of immigration. What were the promises made? What was talked about regarding immigration during the campaign itself, Madeleine? Well, there were quite different positions within the Vote Leave campaign. So there was one narrative that effectively said, listen, this isn't necessarily about numbers. This is about the idea of control. And if we want to be liberal, we can be liberal. So for example, you had people like Priti Patel out there saying, vote Brexit and save the curry houses because we're going to be able to bring in more chefs from outside of the EU.

31:12There were other voices in the Vote Leave campaign who emphasised, no, no, this is a way to be more restrictive across the board, so we'll end free movement. It was very difficult for Remain to talk about immigration because the truth was that the UK could not control migration from EU countries under free movement. It had exceptionally limited levers. So I think there was a bit of a consensus that the Remain side didn't really have much to offer to those who were concerned about controlling and reducing migration. So then the country votes to leave the EU, James. As a consequence of the decision to leave the European Union, what controls did the UK gain over immigration?

31:51So the principal control they gained was the ability to restrict who could move here from EU countries. So theoretically, all of the things being equal, this would have led to a big fall in net migration as fewer EU nationals come. The government chose to liberalise the visa rules and so in the end, net migration significantly increased. The UK officially left the European Union at the beginning of 2020 or the end of 2019. Madeleine, this period immediately after that, when, as James has said, we saw this big spike in the net migration figures, it's sometimes called the Boris wave. Can you just explain it to us?

32:36What happened during that period? Well, after the post-Brexit immigration system was introduced, there was a big increase in overall net migration to the UK. And I think that this happened partly by design and partly by accident. So you had the war in Ukraine and the government's decision to open up a pretty liberal visa scheme for people coming from Ukraine. They had also agreed to implement a route for people coming from Hong Kong after the Chinese crackdown on democracy protesters there. So those obviously not Brexit related. There was then more people coming in as international students. Partly that was because universities started recruiting more aggressively overseas to bring in international students, sometimes marketing the liberal post-study work visa offer under the post-Brexit system.

33:23And then there was an increase in people coming on work visas, initially in some of these middle skilled jobs like butchers and chefs that hadn't been eligible for work visas under the previous system when there was free movement, but then became eligible. and then perhaps most dramatically in the care sector starting in 2022. And all of those things combined together to push the numbers up much higher than was expected. And my suspicion is that if the government had known how many people would take up these policies, it would have introduced a much more restrictive offer. It's just that the enthusiasm for these new policies among prospective migrants was much greater than they had anticipated.

34:01So James, this period, the UK did have more control over its own immigration system because it left the European Union and therefore no longer had freedom of movement. But despite that increased control, the numbers went up before coming down. What do you think that did to the political debate around immigration? It feels like the debate has actually lagged behind the reality on the ground. In 2022, when we had record levels of net migration, people hadn't realised this yet. So their attitudes towards immigration were actually more positive. But now we're seeing very low levels of net migration.

34:41People can remember the very high levels of a couple of years ago and are still saying they want immigration to be cut. Madeline, your thoughts on that? One of the reasons that we don't see particularly favourable public opinion, even despite the reductions in net migration that we've seen, is that we still do have quite high levels of asylum applications and people coming on small boats. And that is the most unpopular type of migration to the UK. And it now makes up a higher share of the total. So there's an extent to which politicians don't really get a hearing on legal migration while there is still this very visible issue of small boats.

35:19There is some debate about whether Brexit had any impact on that aspect of immigration, this idea of people coming to claim asylum in the UK. Do you think it did or didn't, the fact that we left the EU, Madeleine, did that have any impact on the so-called illegal immigration? It's very difficult to work out how big the impact of Brexit is likely to have been on small boat arrivals. the reason that it might have had an impact is that the UK no longer shares data with the EU and crucially the EU no longer shares data with the UK about who has applied for asylum so there's an extent to which the UK has become the final court of appeal for refused asylum seekers in the EU and qualitative evidence suggests that a lot of the people in northern France have had their asylum claims refused in Europe and are coming to the UK where they can get a new asylum decision and actually in many cases will be successful.

