Since the United Kingdom formally left the European Union on January 31, 2020, British politicians have largely avoided, as much as possible, putting the Brexit issue back up for debate. Voters have grown weary of the divisions generated by the June 2016 referendum on leaving the EU and the endless negotiations with Brussels that followed. Keir Starmer, Labour’s relatively pro-European leader, has notably been rather cautious and rarely addressed the separation, paralyzed by the prospect of alienating working-class Brexit supporters whose votes he sought to win for his party. This strategy paid off in the 2024 general election.
The Conservatives now no longer dare to boast about having brought Brexit to fruition after the chaotic tenures of anti-EU prime ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, and their failure to produce tangible benefits for UK citizens. Even Nigel Farage, leader of the far-right Reform UK party and spiritual father of Brexit, has since appeared to lose interest in it, having shifted the target of his scapegoating from the EU to immigrants.
While the economic disaster that Brexit opponents had predicted did not come to pass, the forecasts that the UK’s independent fiscal watchdog issued in 2020 have remained widely accepted. These projections suggested that leaving the EU would, in the long term, reduce the UK’s global trade volume by 15% and cut productivity by 4%. While Brexit has allowed the UK to sign its own free trade agreements and reach a deal on tariffs for its exports with the US ahead of the EU, the gains from these trade deals have been modest.
Regulatory alignment
Over the past three years, polls have consistently shown that Brexit has become unpopular. In June 2025, 56% of Britons said their country should not have left the EU, according to the polling institute YouGov. In September 2025, 62% of respondents considered Brexit a failure. Against this backdrop, Prime Minister Starmer, though previously timid and lacking in vision, changed his strategy in the autumn. While he has continued to restrain his desire for closer EU-UK ties to mere regulatory alignment, he has finally dared to clearly condemn lies spread by Brexit supporters during the 2016 referendum campaign on the issue, such as their promises that Brexit would halt migration and grant the National Health Service £350 million every week.
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