Britain, Brexit, Burnham: how was it for EU?

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0:09Today, it's not EU, it's me.

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0:49Brexit. I know what you're thinking. No thanks, let me out. But stay with me. The total number of votes cast in favour of Leave was 17 million This week marks 10 years since half the UK decided that the best direction the country could take would be to leave the European Union This means that the UK has voted to leave the European Union A four-decade project terminated by the public But how did that actually go? And how has the last decade shaped the way we live now?

1:30I think the political and the economic world we're living in is hugely shaped by Brexit. It's cast a really long shadow over both the major political parties in this country, which are now at risk of not being the major political parties for much longer, over the sort of general tenor of debate, I think, and the extent to which we're polarised. So I think it's been really, really significant and we're still feeling the impact of it 10 years on.

1:57With the departure of yet another Prime Minister and the likely arrival of Andy Burnham in Number 10, the heat is back in the relationship between the EU and the UK. 58 % of Britons now say they would vote to rejoin given the chance. If you ask Gen Z, that goes up to three in five. Are we really going there again? And what lessons have been learnt from one of the most bitter referendums in recent political history?

2:29From The Guardian, I'm Noshin Iqbal. Today in Focus, Britain, Burnham and the other B word.

2:42Heather Stewart, welcome back to Today in Focus. Thanks. Now, you're The Guardian's economics editor and crucially, you were politics editor at the time of the Brexit referendum. I don't really want to go back. numbers do but you know we're here it's been 10 years can you just give me a quick reminder of just how consequential that result the country voting to leave the eu how consequential it felt at the time it was an extraordinary moment really and not to reminisce too much as you say but i was on the early shift the 4am shift and i sort of arrived in the office to this turmoil because it was not what was expected and it was a huge blow to the sitting government the leadership of both parties had said to the public we really really want you to do this our economic security is paramount it is stronger if we stay if we leave we put it at risk i've been the country's chancellor for six years i think it would be a very big mistake for us to leave if we're the country to like to quit then we're out for good there's no going back and the public had sort of shrugged and said, we are not going to listen to you.

3:52We want to do something different. And so it wasn't clear on that first morning quite what the changes would be. And particularly wasn't clear how long it would take to extricate ourselves from the EU and to decide what sort of relationship we were going to have with them. But it was really, really clear that it was a real jolt to the establishment. Lots of people who felt that they knew what they were doing, they knew how to do politics, they knew what the public wanted, were proved completely wrong. And it was a real shock. Also I remember it being a real you remember where you were kind of moment.

4:21And well, in my case, waking up in Glastonbury. Everyone was just like, what? I vividly remember sitting in front of my computer waiting for David Cameron to come out onto Downing Street. And of course he had said, I'm not going to resign. If we vote to leave, will we carry out that instruction? Yes. Will I carry on as Prime Minister? Yes. Will I construct a government that includes all of the talents of the Conservative Party? Yes. And then, you know, shortly thereafter, off he goes. I was absolutely clear about my belief that Britain is stronger inside the European Union. But the British people have made a very clear decision to take a different path.

4:55And as such, I think the country requires fresh leadership to take it in this direction. And I really remember thinking, gosh, this is an extraordinary moment. And from your perspective, what were your hopes or rather even your fears of how the next 10 years would pan out? I think it was so unclear during the campaign what approach to Brexit the Leavers wanted to take. You know, Vote Leave worked really hard not to be pinned down really on any of the details about what kind of trading relationship do they want with the EU? What kind of migration policy did they want? How did they want this to work?

5:31I don't know if you remember that press conference on the morning after with Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, who were, of course, victorious and being around the country on their big red battle bus. and they'd stood up and the whole vibe was of shock and bewilderment. And, you know, it wasn't a kind of confidence about this glorious new future we were going to march towards. And so there was this real sense of kind of unknown. Not only were you going to have a new prime minister, the civil war in the Labour Party that was already sort of humming away really started to sort of run red hot after that.

6:00It kick-started the divide in the Conservative Party and it was incredibly unclear. We knew it would be a wrangle, it would take quite a long time, the details of it were a mystery. I don't think anyone, including Vote Leave themselves, had a very clear picture of how it was going to look.