36:13The challenge is we really don't know what the scale of that is or how much of that type of dynamic actually might have existed anyway if we were still in the European Union. And actually, if you look at the policies while the UK was in the EU, not that many people were sent back to Europe and a lot of the people who had their fingerprints checked to see if they'd applied for asylum in Europe didn't come up with a positive hit. So I think it's very difficult. I think Brexit does seem to have some impact, but assessing the scale of it is really hard. Going back to the overall net migration numbers, James, we've seen them come down, as you say.

36:48Do we have any sense of what the future trajectory of those numbers is going to be? What's going to happen? So in 2026, 2027 and 2028, we're going to see very unusually low numbers. And the reason for this is because the a quarter of a million people a year that were being granted graduate visas in 2024 and actually the first half of 2025 those expire after two years so we'll see a lot of people come to the end of their time in the graduate visa and most won't be able to get a job that will sponsor them for a visa also if earned settlement is brought in in full a lot of people it's very hard to say how many but a lot of people leave the country as a consequence of this however longer term Well, I think we'll see lower levels of net migration than we're used to seeing.

37:38It will very much be a positive figure, over 100 ,000 people a year. And that will be because of a long-term fall in emigration. Fewer EU nationals leaving, fewer international students leaving, because the cohorts coming in are now much smaller, which means fewer people leaving in one to three years' time. I personally don't think that the earned settlement proposal to lengthen the period of time for people to move to permanent status will be particularly decisive in the net migration patterns. I don't think they would have a major impact. But we will most likely see still substantial numbers of people leaving, but then that will tail off over time.

38:18So what that means is we have an unusually low projection for net migration in the short run and then an upwards trend going back to something more normal, perhaps somewhere between two and three hundred thousand, probably just about in time for the next election in 2029. Immigration was clearly a really significant factor in the way that people who voted for Brexit voted. Madeleine, do you think that people got what they voted for or what they at least expected out of that referendum when it comes to immigration? Initially, people absolutely did not get what they voted for in the sense that there was a clear promise that net migration would come down and instead it tripled.

38:55We are now moving into a phase where the levels of migration and the types of policies are perhaps more similar to what most people might have envisaged pre-Brexit. The big difference in the area where people who wanted to restrict migration would still be very much disappointed is the fact that asylum claims and people arriving on small boats are still unusually high. That's not exclusive because of Brexit. Brexit may have played a small role, but this is just another thing that happened at the same time to mean that the initial desires pre-Brexit of policymakers were frustrated.

39:32So the UK did gain more control over aspects of its immigration system on leaving the EU, which meant the end of the free movement of people from the bloc. But the way governments chose to exercise that control meant that many people who'd backed Brexit because they wanted lower levels of immigration didn't see that happen, at least initially. As a consequence, rather than take the sting out of the political debate around immigration, it's arguably become a more salient issue, albeit now often focused on small boat crossings and asylum claims, which can overshadow discussion about the benefits or costs of legal immigration, not least to the economy.

40:13Now, net migration figures have fallen substantially, which may see the debate shift. But 10 years on, immigration is undoubtedly an issue politicians are still grappling with in the face of public discontent. You're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service.

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42:15Part 4 It's become a fairly common claim that Northern Ireland, and specifically its border with the EU and place in the UK, didn't feature in the Brexit campaigns. That is not entirely true. There were claims and counterclaims about the impact Brexit might have on Northern Ireland, but they were nowhere near as prominent in the debate as other issues, such as immigration or the economy. And yet, it was the arrangements for Northern Ireland that proved one of the most challenging aspects of Brexit, taking years of negotiation with lasting implications. To understand the picture now, particularly in terms of the politics and practicalities for businesses, I spoke to John Campbell, BBC Northern Ireland's business and economics editor, and Katie Haywood, Professor of Political Sociology at Queen's University Belfast, who began by setting out why this was one of the most complicated aspects of Brexit.

43:13So if we cast our minds back to just after the referendum and then the move into the negotiations, one of the three priorities set by the UK and the EU in the negotiations was dealing with the Irish border, the unique circumstances on the island of Ireland, which entailed protecting the Good Friday Belfast Agreement, the peace process, and keeping the Irish border as open as it has been, partly in relation to that peace process. And bearing in mind the question of the Irish border is a political source of tensions in Northern Ireland and also when you deal with borders anywhere, you have practical problems.

