Exactly ten years ago, on 23 June 2016, the United Kingdom decided to treat itself to the most spectacular and costly midlife crisis in modern geopolitical history.

51.89 per cent of Her Majesty’s subjects voted to leave the European Union, persuaded by a bizarre electoral coalition that promised the moon and the stars and, above all, a phantom return to imperial sovereignty.
A decade on from that night which changed the continent’s history, the macroeconomic picture reveals a reality that has fiercely disproved both the prophets of doom and the peddlers of empty promises.

Brexit did not bring about the immediate apocalypse conjured up by Remain supporters, but nor did it usher in the ‘Global Britain’ promised by the champions of Leave.
It has done something far more tedious and gruelling: it has condemned an industrial giant to a slow, silent and structural decline.

A decline which, ironically, is unfolding whilst Downing Street witnesses yet another reshuffle, with the sudden resignation of Labour leader Keir Starmer confirming that the rift with Brussels is a political and democratic meat-grinder, capable of devouring Conservatives and Progressives with exactly the same appetite.

The cost of the ‘growth gap’: how to cultivate a bonsai economy

To understand the real impact of Brexit, one should not look for a spectacular collapse, but rather calculate the opportunity cost.

The macroeconomic indicators finalised in mid-2026 paint a picture of a ‘growth gap’ – a disparity in growth – which has now become a permanent burden on the country’s future.
The UK economy is now between 4% and 5% smaller than it would have been had it remained within the single market.

Translated into hard cash, this means that around 40 billion in tax revenue is missing from the coffers every year.
Funds which, in the wildest dreams of the 2016 election campaign, were supposed to be channelled into the National Health Service (NHS), which today, however, lies in a medically induced coma, suffocated by waiting lists and staff shortages.

This slowdown is not the result of bad luck, but of deliberate choices.
The primary driver of this disaster was the slump in private investment, which plummeted by almost 15% compared with historical trends prior to the referendum.
Companies do not invest in a country that has been caught in a whirlwind of regulatory uncertainty for ten years, having seen no fewer than seven Prime Ministers come and go in a decade.

The second factor is the introduction of non-tariff barriers. The Trade and Cooperation Agreement avoided tariffs, but introduced such a tangle of customs controls, rules of origin and VAT compliance requirements that it has produced a devastating asymmetric effect: whilst multinationals have the financial clout to pay legions of consultants, it is estimated that around twenty thousand British small and medium-sized enterprises have simply stopped exporting to Europe, abandoning their natural market out of bureaucratic despair.
All this whilst the structurally weakened pound continues to act as a multiplier of imported inflation, eroding consumers’ real wages much faster than is the case on the continent.

The City’s paradox: a global island in a shrinking country

Whilst the real economy is struggling, there is one small part of the United Kingdom that continues to thrive, or at least is not losing heart. §
Such is the paradox of the City of London, the Square Mile which in 2016 voted overwhelmingly to remain in the EU and which today finds itself as the only real buffer preventing the national GDP from plummeting.

The City has lost its European passport, it is true. It has had to undergo a painful financial operation involving the forced transfer of around 1,200 billion euros’ worth of banking assets to the continent.

But this haemorrhage has not created a new king of European finance; instead, it has fragmented the continent’s landscape.
Dublin and Luxembourg have divided the investment funds between them, Frankfurt has snapped up bank treasuries, and Paris has snatched the title of Europe’s leading stock exchange by market capitalisation from London, aided by the exodus of long-established multinationals that prefer to list anywhere but on the London Stock Exchange.

And yet, London remains an irreplaceable giant for one very simple reason: its core business is not focused on Europe, but on the rest of the world.
The City still handles almost 38 per cent of global foreign exchange and derivatives market volumes, a share that is double that of New York and triple that of the entire Eurozone combined.

The historical inertia of English company law, the unique density of its legal and insurance services ecosystem – one need only think of Lloyd’s – and the advantage of the language have created a defensive barrier that Brussels has failed to breach.
Herein lies the greatest social irony of Brexit: the withdrawal was sought and voted for by depressed industrial and rural peripheries in order to ‘take back control’ from the globalist elites.

Ten years on, the manufacturing base of those regions is on its knees, whilst the only thing keeping the whole thing afloat is London’s hyper-globalised financial sector.

The Festival of Provincialism: Brexit as seen from the Italian perspective

But whilst the UK’s handling of Brexit oscillates between tragedy and farce, it is when one turns one’s attention to the Italian political debate that the whole affair turns into pure commedia dell’arte – a carnival of rhetorical somersaults and collective amnesia that deserves an honourable mention.

In 2016, our homegrown champions of sovereignty hailed the London vote as the dawn of a new era.
You will recall the T-shirts, the fiery tweets, and the posts explaining that Britain’s exit was the glorious prelude to the dissolution of the Eurozone and that Italy should follow suit, freeing itself from the ‘cages of Brussels’.
Matteo Salvini and the early ideologues of the far right pointed to the English Channel as the path to freedom.

Ten years on, those very same leaders sit comfortably in the halls of government in Rome.
And what remains of that incendiary fervour?
Nothing; it has evaporated.
Faced with the stark reality of the British disaster and, above all, with the spectre of the BTP-Bund spread that monitors their every move, our ‘sovereignists’ have discovered the discreet charm of European pragmatism.

The idea of ‘Italexit’ has been hastily buried in some party basement. Today, the watchword is ‘changing Europe from within’ – a magic formula that allows them to play the heavyweights at rallies against electric cars or green building directives, whilst with the other hand they sign off on European budgets and beg for flexibility on budgetary constraints.

Brexit, once an ideal beacon, has become an annoying skeleton in the cupboard, a living reminder of what happens when social media slogans are applied to the real economy.

On the other side of the fence, the spectacle put on by the centre-left is no less hilarious.
For the Democratic Party and its allies, the UK’s ‘decade of passion’ has become a sort of rhetorical security blanket. There is no parliamentary debate or talk show in which, when arguments run dry, the spectre of London is not brandished.
“Do you want to end up like the UK?” is the favourite mantra for silencing any criticism – even legitimate criticism – of the EU’s shortcomings. Brexit has been sanctified by the opposition as theological proof that outside the rigidity of Brussels there is nothing but weeping and gnashing of teeth, forgetting that even the Five Star Movement – now firmly committed to defending the European funds of the Next Generation EU programme – ten years ago looked longingly upon the anti-establishment ambitions of their British cousins.

The end result is a masterpiece of mirrored provincialism.
The complex macroeconomic reality of a nation that is laboriously renegotiating its place in the world is completely ignored by the Italian public debate. No one is analysing migration flows or hourly productivity; it is far better to reduce a decade of British history to a trite set of ready-made slogans, ready to be hurled in the face of the political opponent of the moment during the next televised row.

Brexit, after all, leaves us with this great lesson: changing the geopolitical landscape of a continent is a devilishly complex undertaking, but using it for petty political posturing is a purely Italian speciality.