Six years on, Brexit no longer arrives with noise. It lingers instead, like scaffolding left up long after a building is finished—visible, awkward, and quietly shaping how people move around it. The slogans have faded, the arguments dulled, but the unease remains.

Brexit’s problem is no longer whether it was right or wrong. Its problem is that it was never fully inhabited. Britain’s leaders, having promised a sharp break and a clearer future, stepped back from the responsibility of owning what they delivered. The result is not outrage, but drift.

Leadership requires conviction after the vote, not just before it. Instead, successive governments treated Brexit as something to manage rather than explain, to soften rather than shape. They avoided clear choices, blurred trade-offs, and spoke in technicalities when the country needed meaning. Brexit became a policy without a story.

The cowardice lies not in the decision to leave, but in the refusal to argue for what leaving was meant to achieve. Politicians promised sovereignty, flexibility, and renewal, yet governed as though embarrassed by the outcome. They negotiated cautiously, communicated vaguely, and seemed perpetually afraid of offending both those who supported Brexit and those who never accepted it.

In that vacuum, dissatisfaction grew. Businesses adjusted without guidance. Regions waited for investment that arrived unevenly or not at all. Ordinary voters were left with a sense that Brexit happened to them, rather than for them. When outcomes disappoint, silence from leadership feels like abandonment.

This hesitancy also allowed Brexit to be defined by its costs alone. Border friction, labor shortages, diplomatic distance—these became the dominant language, unchallenged by a confident vision of opportunity. Even benefits that did emerge were rarely claimed or defended, as though success itself were politically risky.

Brexit’s unpopularity is not proof that the public has changed its mind so much as proof that it was never shown how to live with the choice it made. A political project cannot survive on avoidance. It requires explanation, ownership, and the courage to say: this is what we chose, and this is what we will make of it.

History rarely punishes decisions as harshly as it punishes indecision afterward. Brexit did not fail because Britain lacked potential outside the European Union. It faltered because its leaders lacked the nerve to lead once the vote was counted. What remains is not regret alone, but a quieter disappointment—born not from loss, but from the absence of belief.

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Sources

Financial Times The Guardian Institute for Government UK Parliament Reports