43:49The special arrangements that they came up with for Northern Ireland, the so-called Protocol on Ireland and Northern Ireland, now known as Windsor Framework, really placed very particular circumstances on Northern Ireland in relation to border management. So dealing with borders at all, you have these practical questions of customs rules, etc. But you also have political sensitivities. To put it really simply, when the UK was in the EU for purposes of trade, for example, there were no borders. But suddenly the issue that had to be dealt with was, was there going to be a border on the Isle of Ireland or was there going to be a border in the Irish Sea?

44:26Yes. So it essentially became a bit of a choice. Does Northern Ireland have a hard border with the Republic of Ireland as that EU external border or does it have it down the Irish Sea? What they've come up with now is, I won't call it a fudge, but it's a very unusual arrangement when Northern Ireland is de facto in the EU single market for goods. But officially, of course, it still very much remains in the UK internal market. So John, if you had to explain in practical terms, what has Brexit changed for businesses operating in Northern Ireland? Fundamentally, we are now in a position where there is an internal trade border within the UK which didn't exist before.

45:07So before the post-Brexit deal for Northern Ireland, if you were moving goods from Great Britain, so from England, Scotland, Wales into Northern Ireland, that was purely a commercial arrangement between two companies. After Brexit, the government is now involved. There are a lot more things you need to do to satisfy the government that you're allowed to trade. So things like having some goods checked as they arrive into Northern Ireland, having specific labelling to sell some goods in Northern Ireland and still having to fill in customs forms of one sort or another to move goods from Great Britain into Northern Ireland.

45:44That did not exist before. it exists now and that causes cost and complexity to business. So the Windsor framework were the arrangements that were negotiated, announced in 2023, so a couple of years after the UK had officially left the European Union that were meant to address some of those specific challenges. But there were also people arguing at the time, John, that there could be benefit to Northern Ireland as a consequence of that Windsor framework because it would have unique access to both the UK and the EU markets. Has that played out? Really from the outset of those special arrangements for Northern Ireland, there was always this dual market access.

46:20So it meant that a manufacturing business in Northern Ireland could sell into Great Britain without any constraint. And because it was part of the EU single market, it could also sell into the wider EU without any constraint. And that gave it a competitive advantage over businesses in England, Scotland and Wales who faced a whole range of new processes to sell into the EU. So it's certainly there as a big theoretical benefit. in terms of how it's actually worked out in practical terms that is much more mixed because if this was something which was to give northern ireland a huge economic boost you would have expected that to show up in manufacturing because this covers the trade in goods so you would have said well well you have say u.s manufacturers locating in northern ireland to serve those two markets we have not really seen anything which you might call a manufacturing boom and in fact When you look at where all the growth in the Northern Ireland economy has come from, particularly since the pandemic, it has all been in services, particularly business services.

47:20But that's a part of the economy which is not covered by these arrangements. Because remember, Northern Ireland only stays inside the EU single market for goods. It doesn't cover services. So I think it's quite hard to make the case that these dual market arrangements have led to some huge economic advantage. Yes, I just wanted to come on the back of that and say the difficulty for Northern Ireland making the most of these dual market access arrangements has really been because of its political context. So what businesses look for above everything else is certainty, what rules are going to be applying, and also certainty in terms of governance arrangements.

47:55We will not be having a border down the Irish Sea. Northern Ireland's First Minister, Paul Given, has resigned in protest over trade arrangements introduced after Brexit. The protocol represents an existential threat to the union and to the future of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom. Basically, the executive will be paralysed. The executive will no longer be able to function. In fact, there was a lot of uncertainty. In 2022, the DUP pulled out of power sharing over post-Brexit trading arrangements and Stormont collapsed, leaving Northern Ireland without a functioning government for two years.

48:30And that profound uncertainty, which only began to be addressed in early 2024, has just been a context that has proven... Yeah, because if you were, say, an American investor and you were thinking, you know, are we going to deploy tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars in Northern Ireland to set up a manufacturing plant on the basis of having this dual market access? You'll probably pause to think, well, is this still going to be the case in five years time, 10 years time? Are we really going to invest into such uncertainty? And as Katie says there, it's really no surprise then that you haven't had this huge influx of foreign direct investment on the basis of what's being offered.

49:11Given what you've spelled out there, the complexity and the uncertainty, I'm wondering in practical and pragmatic terms how businesses have responded. Have you seen a sort of resilience to that backdrop? I think it's been very interesting in that the politics in Northern Ireland have been so brittle that they effectively broke down to the extent that we had no government for a long period of time. The business and economics have proved much more flexible, much more adaptable. We still have all the same shops we had before Brexit selling mostly the same things. You can mostly get all the same stuff online.

