Ten Years into Brexit: Britain’s Constant Political Chaos
HIIA Perspective – Written by Dorina Molnár
On June 23, 2016, the British voted to leave the European Union with a narrow, yet sufficient majority. Recent articles on the tenth anniversary of Brexit usually assess the economic costs and benefits of leaving the EU. However, Brexit did not just mean a long-lasting impact on the British economy and its ties with continental Europe—it rewired its entire political culture. In the last decade, the party system fractured, and constant political crises became the norm. The political dysfunction is both a symptom of that decline and one of its engines: as the rise of Reform UK at the decade’s end shows, the forces Brexit unleashed have not been contained but have become the new shape of British politics.
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Downing Street’s Temporary Residents
Britain experienced extraordinary turnover at the top: six prime ministers in a decade (the last, Keir Starmer, having just resigned), each consumed, in different ways, by the contradictions Brexit created. David Cameron resigned right after the leave vote, since he campaigned strongly against Brexit. Theresa May was handed a mandate to negotiate a Brexit deal—though having neither majority support in Parliament, nor an agreed definition in the Conservative Party about what the deal should look like. Her negotiated Withdrawal Agreement was rejected by Westminster three times. Her cabinet had a record-high number of ministerial resignations, most over disagreements about the Brexit negotiations. She also faced votes of no confidence and finally announced her resignation in May 2019.
Boris Johnson won the next general election with a landslide on the simple campaign promise of “Get Brexit Done”—which he fulfilled in a narrow legal sense, but probably not as many have imagined. Later, his government collapsed under the weight of its own scandals, including the Partygate during COVID, the Chris Pincher affair, and the Owen Paterson episode. After the unprecedented resignation of more than 50 ministers and government aides within 48 hours, Johnson announced his departure from Downing Street in July 2022. Even after his resignation, he got involved in the Honours Scandal, in which his resignation honors list—the traditional prime ministerial list of peerages awarded on leaving office—was widely condemned as a reward for loyalty rather than public service.
Then came the 49-day premiership of Liz Truss, with the promise of tax cuts. When she and Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng unveiled £45 billion of unfunded cuts, the markets panicked: the pound crashed, and government borrowing costs spiked, requiring an emergency Bank of England bailout. This episode damaged not only the Conservative Party, but also the British reputation for fiscal responsibility.
Rishi Sunak, who seemed like a competent administrator to manage the chaos, took over this already exhausted and discredited Conservative Party. Among others, the increasing cost of living, inflation, immigration, and Reform UK pulling away right-wing voters led to the worst Tory election result since 1906, which was a terminal consequence of years of Brexit-driven instability.
Then came Keir Starmer and the landslide victory of Labour—whose popularity only lasted for a few months. From symbolic mistakes, such as cutting the winter fuel allowance for pensioners or the gifts scandal, to the inability to fix a broken state combined with his non-charismatic stiff style all led to the collapse of his premiership just as the tenth anniversary of Brexit is approaching.
Although the personal and tactical failures of the residents of 10 Downing Street could be listed extensively, the broader patterns of the UK since the Brexit referendum are much more important. This decade revealed the deep structural dysfunction of British politics; the media and political culture became so adversarial and short-termist that any prime minister’s mistake was immediately fatal. Britain’s long-standing political system was designed for stability—something that was stress-tested by Brexit and found surprisingly fragile.
The Self-Destruction of the Conservative Party
If the frequently changing prime ministers were visible symptoms, the deeper cause lay in the party that produced most of them. Brexit was a loyalty test that the Tories couldn’t pass. This didn’t start with the referendum: the Conservatives had been arguing about Britain’s relationship with Europe since the late 1980s. David Cameron suggested the Brexit referendum precisely to silence the Euroskeptic voices, at least for a while. Nevertheless, the referendum had quite the opposite effect: the “Europe question” (and all related issues, such as immigration) became the defining axis of the Conservative Party.
Even after the referendum, many Tories were pro-Remain. In 2019, Boris Johnson suspended Parliament to keep it away from scrutinizing his Brexit strategy—which turned out to be unlawful according to the Supreme Court’s judgment. He also expelled 21 Members of Parliament (MPs) from the faction who voted to prevent a no-deal Brexit. Such events led to deep fractures within the Conservative Party.
The European Research Group (ERG), the hard-liner Euroskeptic caucus of the Tory MPs, functioned as a permanent veto power and pressure group for years. It sustained enough members to deny any leader a majority in the Commons and used its power repeatedly: destroying Theresa May’s deal, pushing Boris Johnson toward a harder line, and resisting agreement with the EU on the question of Northern Ireland.
Labour’s landslide victory and the extreme unpopularity of Conservatives in the 2024 elections were the results of a decade in which the party had, in pursuit of getting Brexit done, made itself ungovernable, unelectable, and heavily divided.
