Ten Years On: Revisiting the Left-Wing Case for Brexit
A decade ago, the United Kingdom made one of the most consequential decisions in its modern history. On 23 June 2016, British voters chose to leave the European Union in a referendum that shocked political establishments across the continent and beyond. In newsrooms, universities, and dinner parties, the result was met with disbelief — and in many quarters, that disbelief has never fully dissolved. But ten years on, it is worth stepping back from the noise and asking a harder, more honest question: was Brexit actually the right call?
For those who argued the left-wing case for leaving the EU — a minority position in media circles at the time — the answer is yes. And the decade that has followed has done more to reinforce that position than to undermine it.
A Newsroom in Mourning — and One Dissenting Voice
On the morning after the referendum result, much of Britain's media was shell-shocked. The Guardian's newsroom, by one account, was deathly quiet — a place in mourning. Virtually every columnist at the paper had backed Remain, and the shock of defeat was made sharper by the near-universal expectation that their side would win. With one notable exception: economics editor Larry Elliott, who had made the left-wing case for Brexit and found himself on the receiving end of more than a few pointed looks from colleagues.
That case — rooted not in nationalism or nostalgia, but in economics, democracy, and class — is worth restating clearly in this anniversary year. Because the arguments made in 2016 have not aged badly. If anything, they have grown more compelling.
The EU's Economic Underperformance: A Decade of Evidence
One of the central pillars of the left-wing Brexit argument was that the European Union, as an economic project, was simply not delivering. This was not a fringe view conjured for the occasion — it was a reading of decades of data. When Britain first sought membership of what was then the European Economic Community, the major continental economies were growing rapidly and closing the gap with the United States. European integration seemed like an engine of prosperity. That story has not held up.
In the more than seventeen years since the 2008 financial crisis, the United States economy has grown by approximately 87%. The European Union, over the same period, has managed around 13.5% — less than one-sixth of American growth. That is a staggering divergence, and it matters enormously when evaluating the economic case for EU membership. The bloc that was once held up as a model of coordinated prosperity has become, by many metrics, a zone of prolonged stagnation.
Defenders of the EU will rightly point out that the UK has faced its own post-Brexit economic turbulence. The Office for Budget Responsibility has estimated meaningful costs to trade and output from leaving the single market. These costs are real and should not be dismissed. But they must be weighed against the trajectory the EU itself was on — and continues to be on. Remaining inside a structurally underperforming bloc would not have been a free pass to prosperity.
Brexit and the Politics of Class
Perhaps the most revealing — and most uncomfortable — truth exposed by the Brexit vote was this: class still matters in British politics. The referendum did not divide the country neatly along party lines. It divided it along lines of education, geography, income, and the experience of economic change. The towns and communities that had been left behind by decades of deindustrialisation, financialisation, and globalisation voted, overwhelmingly, to leave.
This was not a cry of ignorance, as some Remain supporters suggested. It was a political signal — rational, coherent, and long overdue. These were communities that had watched manufacturing disappear, wages stagnate, and public services hollowed out, while being told by successive governments of both parties that there was no alternative. The EU, with its rules on state aid, its commitment to the four freedoms, and its structural bias toward market liberalisation, was not going to offer them a different path. The left-wing case for Brexit was, at its core, a case for democratic self-determination: the ability of a country to chart its own economic course, to invest in its own industries, to prioritise its own workers.
What Brexit Made Possible — and What Remains Unfinished
It would be dishonest to claim that Britain has fully seized the opportunities that Brexit opened up. The years following the vote were consumed by political chaos, and much of the potential for a genuine economic reset was squandered. A left-wing Brexit — one focused on industrial strategy, regional investment, and rebalancing power away from the City of London — was never really tried.
But the case for leaving was never solely about what would immediately follow. It was about restoring the capacity to make different choices. EU membership, with its strict constraints on state aid and public ownership, would have blocked many of the interventions that a genuinely reforming government might wish to pursue. Outside the EU, those options exist — even if they have not yet been exercised with the ambition the moment required.
The Debate Britain Still Needs to Have
Ten years on, the Brexit debate has not ended — it has merely gone underground. Calls for a closer relationship with the EU, or even for eventual rejoining, are growing louder in some quarters. These arguments deserve to be taken seriously and engaged with honestly. But they should not be allowed to erase the legitimate reasons why 17.4 million people voted Leave, or to pretend that the EU's structural problems have disappeared.
The left-wing case for Brexit was never about borders or flags. It was about democracy, economic sovereignty, and the political representation of communities that had been ignored for too long. That case has not collapsed under the weight of events. If anything, a clear-eyed look at a decade of EU economic data, and a decade of British political upheaval, suggests the fundamental instinct was sound — even if the execution fell far short of what was needed.
The Brexit vote showed that class still matters. The task now is to prove that leaving the EU can actually deliver for the people who voted for it — and that task remains very much unfinished.