10 years on from Brexit, King’s College London asked 2,245 people their thoughts on the decision to leave the European Union. The study found that 43 per cent of people now say David Cameron was right to hold the EU referendum – down from 66 per cent in 2016. But, the share saying it was the wrong decision is still short of a majority, even if it has risen from 24 per cent to 38 per cent.
But what would life in Britain be like if we’d stayed in the European Union? Anand Menon is a professor of European politics and foreign affairs at King’s College London and the founding director of the UK in a Changing Europe academic think-tank. As a world-leading expert on Brexit, he reveals what life might have looked like. “The challenge of assessing the impact of Brexit,” says Menon, “is made terribly complicated by the fact that not only did we have Brexit, but we had Covid-19, we had the war in Ukraine, we’ve got what’s going on in the Gulf now. The data is extremely noisy and messy – but here’s what we can speculate on.”
We’d be richer
“We’d be more prosperous if we’d voted Remain,” says Menon. “The evidence is unequivocal on that front.” The initial, catastrophic recession that the Treasury predicted – dubbed by the Leave campaign as Project Fear – did not happen, but economists and researchers agree that longer term, the economy is a lot smaller than it would otherwise have been.