6:22Well Heather, let's take a look at how that decision 10 years ago has shaped the country that we're living in. Leave campaigners made this series of promises that were based on sovereignty, governance, immigration, the pressures of economic globalization all these sort of big ideas but let's start with the economy how has that gone specifically when it comes to looking at the impact of brexit there is a consensus really that it's not gone that well that the economy is maybe four percent to eight percent smaller than it would have been if we'd stayed in the eu you know that's looking at sort of similar countries and what's happened to them since and so on so it sounds small but that's actually but It's really significant.

7:05It's really significant. And then that means much less tax revenue, right? And therefore less to spend on public services. So it doesn't account for all of it because we've had problems with sickly growth for a very long time since the global financial crisis. But it means that we're in a worse economic and fiscal position than we would be had we not left. It's hard to find an economist who disagrees with that, put it that way. And there's at least a couple of things in play there. The first one is there was a very long period of uncertainty. So it was quite a long period where if you were an investor or someone thinking of sort of putting money into the UK economy, it felt like maybe now wasn't the moment because you weren't quite clear what relationship we were going to have with the EU.

7:43If I'm a big multinational, will I be able to sell my products into the EU, tariff-free or not? I don't know. Well, maybe I'll just wait. So there was quite a long period of uncertainty while we sort of rowed amongst ourselves and then with Brussels. There's lots of talk about banks leaving and lots of big companies moving their HQs from London, etc. Yeah, I mean, do you know what? Well, I don't think the city has suffered as there were fears it might. I think, you know, if you go down to Canary Wharf or whatever, there's not much sign of a downturn, although there's an argument that perhaps it would have done even better had we not had Brexit.

8:12But the other impact is exports. You know, lots of companies, small to large, will tell you it's just become more difficult. You know, there are more checks. There is tariff-free trade, but only if you can comply with particular rules. There are complexities about VAT and so on. So it just isn't as easy to export to the EU as it was. It's not as frictionless as it once was. And it's our biggest market because it's right on our doorstep. And we've done some other trade deals, but there's no evidence so far in the data that those have, by any stretch of the imagination, started to offset the weakness in trade with the EU.

8:44And I guess that doesn't even take into account the European workforce, the number of people who lived here and worked here in hospitality and all kinds of different parts of the sectors that have since left. and all you constantly hear is that there's not enough workers. We don't have enough people to do these jobs. Migration is a really interesting one, right? Because migration was one of the key issues on which the campaign was fought, right? And not only by Vote Leave, who talked about an Australian-style points migration system, which I'm not even sure anyone knew what that was, but Australians, it sounded good, right?

9:13I mean, we've just taken their social media ban, so, you know. Right, exactly, exactly, sounded good. And Leave.eu, which, of course, was the more extreme, Nigel Farage's version of the Brexit campaign, which was not attached to Vote Leave, which was the formal campaign. Farage had those grim kind of breaking point posters which had these sort of queues of refugees and this idea that people were flooding in and so on. If you vote to remain, you're going to be letting in Turkey and you're going to be letting in all these asylum seekers, all these brown men. Absolutely. That was what the... Absolutely.

9:41And that was the picture on the posters, essentially. But interestingly, when Boris Johnson got his hands on migration policy, when we did actually leave, we actually had quite a liberal migration policy. We had a big increase of people. Now, the nature of those people switched. So the big nationalities coming in became Nigerians, Indians, Filipinos. Absolutely. Instead of Poles and Romanians and Czechs. But the numbers were very, very big. And of course, now we have this backlash against that, partly because I think people were imagining migration was going to fall quite quickly. Boris Johnson's government decided actually that would be really damaging for the economy if we let migration fall really quickly.

10:19So we better let companies bring people in. And indeed, we better bring people in to fill the big gaps in the social care and the health system. So it was a bit odd because it didn't have the impact that it was expected to on migration. But then that in turn has had a massive impact on our politics, I think you can argue. Heather, I don't think it's a secret to say that a lot of the campaign or a lot of the feeling around it was essentially about racism. There was a lot of anti-foreigner feeling. And some people did vote thinking that it would mean migrants, foreigners out. Now, of course, the irony is, as you said, more migrants, more foreigners were needed.

10:52Not to be facetious, but have we taken back control of our borders? And what does that even mean? And what impact has Brexit had on migration in 2026? So I would say we are taking back control of our borders. I get frustrated with the idea that the sort of influx, the surge we had in 2022, 23, 24, there's an idea that that was kind of uncontrolled. It wasn't. It was a deliberate decision. The conscious decision made was to let a lot of people in. I mean, I think it is ironic that we had a campaign that absolutely, as you said, had kind of racist undertones to it. It wasn't the only reason. It's unfair to say it was the only reason people voted Brexit.

