5 years after Brexit vote, divided UK still feels shockwaves

Five years back Wednesday, Britons voted in a referendum that was designed to bring certainty to the UK’s unsettled relationship with its European neighbors.

Fat chance.

Voters’ decision on June 23, 2016 was narrow but clear: By 52% to 48%, they thought we would leave the European Union. It took over four years to actually make the break and the former partners remain bickering, like many divorced couples, over money and trust.

And five years after a fractious referendum campaign that sparked family arguments and neighborhood disputes, Britain is still as split over Europe as ever.

“Britain is still drastically divided over the merits of Brexit,” said polling expert John Curtice of the University of Strathclyde. He says voters are split almost specifically 50-50 between “remain” and “leave” supporters, and relatively few have changed their minds since 2016.

“Over four in five persons still say that they might vote exactly in the same way because they did five years back,” Curtice said.

The country is also split on whether Brexit has been a success. In 2016, Brexit campaigners claimed leaving the EU wouldn't normally only restore British sovereignty, but save the united states money. Notoriously, campaigners emblazoned a double-decker bus with the declare that Brexit would supply the UK an extra 350 million pounds ($486 million) a week to invest on its beloved national health service. The UK’s net contribution to the EU was actually about 50 % that much.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson's Conservative government insists that Brexit is bringing new economic opportunities. Britain recently signed its first full post-Brexit trade deal, with Australia, and has put on join a trade partnership of Pacific-rim countries.

But Britain’s trade with the EU, which before Brexit accounted for approximately half of most imports and exports, plummeted by 20% after the UK made a complete economic break towards the end of 2020, although the disruption from the coronavirus pandemic makes it hard to tell just how much of this impact is from Brexit.

Jonathan Portes, professor of economics at King’s College London, said Brexit will be “a substantial however, not catastrophic” drag on UK financial growth for many years.

“Not really a blowout, but a slow puncture,” he said.

The referendum ended the career of then-Prime Minister David Cameron, who had championed residing in the EU and quit soon after. His successor, Theresa May, tried and failed to strike a divorce deal that both the EU and Britain’s Parliament would accept and resigned in 2019.

Both most prominent Brexit champions have had mixed fortunes. Former UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage arguably did more than one to make Brexit happen, but never won a seat in Parliament despite repeated attempts. He founded, and left, the Brexit Party, and remained in the public eye as Britain’s most vocal supporter of Donald Trump. He's currently out of frontline politics.

Johnson, who led the state “Vote Leave” campaign, became prime minister in 2019 by promising to “get Brexit done” after years of wrangling. He succeeded in leading Britain from the EU -- and directly into another crisis, the coronavirus pandemic.

He leads a nation divided over a lot more than just Brexit. Definately not bringing the UK together, Brexit has frayed the bonds between the several parts of the United Kingdom.

It has increased support for independence in Scotland, which voted in 2016 to remain in the EU but had to leave the bloc when all of those other UK did. In addition, it has destabilized Northern Ireland, which borders EU member Ireland, by imposing new trade barriers between it and all of those other UK that contain angered Northern Ireland's pro-British unionist community.

As for the divorced couple itself, Britain and the EU are squabbling, with Britain urging the bloc showing versatility and the EU threatening legal action unless the UK sticks to the Brexit agreement.

British Brexit minister David Frost, who led negotiations for the UK side, said Tuesday that lots of Brexit supporters like him were surprised at how rocky the partnership had become.

“It’s not something that people want,” he said. “The earlier we are able to move beyond the settling-down process the better.”