The Endless Brexit Negotiations
It’s beyond the capacity of any single article to describe the Brexit negotiations in detail, but one thing is for sure: it seemed like a never-ending story for British voters. The text of the Withdrawal Agreement—which governs citizens’ rights, financial obligations, and the Irish border among others—took two and a half years to negotiate and was rejected by the Commons three times. The Article 50 deadline was extended twice, and each episode was a public admission that the government couldn’t deliver its promises. Not to mention the media spotlight and polarization of Brexit, making compromises difficult and each concession to Brussels a weakness.
Finally, Johnson’s deal that was signed on Christmas Eve of 2020 was presented as a victory. Voters expected that sovereignty would be restored, and a new prosperous chapter could begin. Nevertheless, trade friction with the EU increased, and disputes over financial services (one of the UK’s most important sectors), fisheries, data adequacy, and Northern Ireland continued for years. Getting the Brexit deal done meant closing one argument but opening several others.
Northern Ireland Furious: The Border That Couldn’t Be Named
The Northern Ireland Protocol is worth elaborating on briefly, since it illustrates how the UK found itself wanting to leave the EU and preserve the status quo simultaneously. Brexit required the UK to leave the EU’s single market, but this created an impossible situation: if goods could flow freely across the Irish land border (the one between Ireland—an EU member—and Northern Ireland—part of the UK—kept open by the 1998 Good Friday Agreement), they would enter and leave the EU unchecked.
The solution was to place customs checks in the Irish Sea instead, instituting them between Northern Ireland and mainland Britain: in practice, a border within the UK itself. This left Unionists angry, as they saw Northern Ireland being separated from the rest of the country. Precisely because of this controversy, British politicians insisted there was no such border control between the two parts of their country and tried to bury the truth with vague legal language.
Scotland Also Furious: Independence?
62 percent of Scots voted to remain in the referendum and were dragged into leaving the EU anyway because of the English votes. Scottish politicians have been demanding a new independence referendum, repeatedly rejected by London. The argument was that there was a Scottish independence referendum in 2014, while pro-independence voices emphasized that back then, they voted to remain in a UK that was part of the EU. The Scottish–English relationship hasn’t been without friction anyway, but Brexit increased tensions. Therefore, the rewiring of politics by Brexit did not stop at parties and prime ministers but reached the integrity of the state itself.
“Remoaners” and “Brexiteers”: Culture War
Before the referendum, British politics was primarily structured around class: the working class voted Labour, and the middle class voted Conservative (of course, with exceptions). However, Brexit redrew the political map. Geography (the divide between cities and smaller settlements), age, and education became the new faultlines.
Brexit became a new identity marker, following a tribal logic. Remainers who continued to argue against Brexit were labeled “Remoaners” (Remainer + moaner), while Brexiteers (leavers) were accused of being racist and duped. Gradually, objective arguments and evidence were replaced by identity and group membership. It wasn’t just about Brexit narrowly: this dynamic crept into debates about immigration, statues, universities, free speech, the BBC, and so on.
The Winner of the Last Decade: Reform UK
While mainstream parties suffered lasting damage in the post-Brexit decade, Nigel Farage’s party disrupted the traditional two-party system of Britain. Reform UK’s predecessor, the UK Independence Party (UKIP), spent two decades as a pressure group without proper election wins due to Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system. (Farage was only first elected as an MP in 2024!)
Although their main mission was to drive Britain out of the EU, Farage successfully managed to turn their single-issue movement into an established party across the country. Though its agenda extends well beyond Brexit, Brexit’s political DNA runs through it. Reform’s core offer is a radical criticism of the British state and its institutions, progressive ideology, and elites that have overlooked “ordinary people,” and advocates for sharp cuts in immigration, lower taxes, and withdrawal from international human rights frameworks. These positions are not directly related to Brexit, but they mobilize the same coalition and have common roots.
Reform’s rise put the Conservatives in a difficult situation. To compete with Reform for right-wing voters, the Tories must move toward the right in their positions, making them unelectable to moderate or swing voters. To get those moderate votes, they risk losing their right-wing voters to Reform. The result may be, at least in short term, that the right-of-center vote is split, which would keep Labour in power despite significant discontent with its governance. On the other hand, Reform confidently leads the polls ahead of both Labour and the Conservatives. What is certain is that the traditional two-party system ceased to exist, and the dominance of mainstream parties is heavily questioned.
Brexit May Be Over, but It Fundamentally Changed British Politics
Ten years after the referendum, Brexit remains a live political force rather than a settled chapter. Although no relevant party advocates for rejoining the EU, the practical frictions of Brexit—like trade, Northern Ireland, or European labor—generate constant political pressure even today.
Keir Starmer’s recent resignation symbolically marks the tenth anniversary of the referendum. On a tactical level, it was about approval ratings and policy misjudgments, but the structural conditions were inherited and mishandled: austerity, public finances with no room for maneuver, and a highly polarized political culture as well as voters’ distrust in governments that subsequently failed to deliver.
What the decade has demonstrated is that the forces Brexit released—the distrust of institutions, the demand for radical change, the fragmentation of the political center—have not been resolved; they continue to shape British politics.
A shortened version of this piece was originally published by Geo-Polemic.