49:46But behind that, there's been a huge amount of work by businesses to adapt and make that possible. And, you know, when the government comes along to businesses and say, you know, if you want to continue to trade, here are the things you must do. Now, businesses will like it, but they'll say, OK, we will find a way. And to a large extent, they have found a way in Northern Ireland. To a large extent, the flow of goods has continued, but has involved a huge amount of work and work which is ongoing because this is a dynamic arrangement. As the EU updates its laws and rules and regulations, what you actually have to do to get goods across this internal UK border, that also can change.

50:23And I think for some businesses, particularly smaller businesses, it has been exhausting. Bigger businesses have been much more able to absorb this. For smaller businesses, it has been much more of a struggle, a daily struggle in some cases. Has it increased trade with the Republic of Ireland? Yeah, I think that's the one thing where if you were to look at all the charts, the economic charts in Northern Ireland and say, you know, point to me where Brexit and the sea border has actually had an impact. That's the one where you would see this big increase in trade, both from north to south and south to north.

50:56and simply it's because in some cases where previously it made sense to source a product in GB it now makes more sense to source that either directly in the Republic of Ireland or bring it through the Republic of Ireland because you have less friction.

51:14So Brexit created uncertainty for businesses and destabilised the political situation in Northern Ireland evidenced by the collapse of the Northern Ireland government. Even now, many unionists who supported Brexit say the way it's been implemented has weakened Northern Ireland's place in the United Kingdom. Has it deepened political divisions? Certainly, if we look at the survey data, we see that leave remain identities in Northern Ireland are stronger here than they are in Britain even. And those, by and large, lie on top of divisions that already existed in terms of unionists and nationalists and others.

51:51And this is partly in the context of, in a particular view, that Brexit has increased the likelihood of a united Ireland and of the breakup of the United Kingdom. So about two thirds of people think that. And that includes the plurality of unionists as well. So in that context, you can understand why it is that it's become such a divisive issue here and why we've had the reactions we've had from unionists who feel that Northern Ireland's place in the UK, both internal market and constitutionally, is that much more insecure. We've now got a government that's talking about closer economic ties with the European Union.

52:28We don't know yet what exactly that would look like. But Katie, do you think that that could go some way to address some of the issues that you have raised, as you see as a consequence of Brexit in Northern Ireland? Yes, certainly. The British government and government officials are very clear that they are bearing Northern Ireland's place in mind as they negotiate these new agreements, including in the most tricky aspects of border management, so-called SPS, dealing with plants and animal health. And so we expect them to be sort of overlaying this UK-EU agreement on top of the Windsor framework.

53:03It doesn't get rid of the Windsor framework, but it does mean that those arrangements that are particular to Northern Ireland will be less necessary. The intention is, I think, that this would lighten the load for businesses, make trade across the UK internal market that much more. easy. Yeah, I think for particularly small businesses in the food and agricultural sector, a big overarching agri-food deal of the sort we think the UK government is aiming for, that would have a huge impact because in terms of the actual practical day-to-day management of this internal UK border, it's the movement for those food and plant products, which is still the most difficult, the one which involves the most paperwork, the most intrusive checking.

53:42So you could potentially kind of add a stroke, get rid of that. Katie, at this point now, looking back, do you think that the unionists who supported Brexit regret it? According to the polling data, no, they don't. So there's this overall sense that Brexit has been a failure in Northern Ireland. And the reason why that sense is very strong, about three quarters of people think that, is because both leavers and remainers think it's been a failure. And for leavers, they essentially think they never really got the proper Brexit. So any difficulties that they see post-Brexit. They blame on those deals that Boris Johnson did and Theresa May before him.

54:20So this sense of being cheated and hard done by is what they put down to being the failure of Brexit, not the fact of Brexit itself.

54:34For an issue that featured so little in the Brexit campaign compared to others, Northern Ireland dominated post-Brexit discussions. While the UK voted to leave the EU, Northern Ireland voted to remain. The arrangements it's been left with after years of wrangling place it in a unique position, with access to both the EU single market and the UK internal market. But Brexit has caused complexity, friction, political instability and lasting constitutional questions.

