Tuesday marked ten years since the UK's 2016 referendum on EU membership.
The vote set in motion the country's formal departure from the bloc on 31 January 2020.
The referendum was called by then-Prime Minister David Cameron, who had promised it during the 2015 general election campaign in response to growing pressure from eurosceptic MPs within his Conservative Party.
Cameron said he hoped that the referendum would settle the issue of Britain's relationship with the European Union.
How did people vote, and how do they feel now?
On 23 June 2016, 51.89 percent of voters backed leaving the EU, against 48.11 percent for staying, on a turnout of 72.2 percent.
England (53.4 percent) and Wales (52.5 percent) voted to leave; Scotland (62 percent) and Northern Ireland (56 percent) voted to remain.
Ten years later, opinion has shifted.
A YouGov poll marking the anniversary found 57 percent now think leaving was the wrong call, against 30 percent who still think it was right.
A separate "More in Common" survey found only 9 percent felt Brexit had improved their lives, while 40 percent said it had made things worse.
Two-thirds reported feeling the effects when travelling abroad, 62 percent linked Brexit to higher living costs, and 56 percent said it has negatively impacted the economy.
Supporting rejoining the EU and actually voting for it are, however, two different things.
John Curtice, Professor of Politics at Strathclyde University, writes in his commentary for the think tank UK in a Changing Europe that in a hypothetical re-run, support for EU membership currently averages around 60 percent to 40 percent against.
Also, since September 2022, only one poll has shown eurosceptics in the lead.
Yet that support is soft: when YouGov asked whether people would back rejoining if it meant adopting the euro and Schengen, opinion flipped, with only 35 percent in favour against 43 percent wanting to stay out.
As pollster Keiran Pedley of Ipsos MORI told Poland's news agency PAP, the same people who think Brexit failed in practice often still believe leaving was the right decision in principle.
So is Britain actually poorer because of it?
By most economic measures, yes – though pinning the exact cost on Brexit alone is difficult, since the pandemic and Russia's war in Ukraine hit during the same period.
Estimates vary in size but point the same way:
- Allianz Trade puts the UK economy at 2-4 percent smaller than it would otherwise be, with goods trade with the EU now roughly 21 percent lower.
- Poland's Sobieski Institute estimates the hit at 6-8 percent of GDP per capita, business investment down 12-18 percent, and UK government revenue GBP 75-100 billion a year lower – comparable to the entire annual defence budget.
Both reports agree on the underlying lesson: leaving did not just cut financial transfers, it reduced Britain's access to trading and investment networks that money alone cannot replace.
As the Sobieski Institute's authors put it, formal sovereignty turned out to be no substitute for access to the world's largest markets.
The trade map has also been redrawn.
According to Allianz Trade, the EU's share of UK goods imports fell from 57 percent to 43 percent over the past decade, and the EU's share of value added in UK manufacturing demand dropped from 52 percent to 39 percent between 2016 and 2022.
China overtook Germany as the UK's largest single trading partner, with Germany's share falling 8 percentage points while China's rose by the same amount; the US gained 2 points.
Among EU states, only Poland and Ireland grew their share of the UK industrial goods market.
Allianz Trade credits Polish exporters' ability to adapt to Britain's shifting industrial needs, while most of Western Europe lost ground.
The Sobieski Institute report also points to a deeper irony: the regions that voted most strongly for Brexit in 2016 have suffered the most from its economic consequences.
It is not all decline, though.
UK manufacturing output fell just 1.4 percent overall between 2016 and 2025, but some sectors boomed: transport equipment grew 25 percent, pharmaceuticals 43 percent, food and drink 31 percent, and electrical and computer/electronics equipment both 20 percent.
The UK also remains the world's second-largest exporter of financial services (21 percent of global exports), handles nearly half of global interest-rate derivatives trading and around 38 percent of global currency trading.
Great Britain attracted roughly USD 164 billon in venture capital between 2020 and 2026 – more than any other European country.
Wind power generation is up 130 percent since 2016, helping the UK phase out coal power entirely in 2024.
What about immigration?
This is where Brexit has produced the opposite of what was promised.
Leave campaigners argued the vote was about regaining control of immigration policy.
Instead, net migration rose sharply after Boris Johnson's government introduced a new points-based visa scheme in 2021, modelled partly on Australian and Canadian systems.