11:31There was also a sort of sovereignty argument, wasn't there, about we don't want our rules to be made in Brussels. we want to make our own decisions, all of that. But there was that strand of anti-migration feeling. Quite definitely. And so it's ironic that then that handed the reins of government to a bunch of people who decided the right thing for the economy and for the health service was to let a large number of people in. I guess the other irony is that when we talk about how Brexit has affected our current political landscape, it feels like the conversation around immigration is sort of cyclical and the debate, you know, you can't say anything anymore, stuff comes around every few years.

12:05And right now it's a fever pitch. How do you think Brexit and the decision to vote leave has shaped some of the attitudes and feelings that we're seeing today? Well, it's difficult, right, because you can't lay all of it on Brexit. You know, if you think about J.D. Vance and Donald Trump and the, you know, it turns out for Deutschland in Germany and some of these questions about migration and how you deal with it and how you integrate people or don't and what it means culturally are very, very strong in lots of countries, unfortunately. But I do think it was a moment where some of those thinking about those breaking point posters, which actually would probably look quite tame compared to some of the really toxic stuff that we're drowned in now.

12:47But covering some of that stuff at the time that felt to me like taboos were being broken in the UK debate and that there was a line in the UK debate that maybe it started to be crossed in Brexit and it continued to be crossed. Otherwise, I say we are far from the only country where there is a very polarised and toxic debate about migration. Heather, we've talked about the Boris wave and how net migration hit almost a million, but those numbers have dramatically come down now, right? They've absolutely plunged. So some controls were put in place in 2024 by the Conservatives. More tightening took place under Labour when Yvette Cooper was Home Secretary.

13:22And that involved, for example, shutting down the route by which social care workers could come into the country from overseas. That's just not a thing now. And tightening quite a few other aspects of the regime. So lifting salary thresholds, making it harder to bring in family members, lots and lots of changes that mean that, you know, if you look at net migration figures, it's like a child's version of drawing of a mountain. You know, it goes up very, very sharply and it comes down very, very sharply. And looking ahead, the way that visa applications are falling suggests that it's going to continue falling very, very sharply.

13:51And some experts think we might even have negative net migration in coming years. Wow. So it's kind of extraordinary that we're still having a tenor of debate right now. Yeah. And we're still having this very hot debate about it. Right. And yet numbers coming into the country are falling. But we certainly have, in inverted commas, taken back control of migration in recent years and it's fallen very sharply.

14:21Heather how do you think Brexit has shaped Britain's standing on the international stage? I mean it's not been good has it? There have been moments I suppose where you could say we've slightly been able to plough our own furrow a little bit so Keir Starmer has at some points peeled away from the EU in the way that he's handled Donald Trump although you know I'm not quite sure that's better or worse. I'm not sure that's gained us very much. But it's quite hard to see that it's increased our standing, I think. Part of the Brexit argument, I think, was that we were sort of neutered on the world stage a little bit.

14:56We weren't able to take our own individual place because institutions like the World Trade Organization, for example, we were spoken for by the EU because there was an EU seat at the table, there wasn't a UK seat at the table, and this was sort of bad. But I think it's quite hard to think of moments where we have exerted our influence or made our voice heard on the global stage since Brexit and in a way that we weren't able to before. Well, after Brexit, we had, you know, years of conservative rule shaped by the turmoil and debates over Brexit, which again, I don't need to remind you about, but you know, you can forget hard versus versus soft Brexit, Norway style, Norway plus, Canada style, half in, half out, no deal Brexit.

15:33All of it ended with Boris Johnson's hard Brexit and relations with the EU cooling. Then had the election of a Labour government, which signalled something of a shift in Britain's approach to the EU. Heather, what happened? So there has definitely been a sort of quiet rapprochement. There is more warmth than there has been in a long time. We want to work with all of you to reset relationships and renew the bonds of trust and friendship that brighten the fabric of European life. And Labour has this specific but fairly narrow list of things that it's trying to negotiate or well on the way with negotiating, but nothing signed yet.