55:08While the United Kingdom voted to leave the EU, the votes in its constituent nations differed, with England and Wales voting to leave and Scotland and Northern Ireland voting to remain. The process that followed, extricating the UK from the EU, tested the UK's constitutional arrangements. To get a sense of the effect on devolution and politics in Scotland and Wales, I spoke to Richard Wynne-Jones, a professor of Welsh politics and director of the Wales Governance Centre at Cardiff University, and Nicola McEwan, professor of public policy and governance at the University of Glasgow. So Nicola, let's just start with you.

55:48Take us back to the period of the referendum campaign itself. What were the key arguments being made both for and against Brexit in Scotland? So I think it's important to recall that the Brexit referendum campaign overlapped with the elections to the Scottish Parliament and of course the elections in Wales as well. So it was actually much more low key in Scotland than it probably was in England certainly. The other factor to bear in mind as well is that none of the parties represented in the Scottish Parliament had leaders that were championing leave. There was a very broad political consensus in favour of the UK remaining within the European Union.

56:30So when you don't have that much competition among the parties, then you don't really have that much intensity of debate. So in some respects, it felt like the debate was taking place somewhere else. And Richard in Wales? To be frank, there wasn't much of a referendum campaign in Wales. The devolved election campaigns, rightly or wrongly took precedence. So it was basically the debates in London and in England reflected over the border. And the specific implications in terms of the specific nature of the Welsh economy, the constitutional implications for devolution, none of these things were really aired because there was no campaign.

57:14And it's interesting after the referendum, Richard, quite a lot was made about the fact that of the four UK nations, Wales is one of the biggest beneficiaries of EU funding. And the question was raised about why, therefore, did Wales vote for Brexit ultimately? How much of a factor do you think that actually was in voters' minds? I mean, certainly after the referendum, Wales became the subject of a particular genre of journalism. And the kind of story was, look at all the money that this place got. Because Wales is one of the poorest places in Western Europe, we were in receipts of lots of Objective One funding, which is the kind of structural funds meant to bring up the poorer bits of the European Union, a kind of levelling up European style.

57:59and people would pitch up and say, well, OK, this community voted to leave. And there was a kind of certain element, I think, of condescension there and completely ignoring the other bits of poor West Wales that voted Remain, in particular the Welsh-speaking heartlands that were much more likely to lean in the direction of Remain. Because actually, in terms of the vote in Wales, Wales was one of the most divided bits of Britain, certainly. So in the aggregate, it was very close. It was the classic 48-52. But under the bonnet, so to speak, fluent Welsh speakers who identify as Welsh were probably the most pro-Remain demographic in the whole of Britain.

58:45And then on the other side of the spectrum, around 27 % of the Welsh electorate are born in England. And those people in Wales who feel strongly English voted in the same way as people who feel strongly English in England, which is overwhelmingly to leave. So identity was a key factor as opposed to thinking about potentially the economic benefits of EU membership. In terms of the explaining the votes across Britain, so Scotland, England and Wales, what you find is national identity is really very, very important. In England, it was Englishness that was strongly aligned with Leave. In Scotland and Wales, the kind of attitudes that align with Englishness in England align with Britishness.

59:31But that's not to say that the economic dimension is unimportant. It's, I think, refracted through the lens of national identity. So how you understand the problems of your place in the world and what should be done about those national identity plays a really important part there. I'm going to ask you both a bit of an impossible question, but in the decade or so since the referendum itself, how would you sum up the effects it's had on Scotland and Wales respectively, for good or for ill? Nicola? So there was some modelling undertaken by the Chief Economic Advisor in the Scottish Government last year that modelled the estimated economic impacts, taking into account both the nature of the agreement that the UK now has with the European Union and the other trade agreements.

1:00:24And the economic impact has been significant in terms of its detrimental effect. Over the 10-15 years, the expected drop in GDP is 2 % or£4 billion. So it's difficult to point to economic effects without seeing them in the negative. I think though, political and constitutionally, there are significant effects on devolution and the functioning of devolution, because the UK government at the time, and indeed its successors have maintained this largely, felt they needed, as the UK left the European Union's internal market and its regulatory system, that they needed something in the UK domestically to maintain the UK's own domestic market.

