It is June 24th, 2025 and Britons are celebrating their 10th annual Independence Day. They have so much to celebrate. The United Kingdom is now Europe’s foremost knowledge-based economy.
It leads the world in biotech, law, education, the audio-visual sector and financial services and it is the global software design capital. New industries, from 3D printing to driverless cars, have sprung up around the country. Older industries like steel production and shipping have revived remarkably.
The only question on the minds of the revellers as they watch the fireworks stream across the clear summer sky is why Britain waited so long to leave the EU.
This is not science fiction. Well it is, but it is not meant to be
It had all been so easy in the end. After the immediate shock, the Europeans had come to their senses and realised that there was no point in fighting reality. Terms were agreed easily enough: Britain withdrew from the EU’s political structures and institutions but retained free access to the single market.
By the time the UK formally left the EU on July 1st, 2019, it had already replicated all the EU’s external trade deals. But it had also concluded much more liberal deals with the US, China, India and Australia. All done in record time and fully ready to become operational as soon as Brexit went into effect.
And as for all that Irish Border nonsense, it was never an issue. Why? Because Ireland, along with Denmark and the Netherlands, has also left the EU.
By June 2025, Ireland is one of 22 member states in a new British-led free trade bloc that stretches from Norway to Turkey and from the Aran Islands to Ukraine’s border with Russia. The Irish referendum on Irexit took place in 2020, and because the UK was so obviously flourishing outside the EU, the result was never in doubt.
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This is not science fiction. Well it is, but it is not meant to be. This is the exact scenario put before UK voters on June 21st, 2016, two days before they voted in the referendum, by the leading Brexiteer intellectual (and then Tory MEP) Daniel Hannan. This is what they were going to get and all they had to do was put a mark on a ballot paper.
Hannan’s fantasia was not, in Brexitworld, extreme. This is the future the voters were promised. The proposition in 2016 was not (yet) “no pain, no gain”. It was “all gain, no pain”.
In itself, Brexit is a perfectly respectable idea. There would even be something admirable in saying to voters: national pride matters more to us than material comfort. This is going to hurt, but we should do it because we just can’t stand being in the EU with all those merely ordinary countries.
The only things Johnson believes in are his own destiny, his own convenience, his own pleasure
But this is emphatically not the choice UK voters were offered. What was dangled before them was the idea that, in effect, no choice had to be made at all. You can, in Boris Johnson’s infamous formulation, eat the cake and still have the cake. You can leave the EU and have all the benefits of being in the EU – plus all the benefits of being outside.
The remarkable thing is not that just over half of them voted for this best of all possible worlds, but that almost half voted against.
In trying to understand the state of the Brexit project now, we have to go back and ask: what did the Brexiteers themselves really think about this fantasy future? More to the point – were they lying to voters or only to themselves? They divide, I think, into three categories: believers, opportunists and disruptors.
Hannan, I’m sure, was (and is) a true believer, which is to say, he is sincerely deluded. He is part of a hard core of anti-EU ideologues. They are driven by two articles of faith. One is that Britain is innately and naturally great – therefore, if this greatness has gone behind a cloud (the EU), it just needs to blow the cloud away and its happy people will be bathed again in the warming rays of a red-white-and-blue sun. The other is that regulation kills wealth creation, and so, cut loose from Brussels “red tape”, every industry in the UK will automatically thrive.
The opportunists are embodied, of course, by Johnson. Does he believe the fantasy or not? To ask the question is to misunderstand him – the only things he believes in are his own destiny, his own convenience, his own pleasure.
Johnson's opportunism is running out of road. He can't convince anyone (even himself?) that he believes his own bluster
All of these are best served by acting out the make-believe story. And, as any method actor will tell you, you perform best when you convince yourself that the role-play is real. You suspend your disbelief so that your audience will do likewise.
The chief of the disruptors is Dominic Cummings. For Cummings, Brexit is not primarily about the EU at all. It is a wrecking ball aimed at the British institutions he despises: parliament, the judiciary, the Tory Party, the civil service, the BBC, Oxbridge. He (rightly) perceived that Brexit would radically destabilise his own country. For him, that's the point.
For all the political chaos it has unleashed, the Brexit project has remained viable because it has been able to keep these three kinds of motivation more or less together. They have overlapped sufficiently.
The Hannan types thought they could use the opportunists to get them to the promised land. Johnson liked the fantasists’ airy scenarios because they saved him the bother of having to have a plan or engage with details. Cummings could justify the disruption by telling himself that a Hannanesque utopia lay just the far side of it.
But two realities have refused to bend themselves to the Brexiteers’ wills. The EU, inexplicably and maliciously, has not seen sense and given Britain a self-renewing supply of free cake. And Ireland has stupidly not left the EU. These actualities have undermined both the fantasist and the opportunist positions.
On the one hand, Hannan and his fellow idealists look increasingly like one those cults that promised the Rapture on a certain date and are devastated to find themselves boringly alive on the same old Earth the next morning.
On the other, Johnson’s opportunism is running out of road. He can’t convince anyone (even himself?) that he believes his own bluster about the “golden age” that is a-coming by and by. The performance is becoming an embarrassment even (perhaps especially) to his own fans.
And that leaves only the disruptor. If you hate almost all of Britain’s institutions in the way Cummings does, the idea of Brexit as the dynamite that will explode under them is not failing.
It is succeeding far beyond expectations. Who would have thought that the prestige of the British state could be brought so low that it could not even manage to honour an international treaty for nine months?
It may be floundering in every other respect, but as a machine for the destruction of what Britain used to mean, Brexit is tearing triumphantly ahead.