Brexit tore Britain apart – but a decade on it has changed us less than we think

Brexit changed British society much less than Leavers imagined, and perhaps not nearly so much as Remainers feared.

Yes, right now Britain still feels like a more fractious and divided society than we had realised it was before 2016. What divided people most was not just the choice on the referendum ballot paper about the pros and cons of being in the European club, but that it gave us new “them and us” identities – Remainers and Leavers.

And yes, many of Brexit's most surprising impacts came in its complex legacy on immigration. Without the scale and pace of EU migration after 2004, it is unlikely there would have been a 52-48 majority for Leave. Yet Brexit initially saw considerably softer – rather than tougher – attitudes towards immigration.

But a decade on, the surly mood about Brexit now is really down to something even more interesting. Few on any side of the debate think that Brexit is working – though there are once again contrasting stories about who is to blame. In that respect, the country is more united than it has been since the referendum.

Let us go back to the aftermath of Brexit to understand why so many feel failed by the decision to leave. There was a broad public consensus for ensuring European nationals in Britain should be able to stay: that 84 per cent of people favoured this showed it was not an issue that split the 48 per cent and the 52 per cent. A vocal toxic minority of the Leave vote wanted to imagine it was a "send them back" referendum.

Most of the European nationals in the UK did stay – though many fewer arrived afterwards. There are around four million European nationals in Britain, though there has been net emigration to the EU in the 2020s.

Not many guessed that Brexit would see immigration spike to record levels: most Leavers made a case for much less immigration.

Yet rise it did: welcoming Hong Kongers and Ukranians had broad support. Fewer Poles and Romanians came to Britain, while many more Indians, Nigerians and Pakistanis did so as the government liberalised visas for work and study. These were UK government decisions under Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak about what to do with post-Brexit control, rather than direct consequences of Brexit itself. Net migration has now fallen sharply since Labour came to office – to well below pre-Brexit levels this year, though most people are unaware that immigration is falling from record levels.

Immigration attitudes toughened again as small boats crossing the Channel dominate, as governments have promised but failed to stop the boats. But the core question will be whether it is cooperation with European neigbours or declarations of sovereign power that can deliver control of the Channel in practice.

Post-Brexit Britain certainly does not feel like a country transformed in the places that voted to leave the EU out of frustration at being unheard, nor the unleashed ‘new superpower’ that the more globally minded Leavers imagined it would become. But nor does it feel a dramatically less European society: not in the Remain-voting cities like Edinburgh, Manchester or London anyway. Yet the divide can be exaggerated too. There is just as much excitement about Sunderland qualifying for European club football for the first time since 1973 as in the parades to welcome Arsenal’s domestic title winners and champions league finalists back to North London.

The social cleavages which have retained some power have done so because the issue of the European Union was as much Brexit’s occasion as its cause – springing from the different worldviews between different generations, geographies and political perspectives. Issues of culture and identity seemed to link up and invite everybody to pick a tribe.

But is that still true? Dominic Cummings idea is that the Leave side would campaign on the message “tell them again”. Yet it may now be the forces of the right, more than the metropolitan liberal Remainers, whose echo chambers mislead them about the shape of public opinion.

For the balance of opinion has shifted against those who narrowly won in 2016 – not least because one in five of the 2029 electorate were too young to be asked a decade ago, and most have never heard any convincing argument about what was in it for them.

Brexit certainly did not settle the question of Europe in British politics, as David Cameron imagined it would. After four decades of somewhat half-hearted membership, we face years of negotiation about how to have a closer relationship again. The public mood looks increasingly for Britain to get much closer to our European partners again, whether back in the club or in some new form. Is that a question for another uncivil war between our new post-Brexit tribes – or can we find more common ground this time around?