1:01:15And through a variety of measures, the most notable one being the United Kingdom Internal Market Act, that has had an impact on the autonomy, the legislative competence of the devolved legislatures. I want to pick up that thought about devolution in just a moment. But Richard, in the broad terms, how would you characterise the key impacts of Brexit in Wales? So economically, first of all, Wales was probably more reliant than the rest of Britain, certainly on the single market, and we have a particularly weak financial sector in Wales. So it's hard to view the economic effects of Brexit as other than pretty negative.

1:01:59But it's also interesting just to note how it has had a fairly fundamental impact in terms of the debate on independence for Wales. There wasn't really a debate on independence for Wales prior to the 2016 referendum. And since then, support has grown to around a third of the Welsh electorate, which obviously isn't at Scottish levels, but it's a really dramatic change from where we used to be. And it's mainly Remainers who've shifted in the direction of independence. Just picking up this point about devolution. So the UK Internal Market Act was drawn up effectively to allow businesses to trade freely within the UK, outside of the EU single markets.

1:02:41Nicola, I just want to return to this point about how that was practically, but perhaps also politically received and the impact that that had on the devolved administrations. First of all, it was passed by the UK Parliament without the consent of the devolved legislature. So that consent principle, known commonly as the Suele Convention, is a really important symbolic underpinning of devolution within the United Kingdom. And the fact that it was set aside to pass this legislation made it really politically difficult from the outset. In practice, what that legislation also does is if, say, the Scottish Parliament was to introduce a law on the type of goods or the conditions of goods as it tried to do with introducing the deposit return scheme for materials, including glass, then it can only apply that law to goods that are manufactured or produced within Scotland.

1:03:42It cannot apply it to goods that come into Scotland from the rest of the UK unless it secures an exemption. And it does change the balance of power in a sense between the devolved legislatures and the UK government given its overall strength in regulation.

1:04:02The operation of the UK Internal Market Act has been reviewed to consider concerns about the impact on the devolved nations. So what has it done to perceptions of devolution and the relationship to the Parliament in Westminster? So I would say that the issue goes far beyond a particular piece of legislation. It's more fundamental than that. one of the interesting things about devolution is it never fitted neatly into kind of traditional notions of Westminster parliamentary sovereignty. One of the consequences of Brexit, and particularly the way that the UK government of the day chose to interpret the mandates of the Brexit revolution, it was, you know, restating Westminster sovereignty principles, which sit really, really uneasily with the existence of powerful parliaments in Cardiff, Edinburgh and indeed Belfast.

1:04:56And I think that this circle has not been squared, so to speak. We now find ourselves in a position where you have first ministers who support independence. How much of that would you attribute to Brexit versus other factors? I think in Scotland, there is a dominant narrative that was initially introduced by Nicola Sturgeon as First Minister and has continued all the way through, that Scotland was taken out of the European Union against its will. And that colours the constitutional debate within Scotland, and it colours party politics. But I wouldn't say that Brexit is the primary reason for the SNP's continued dominance of Scottish politics.

1:05:42That probably emerged after the independence referendum. And while the makeup of that support for the SNP has been shaped and coloured by Brexit, and that it's much more clearly pro-Remain than it was before the independence and Brexit referendums, the strength of the SNP and its dominance within the party political system is much more about that broader constitutional debate in Scotland as to where Scotland's future lies in relation to the rest of the United Kingdom. I think the situation in Wales is slightly different from that in Scotland because the change came after the Brexit referendum.

1:06:19And I think that the Brexit referendum has had a material impact on this massive shift in Welsh politics that we've seen very recently, in fact. And, you know, it has certainly unleashed different kinds of forces on the progressive left and on the kind of populist right. And Welsh politics is, I think, largely being reshaped as we speak in large part because of Brexit.

1:06:50Brexit tested and at times strained relations between Westminster and the devolved administrations, notably when it came to the way powers were repatriated from the EU. In Scotland, the SNP government pointed to Brexit as a reason for a second independence referendum. While UK governments have consistently resisted, the decision to leave the European Union has, in some quarters, amplified debate about the UK's internal union too. And whether it's Brexit-related or not, there are now nationalist First Ministers in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. So the constitutional questions are likely to continue.

1:07:31Next time, Brexiteers claimed that leaving the EU could unleash the UK from birders and rules set in Brussels. So, what has it meant in terms of regulatory freedom?

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