00:00Ten years ago, voters in the U.K. made a decision that reshaped not just the United Kingdom, but politics
00:05around the world.
00:06Brexit was sold as a way to restore sovereignty, control immigration, and unleash economic growth.
00:12But our next guest says it was, quote, a remarkable howl of self-defiance that was also an act of
00:17economic self-harm.
00:18Adrian Woldridge is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.
00:20His latest piece for Bloomberg Weekend, co-written with Bloomberg's editor-in-chief, John Micklethwaite, is The Day That Changed
00:25the World.
00:26Adrian joins us now in New York. Great to have you with us.
00:29Thank you for inviting me.
00:30Let's go back to that howl and how it's echoed around the world in the decade since.
00:34But we should start by saying this was wholly unexpected.
00:36And you point this out in the piece, that there was a lot of interest in the Brexit referendum, what
00:41might happen.
00:42Of course, politicians talked about it in the lead-up to it.
00:44But I think the world was largely surprised that it came out the way that it did.
00:47Well, it was unexpected in two ways.
00:48One, it was unexpected by the vast media sort of blob, people like me who covered this.
00:55Mayor Culpo.
00:55Yeah, I was going to say, of which we are guilty members, yes.
00:57And we did not expect it at all.
01:00Partly because most of us live in London and that was a sort of big centre of Remain.
01:06But partly we didn't sort of get to the north and talk to people up there enough, the north being
01:10the big driver of that vote.
01:12But secondly, it was unexpected by the people who actually campaigned for it.
01:16And the look on the face of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove when they were told that they actually won
01:21was a look actually of horror.
01:22Because they thought, actually, we've got to start running the country now and we don't know what we're going to
01:27do.
01:27I mean, the other political surprise is that it was put on as a referendum in the first place, that
01:32it was put up to the voters.
01:33Talk to us about how that decision came about and the fallout from that happening.
01:37Well, the decision was the decision of party management.
01:40The big faction within the Conservative Party had been arguing very strongly that they needed a referendum.
01:46And in particular, a man called Jimmy Goldsmith created something called the Referendum Party.
01:51He was an eccentric billionaire, very successful businessman.
01:57But, you know, he lived in France, he lived in Mexico, he lived sort of everywhere apart from Britain, as
02:01far as I can see.
02:02And he created this thing called the Referendum Party, which stood in elections, particularly against Tory candidates.
02:08And he really frightened a lot of these Tory candidates.
02:10And these candidates started arguing, saying we need to have a referendum.
02:15And David Cameron listened to this and said, actually, they're not going to win.
02:19Give them the referendum.
02:19He thought this would put it to bed.
02:20He thought it would put it to bed.
02:21He thought it was a tool of party management.
02:23In fact, it was a tool of party destruction.
02:26The economic ramifications were apparent pretty early on, if I remember right.
02:30This was going to be deleterious to the British economy.
02:33And yet it continued.
02:34And here we are today.
02:35As you look back on the last 10 years and the state of the UK economy today, directly attributable to
02:40what happened a decade ago?
02:42Well, there are two complicated things.
02:43One is that there were people who argued that it would be good for the British economy.
02:46I see.
02:47They argued that it would be because it would free us to do what we wanted to do.
02:50We're a global trading nation.
02:53Europe has got big productivity problems.
02:56You know, we could be the Singapore on Thames.
02:58That was the argument that was presented by some Brexiteers.
03:04And there's some possibility that that wasn't completely foolish.
03:08But what happens were two things.
03:09One was that they didn't really come in with a coherent plan of how to deliver those gains.
03:18And the second was the sort of world that Brexit created, which was a world of increasingly divided trading blocks,
03:26was exactly the worst sort of world for a free trading Britain to survive in.
03:30And so they sort of shot their own goose, as it were.
03:33One of those big motivators.
03:34I mean, there are huge parallels here with what happened in the U.S. a couple of years later.
03:37Obviously, we didn't learn our lesson here even after watching Brexit.
03:41One of the big motivators for those people in the North and folks that you say didn't get spoken to
03:45enough before this vote was immigration.
03:47And one of the interesting things that has happened is we do have a graph for those of us who
03:52can see our radio listeners.
03:53I'll walk you through it.
03:54But it shows a big spike in immigration after Brexit.
03:58Why are you seeing that?
03:59And what does that mean?
04:01Well, there are two things that happen with immigration after Brexit.
04:04One is that it spikes.
04:05It actually goes up rather than going down.
04:08And the second is it becomes browner.
04:11That before Brexit, a lot of the immigrants came from Europe.
04:16After Brexit, fewer and fewer come from Europe because of the free market people.
04:22The visa issues.
04:23And more and more come from the Commonwealth.
04:26So if you voted for Brexit, hoping for a whiter country essentially, which some people did, you got very disappointed.
04:32If you voted for Brexit hoping for immigration control, you were also frustrated.
04:39So in some ways, the winners from Brexit turned out to be in the long term the losers.
04:44Why did that big surge in immigration happen?
04:47It happened partly because of COVID.
04:49And COVID created a lot of demand for labour, particularly in care homes and particularly in the National Health Service.
04:57And that labour is much more easily acquired from the Commonwealth countries than it is domestically.
05:02But secondly, there were two groups of Brexiteers.
05:06One was the group of little Englanders who wanted to restrict immigration.
05:10But the other was the group of globalists who said, well, Europe is this protectionist zone.
05:16We want a global Britain.
05:17And a global Britain means free trade in goods.
05:19It means free trade in money.
05:21But it also means free trade in people.
05:24It means more immigration.
05:25And Boris Johnson, who is the leader of that wing of the Brexit movement, became prime minister and implemented his
05:33plan of more immigration, which is now referred to as the Boris wave.
05:39Regular readers of yours, I count myself among them, know that you like to think about history and historical sweep.
05:45And here we are 10 years out, a very small amount of time in the grand sweep of history.
05:50Do you see a world in which the UK is reintegrated into Europe in the way that it once was?
05:54How do you see this playing out in not the years to come, the decades to come, the centuries to
05:58come?
05:59A very, very difficult question.
06:01I think there is now such doubt on the European continent about Britain.
06:06They're always a bit worried that Britain was a bit odd, an island nation and the rest of it.
06:11But I don't think Europe will really rush to readmit the British on the old terms.
06:17Because they think, well, they might leave again.
06:19You know, it's a very, very close thing.
06:22Secondly, in order to join the European Union, we'd have to join the euro.
06:25We were in a rather good position in the past that we were sort of a member but not a
06:29member.
06:29Always an interesting deal.
06:31We had a very good deal.
06:32Very annoying for those of us trying to travel and convert our pound.
06:34Also, the pound was always worth more than the dollar or the euro.
06:38But now they would say, well, you have to join much more on our terms.
06:41You have to accept the euro.
06:42You had all sorts of opt-outs under the old deal.
06:45You're not going to get those this time around.
06:47So I think if it comes to practice, we may move towards a world in which we revolve a bit
06:54more closely with Europe,
06:56particularly when it comes to defence, perhaps when it comes to trading.
06:59But I don't see the old, what I thought was actually rather a good deal that Britain had, being recreated.
07:04So I think it's a good deal.
07:04So I think it's a good deal.
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