A warm reception, despite the rain<\/strong><\/p>\n Throughout, Seldon embraced the Festival atmosphere, leaning into comic asides and references, with timing better than several comedians I saw during the Fringe. He opened by joking that he was glad to be in Glasgow, before describing Edinburgh as his \u2018favourite city in Europe\u2019. He was hardly short of goodwill in the room.\u00a0<\/p>\n Reading the audience<\/strong><\/p>\n One of his worst experiences as a public speaker, he said, came in Henley, Boris Johnson\u2019s former constituency. He had failed to notice that almost everyone in the room was a committed Brexiteer with little patience for his sceptical and reasoned position. In Edinburgh, Seldon repeatedly tested the room with show-of-hands questions about Brexit and soon established that most of those in front of him were Remain voters, many of whom would like to see the UK rejoin the EU as soon as possible. When he later asked how many wanted the UK to rejoin, around 95 per cent of hands went up.<\/p>\n That reading of the audience shaped the discussion. Seldon felt he needed to explain why Brexit had happened in the first place, while also making the point that a book festival audience is not representative of the country as a whole. He returned more than once to people who felt \u2018left out\u2019 of the centres of power and influence, and to the resentment he said the Leave campaign had exploited with considerable skill.Though weaponised, these resentments were genuine and justified.\u00a0<\/p>\n Why Brexit still divides<\/strong><\/p>\n Seldon argued that Brexit had been \u2018deeply divisive\u2019 in 2016 and had remained so ever since. He described it as the most significant political event in Britain since 1945. People remain \u2018so invested\u2019 in their view of Brexit that the position they take has become part of their identity, making it difficult to reach an honest judgement about whether Brexit has succeeded or failed. He also argued that the debate had been dominated by the \u2018predominance of emotion\u2019 rather than reasoned argument.<\/p>\n Part of the difficulty, in his view, is that Brexit sits awkwardly with the overlapping identities most people actually have. He mentioned his own Scottish and Ukrainian ancestry as an example of an identity that does not fit easily into the binary politics of a yes\/ no referendum. Aware that he was speaking largely to a Remain audience, Seldon was careful to say that \u2019emotion was on both sides\u2019. It was not simply a matter of reason versus emotion. He argued that Remain\u2019s leadership had been arrogant and out of touch with the \u2018deep hurt\u2019 felt by people who believed decisions were being imposed on them by remote institutions such as the EU. Immigration and the aftermath of the financial crisis had fed that resentment. He also believed the EU had made a serious mistake by not offering David Cameron\u2019s government more concessions before the vote. A greater willingness to respect views different from one\u2019s own, he suggested, might have changed the result and lowered the temperature of what followed.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ten lost years<\/strong><\/p>\n Taylor and Seldon then moved through specific areas of policy. On the economy, Seldon said it was \u2018almost impossible\u2019 to regard Brexit as an economic success, pointing to the damage experienced by small businesses and by the \u2018most vulnerable\u2019 members of society. He linked this to what he called \u201910 lost years\u2019 in British politics, which he said could be seen in crumbling public infrastructure and a wider sense of national decline. On immigration, he said border security had become much more prominent in political debate, while it was difficult to identify a clear benefit that Brexit had actually delivered. Yet, he noted, Brexiteers had largely escaped blame for that failure.<\/p>\n A referendum without rules<\/strong><\/p>\n For Seldon, the deeper problem lay in the \u2018catastrophic way\u2019 the whole process had been handled. Leave campaigners were never required to set out a detailed plan for what Brexit would actually mean. The term therefore remained remarkably flexible, capable of meaning different things to different audiences. Seldon described this as a \u2018big error\u2019 that worked heavily in Leave\u2019s favour.<\/p>\n During the Q&A, an audience member asked whether the referendum should have included a minimum percentage of the electorate threshold, as happened with the 1979 Scottish devolution vote. Seldon thought it would have helped and used the question to make a wider point: there is \u2018no agreed structure\u2019 for referendums in the British system, which he described as still basically \u2018alien to our system\u2019. Cameron, he argued, avoided discussing thresholds because he wanted to \u2018force it through\u2019 without delay. Seldon described the referendum itself as \u2018ill conceived\u2019 and \u2018amateurish\u2019.<\/p>\n He was equally critical of the campaign. Remain\u2019s effort, he said, had been \u2018terrible\u2019. Cameron, Seldon argued, was too frightened of the Conservative press to make a positive case for EU membership and had never been particularly interested in the issue in the first place. Seldon suggested that Cameron had hoped that dealing with Scottish independence and EU membership in quick succession would allow him to get back to what he really wanted to do, \u2018the important stuff\u2019, including his Big Society agenda. Brexit instead became \u2018a distraction\u2019 from which he never recovered. Seldon showed little sympathy for him on this point.<\/p>\n He was also critical of Labour\u2019s role, arguing that Jeremy Corbyn\u2019s leadership weakened the Remain case (Corbyn came from the Eurosceptic Bennite faction). A more capable and clearly pro-EU figure such as Gordon Brown, whom Seldon believes history will judge kindly, might have produced a different campaign and perhaps a different result.<\/p>\n A dangerous age, and the worst prime ministers<\/strong><\/p>\n Asked whether the UK might one day rejoin the EU, Seldon thought it unlikely for at least 20 years, despite the overwhelming show of hands in the room. His preference would instead be for closer ties with the rest of Europe, which he saw as a defence against what he called a \u2018dangerous, sinister age\u2019. He cited Russian influence, the rise of autocracy and what he described as democracy being \u2018in recession\u2019, including in established democracies such as the United States. He compared the current situation with George Orwell\u2019s 1984, with large power blocs competing for control; a return to the 1930s.\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/image-41.png\")
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