16:14Like what? For example, a veterinary deal. So the UK's food exporters, very frustrated that their products face checks at the border. You do this deal and you say, OK, we'll abide by all of your rules on that particular sector. And in exchange, could you wave through our lovely products, please? You know, it's fairly narrow things. And the EU, in exchange, wants a youth mobility scheme, which will mean a certain number of young people going backwards and forwards each year. Details to be determined. But Labour set itself these what it called red lines. They can strain themselves quite a lot in the manifesto.

16:47But the truth is that then boxes you in quite significantly in terms of what you can negotiate. And you end up negotiating the sort of little details about specific sectors rather than anything broad brush.

17:07Heather, how do British people feel about Brexit now? I mean, what do the polls say a decade on, you know, does the country stand by its decision? So the latest YouGov poll says 57 % of the public think it was the wrong thing to do to leave, including 23 % of leavers. That's a big portion of people who regret what they chose. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. What we have to remember is that is a different question from, would you like to reopen it all and go back in, right? So 55 % do say rejoin. But then if you say to them, would you like to rejoin fully without the sort of opt-outs that we had before?

17:43So you remember we weren't members of the Euro. We weren't part of the Schengen area. We had a significant rebate. Once you say to people, if we had to go back in but join the Euro and full fat membership, that goes down to 35 % won't rejoin, apparently. So I think it feels like there is a growing consensus that it's not gone that well and a small but growing proportion of Leavers who aren't happy. But then you might not necessarily want to sort of pull the lever to rejoin. You know, I think politicians probably need to be slightly cautious in looking at the fact that people feel unhappy about Brexit and don't think it's gone well doesn't necessarily take you all the way to let's go back in.

18:19Although that obviously is increasingly bubbling up as a discussion point in the Labour Party. It's interesting you talk about it bubbling up in the Labour Party, because from everything we understand about him, Andy Burnham, if he's to become prime minister, is especially pro-Europe. And he has said before that he wants Britain to rejoin the EU in his lifetime. Are you in favour of rejoining the European Union? I've said in the long term there is a case for that, but I'm not advocating that in this by-elect. Heather, how realistic is that? I mean, in his lifetime may well be realistic. In the next parliament, difficult.

18:54So there is a real demographic divide. So 67 % of 18 to 24 year olds would say they want to rejoin. 35 % of over 65s. We're very divided on this, but in a way that seems to favour an increasing weight behind the idea of rejoining over time. I suspect it will take quite a long time. I don't think we're talking about the next two, three, five years. I could be wrong. I think it's a longer term project than that. There was an interview with Jean-Claude Juncker, the former president of the European Commission that the Financial Times did recently. And he said that there's still a feeling in the EU that people were kind of, the phrase he used was wounded by Brexit.

19:33You know, that there was a feeling that we'd sort of done some damage to the whole project by leaving. And if you're the EU, do you want to sit down and expend a lot of time, a lot of energy, a lot of political capital on drawing up a deal with the UK, a notoriously sort of fractious and unreliable part? We've not been a great negotiating partner. It takes me to my next question because I was going to say, I would have assumed that even if the UK wanted to, the EU might not be into us anymore. They might not want to take us back. And yet there's this new polling by the European Council of Foreign Relations which suggests that two-thirds of EU citizens would back us being back in the bloc.

20:12In fact, Michel Barnier, that total blast from the past, the former Brexit negotiator, has said recently he thought it could be done with us still keeping the pound and still keeping out of the passport-free Schengen zone. Heather, how likely do you think it is that we would be welcomed back again with open arms? Well, I think that it would be a publicity coup for the project, right? To say, you know, I think it was a sadness that we left. I think you'd also have to confront, you'd have to say to the public, well, we're going back to free movement, which we've talked about how toxic the migration debate, it feels like we're quite a long way to go.

20:47So, I mean, you have to wonder why the EU would sit down with us, because if you're them, you're looking at the opinion polls in Britain and you're thinking, well, it looks like there might be a Farage government. Why would you spend a single nanosecond really doing a deal with the UK that you would know that a right wing government might unpick as soon as it could? So I think there would have to be a really settled opinion in the UK that we wanted to go back. You could have a Labour manifesto that said, we will open negotiations to rejoin, I suppose. And then if there was a ringing endorsement of that, maybe you start tiptoeing towards it.

21:23But again, if you're a Labour government, how much of your time and energy do you want to put into that if you feel that Brussels isn't really ready to engage because they think we're a load of, you know, short-termist, kind of indecisive, you know, whatever. Just can't make up our minds. Exactly.