Need to Know

August 21, 2023

Bregret

United Kingdom

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Seven years ago, a majority of British voters opted to remove their country from the European Union. Now many are having second thoughts – or “Bregret,” as the New Statesman termed it.

The United Kingdom’s exit from the EU is estimated to have shaved four percent off the country’s gross domestic product, because companies moved across the channel to the bloc’s nations to access the common market and imports from the EU, the country’s biggest trading partner, became more expensive.

It has caused headaches at border crossings with Ireland, France, Gibraltar, and elsewhere. It’s made Scottish independence more likely. If Britons could vote on rejoining Europe, 55 percent say they would cast ballots to return to the bloc, according to YouGov.

“There’s a growing understanding in Britain that the country’s vote to quit the EU, a decisive moment in the international rise of reactionary populism, was a grave error,” wrote New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg recently.

Even the former leader of the UK Independence Party, Nigel Farage, who helped engineer Brexit, believes it is a failure, Politico reported. “We’ve mismanaged this totally,” he said.

It’s no wonder that pundits now predict that the governing Conservative Party that promoted and presided over Brexit will likely lose control of parliament when the country holds its next general election no later than January 2025, according to National Public Radio.

Meanwhile, negotiations over Brexit are still ongoing. Scottish salmon producers, for example, complained to IntraFish, a trade publication, that they are still waiting for the British government to enact protocols to reduce the paperwork necessary to export their catches to Europe.

These problems have emboldened advocates of Scottish independence, who believe they could rejoin the EU around four years after breaking away from the central government in London, Scottish newspaper the National said.

Diplomats are also still discussing the border between Northern Ireland, a British territory, and the Republic of Ireland to the south. As the BBC reported, Northern Ireland remained in the EU’s single market while retaining its British sovereignty. Under the current agreement regulating trade in the region, from October green and red truck lanes in Northern Irish ports will help customs officials manage commerce between the different jurisdictions, but it is a system that a House of Lords committee said would be burdensome to businesses.

Officials in the British territory of Gibraltar on the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula are also hoping to finalize an agreement to ensure that Spanish workers can cross the border to their jobs, the Financial Times added.

The thought of reversing the purpose of these talks to reconnect the UK to Europe, rather than finalizing the separation between the two, is likely one of the greatest obstacles to the country rejoining the EU.

As EU officials like to say, with some regret: They made their bed.

This story originally appeared in the August 21, 2023 newsletter, Bregret.