According to The Times, net migration to the UK reached around 2.6 million between 2021 and 2024 – a surge nicknamed the "Boriswave".
The Centre for Policy Studies reports that population growth over that period was 3.8 percent, with immigration accounting for 99 percent of it.
Net migration peaked at 944,000 in the year to March 2023 – nearly three times the 321,000 recorded in the year before the referendum in June 2016.
Professor Jonathan Portes, an economist at King's College London, told PAP that this was not really a failure of policy but rather a consequence of labour-market realities: leaving the EU gave Britain the tools to reduce immigration, but the country chose not to use them fully, because the economy needed the workers.
He compares it to Italy under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, where a government elected on promises to cut immigration ended up raising it for the same reasons.
Different immigration, not less immigration
What did change was where migrants came from.
Free movement with the EU, including a large Polish workforce, was replaced by migration from outside Europe, notably India and Nigeria, which Portes says still benefits the UK economy, even as he misses the EU's free movement arrangement.
Przemysław Biskup, an analyst at the Polish Institute of International Affairs (PISM), argues British politicians simply misjudged how voters would react: they expected tighter rules and got the opposite, leaving a deep mismatch between what Leave voters were promised and what followed.
He points to Department for Education figures showing the proportion of native British pupils in secondary schools has fallen from over 70 percent to 60 percent over the past decade, and to around 50 percent in primary schools, as a sign Britain may be approaching the limits of how much immigration its society can absorb.
Leaving the EU also weakened Britain's ability to manage illegal immigration, analysts say, since the UK lost the EU rule requiring asylum seekers to be processed by the country where they first entered the bloc, along with the right to return migrants there.
The Conservative government's plan to process asylum claims in Rwanda rather than the UK was scrapped by the Labour government in 2024.
Has it reshaped British politics?
Significantly, analysts say.
The Sobieski Institute report argues Brexit triggered the deepest restructuring of the UK party system in a century, weakening the traditional Labour-Conservative duopoly and opening space for anti-establishment parties.
Biskup notes that Labour and the Conservatives now receive fewer votes combined than either party used to win on its own before mass immigration began.
Support has grown for Nigel Farage's Reform UK, a party that was still called the Brexit Party as recently as early 2021.
Public frustration over migration was also reflected in unrest in Belfast following a knife attack involving an asylum seeker.
Biskup notes this is striking because it briefly united loyalist and republican groups that fought each other for thirty years.
Could Britain go back?
Most experts think not easily, and not soon.
Despite the regret showing up in polls, none of the major political parties currently campaigns on rejoining, and the government in London talks about improving relations with Brussels rather than reopening the membership question.
Business, too, tends to favour practical arrangements with the EU over another referendum battle.
A man holds a placard during the National Rejoin March, marking ten years since Britain's Brexit vote, London, June 20, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Jack Taylor
Analysts also caution against reading too much into the "rejoin" numbers.
Researcher Marta Prochowicz-Jazowska points out that current pro-EU sentiment may be propped up by today's geopolitical climate, including US policy under President Donald Trump and Russia's war in Ukraine, making it a fragile basis for any future campaign.
And Pedley notes that immigration and asylum remain the issue Britons name most often as the country's top problem, which he says should warn anyone assuming a rejoin campaign would be straightforward.
The same free movement of people that Leave voters rejected in 2016 would inevitably resurface in any rejoin debate.
Biskup frames the 2016 vote itself as fundamentally about identity rather than economics – a reaction to UK membership terms going back to the 1960s, when French vetoes delayed British entry and forced concessions, notably in fisheries, that later fuelled Leave arguments.
He also notes Britain's economy shifted from industrial to almost entirely services-based during its EU membership, a transformation many voters felt brought few personal benefits while exposing them to its downsides.
The bottom line
Brexit did not bring economic catastrophe, nor did it deliver what was promised.
Trade with the EU shrank, growth slowed, and immigration rose rather than fell – just from different places.
Politically, it weakened Britain's traditional two-party system that had held for decades.
One unexpected consequence was that it pushed Poland and the UK into one of Europe's closest strategic partnerships, built on shared threat perceptions and defence cooperation.
The transformed relationship has redefined how Britain sees Poland, from a country associated mainly with migration to a key security partner.
(ał)
Source: PAP, IAR