Brexit has been a success – although not nearly as much of one as if we had taken advantage of the freedoms it gives us
by Martin Howe KC, 23 June 2026
It is now 10 years since the British people voted by a small but decisive majority to leave the European Union and take back control of our laws and our destiny.
But regaining the right to control our own laws is not the same as actually exercising that right. The advantages of Brexit arise from choosing to do things differently from the way we were forced to do them when we were in the EU. With Starmer’s so-called “Reset”, now likely to be carried on by Burnham, the prospect is that we will apply EU laws in more and more areas under the mechanism of so-called “dynamic alignment”.
This mechanism already applies to EU single market laws in Northern Ireland. Under it, we would take on the existing body of EU laws and in addition have to apply new laws and amendments, without having a vote on them. So we would have all the disadvantages of loss of control of being EU members but without the right to participate in EU decision making. This is a worst-of-all-worlds state of vassalage, and ten years on we need to reflect on how we have got here.
A catalogue of failures and missed opportunities
The Brexit process set off on the wrong foot with the Conservative Party’s disastrous election of Theresa May, a Remainer, as its leader and prime minister. She allowed the remainer-dominated civil service to hijack her EU (Withdrawal) Act 2018 into being a vehicle for keeping as much EU law as possible with the blatantly obvious purpose of making it easier for the UK to rejoin the EU in due course. Billed as repealing the European Communities Act 1972 which gave effect to EU law within the UK, her 2018 Withdrawal Act in fact preserved almost the whole body of EU laws which had been imposed on the UK during our membership by tuning it into so-called Retained EU Law.
Not only did this Act carry forward existing EU laws (including principles like the supremacy of EU law over national law) after Brexit, but it made ECJ judgments interpreting those laws continue to be binding on our courts. The Act provided for the correction of defects, but provided no mechanism for repealing or amending the substance of Retained EU Law and in fact made it harder to do so.
The huge volume of EU laws which we had accumulated during membership could not all be repealed overnight in one fell swoop. So we needed a transitional regime of temporarily carrying them forward while they were reviewed and repealed or amended to bring them into line with our national interest. But such a regime should have been time limited and should never have involved giving binding effect to the judgments of a court which became wholly foreign to the UK after Brexit.
Theresa May’s errors on internal law in her 2018 Act were more than matched by her Withdrawal Agreement. Her poor political direction was compounded by the utter and tragic incompetence of the civil service team sent to “negotiate” it, who were apparently devoid of any legal or negotiating skills or experience whatever. The resulting Agreement was an utter disaster from end to end, turning Northern Ireland into a permanent EU colony and reducing the whole UK to a vassal-state relationship with the EU through a customs union relationship under which the UK would have to follow all EU tariffs and have no right to enter into its own trade agreements.
Fortunately this Agreement was so obviously disastrous that it led to the replacement of Theresa May by Boris Johnson who negotiated changes and then secured his 2019 general election victory on the promise of getting Brexit done.
In fairness, the changes which Johnson secured to Theresa May’s original agreement were important and substantial. He removed the so-called Backstop, which would have tied the UK into a customs union with the EU and would have prevented us conducting our independent trade policy. He secured limited changes to the Northern Ireland customs regime, allowing some goods to come into NI under the UK tariff regime instead of having to pass through the EU’s external tariff wall.
Unfortunately, other malignant aspects of the Withdrawal Agreement were not changed, including the continuing direct effect and supremacy of EU law in relation to Northern Ireland and the rights of EU citizens, and its continuing obligations to make post Brexit budget payments to the EU which were not required by international law. Johnson made promises to address these problems, particularly the EU colony status of Northern Ireland, which were never kept.
The Johnson government’s steps to remove EU laws from the UK were limited and patchy. No systematic programme of review and repeal or amendment was undertaken until too late in the Parliament, when Jacob Rees-Mogg’s Bill to deal with retained EU regulations was disastrously watered down by Kemi Badenoch when she took over as Business Secretary and removed the automatic sunsetting clauses.
There were however some limited but important departures from EU laws and court decisions. Notably, a Bill was passed to permit gene editing of crops – although it was implemented by a painfully slow process under which the regulations allowing it to go ahead did not come into force before the Tories lost office at the general election.
The Northern Ireland problem was not dealt with. Instead of ending the EU’s law making powers over Northern Ireland, the Sunak government rebadged the Northern Ireland Protocol incongruously as the “Windsor Framework” and made deep and permanent concessions damaging to the sovereignty and integrity of the United Kingdom and the long term future of Northern Ireland, in return for some very limited easings of the processes for UK supermarkets to distribute goods to their branches in Northern Ireland – distributions inside our country which should never have been subjected to EU laws or control in the first place.
These problems were overshadowed by the Tories’ policies on immigration. Brexit gave this country the right to cut down on the disastrously high level of immigration by stopping or at least restricting the entry of EU nationals under the treaty right of free movement of persons. But instead of taking advantage of this Brexit freedom, Johnson instead opened up the country to the “Boris wave” of low-skill low-wage high-dependency-ratio million plus immigration, doubling it from the previous unacceptably high levels. This was compounded by the Conservatives’ total failure to deal with illegal immigration, a direct consequence of the majority of its Parliamentary party being slavishly wedded to the European Convention on Human Rights and unwilling to curtail the impact of out-of-control judicial activism on the ability of the UK to control our borders.
Has Brexit been a success?
This is a natural question to ask, ten years on from the referendum. Given this history, it is not surprising that very many people who voted “leave” are disappointed by what has happened and are left with feelings of anger, outrage or betrayal. Many people quite understandably blame Brexit for Boris’s mass immigration wave, when in fact it was the deliberate policy choice of him and his government.
Nonetheless, my answer is that Brexit has overall been a success, even if it has been much less of a success than if a determined government had actually tried to implement it and take advantage of our Brexit freedoms. The UK’s departure allowed us to develop an effective anti-Covid vaccine and deploy it much more rapidly than if we had remained an EU member. There have been some limited positive relaxations of restrictive EU laws such as gene editing, and also in financial services.
Our independant international trade policy has been a success. Most notably in December 2024 we joined the Trans Pacific Partnership, a huge and rapidly growing trade bloc with freedom to trade based on mutual recognition of standards, as opposed to the EU’s stifling attempts to impose its own restrictive regulations on its trade partners. The importance of the CPTPP to our international trade will grow as the low-growth EU continues to fade.
And ironically, one of the biggest advantages has arisen from the do-nothing torpor of the British State under both the Tory and Labour administrations. Even though their inertia and torpor has prevented them from actively repealing or amending damaging EU laws, at least the UK has not taken on board and adopted the torrent of damaging, restricting and growth destroying Directives and Regulations which the EU has been imposing on its members since we left. A particular example is artificial intelligence, an industry with huge potential to the future, which we are free to regulate according to our own wishes and national interest without being hobbled by the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689).
Brexit gave us the freedom to do things our way, according to the wishes of our voters and without the dictates of foreign organisations. Despite the disappointing failure of successive governments to take advantage of Brexit freedoms, they are still there for a future government and Parliament to take advantage of. British politicians can no longer hide behind the EU and claim that they cannot solve our problems because of EU laws. It is now in our hands to work for a future Parliament which has the will and determination to sweep away the legal detritus of our EU membership, and replace it entirely with laws made in the United Kingdom for the benefit of the United Kingdom and its people.
