Is Brexit Done? Ten Years Since the UK Referendum to Leave the EU

“We can and will secure our borders […] we will revive the ultimate sovereignty of our parliament. We’ll discard the foreign laws that protect the wicked at the expense of the innocent […] We will make you, the British people, feel safe.”

Sound familiar? These are not words from the 2016 Vote Leave campaign of the Brexit Referendum, but from a speech made in February 2026 by Reform UK’s Spokesperson for Home Affairs, Zia Yusuf.

“Where the enemy are at their absolute weakest is on this whole question of open door migration, the effect that it’s had on the lives of ordinary Britons over the course of the last decade.” Brexit-era Nigel Farage or Boris Johnson in 2022? Or Rishi Sunak in 2024?

“Take back control of our borders, our laws and our money, and protect our economy, our security, and our United Kingdom.” A sentence from a 2018 UK White Paper on Brexit, or a current Reform UK policy?

Groundhog Day

At some point, the timelines begin to blur. Borders, sovereignty, laws, immigration, Britain: words that have marinated in this nationalist soup for more than a decade. Old and new faces, all promising the same. The latest Reform UK policy document, “Operation Restoring Justice”, pledges to leave a European Institution (the European Court of Human Rights), re-establish border sovereignty, and build a secure, prosperous, and powerful Britain once more. Wasn’t this the roadmap of Brexit? Weren’t these promises repeated by Johnson in his mission to “Get Brexit Done”?

Recycled, Not Reformed

Reform UK has topped the polls throughout the past year, all the while citing this rhetoric. Of their 19 core policies, most could have been lifted from the 2017 Brexit White Paper. “Restore Britain’s Sovereignty” echoes the White Paper’s “Taking control of our own laws”. Stopping small boats and mass deportations repackage its chapter on “Controlling immigration”. Even the foreign aid pledge follows the same logic: where the White Paper promised to redirect EU budget contributions back to British priorities, Reform promises to halve the overseas budget. Fisheries, Brexit’s most potent symbol of reclaimed sovereignty, feature prominently in both. Brexit ended EU free movement; Reform seeks to abolish Indefinite Leave to Remain entirely.

Strife and Strife Again

Why the comparative study? More than exposing Reform’s lack of originality, this depicts the extension and, significantly, the enduring popularity of the Brexit narrative. The Leave campaign won on these pledges, and Reform, running on near-identical policies, currently leads in national opinion polls. The anti-immigration and nationalistic attitudes that took over the Leave campaign are still prevalent in the British public today: mass protests outside of asylum-seeker hotels, the violent Southport riots of August 2024, after which far-right mobs attacked mosques across England, and Tommy Robinson’s May 2026 “Unite the Kingdom” march all attest to this.

Reform’s policies speak to the mood of the UK public, a mood that has persevered since the Leave Campaign won in 2016. Sorry, Mr. Johnson, Brexit is not “done”.

Sovereignty

Brexit is not “done” because it has evolved into a political identity project. Or perhaps it always was. The original campaign was won on three distinct grievances. The first was economic: a deep, unresolved dissatisfaction at the inability of any institution to contain the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis, and the effects thereafter. The second was demographic. The 2015 migration crisis, which made the movement of people feel like something happening to Britain as opposed to something that Britain could shape. The third was psychological: an imperial nostalgia never quite realised, a lingering conviction that Britain’s natural condition is singularity. The concept that links all three, and which is continually invoked, is sovereignty. A longing for sovereignty is what powered Vote Leave, and is now powering Reform.

The Shadow of Greatness

Following the 2016 Referendum, academic commentary on Brexit was peppered with explanations of imperial nostalgia. It is a compelling thesis, and not entirely wrong. However, it mistakes the symptom for the condition. The more precise phenomenon is imperial amnesia. The empire is everywhere in Britain and nowhere, present in architecture and institutions, absent from any honest national conversation. This amnesia is the precondition for the more potent phenomenon: great power nostalgia. It is greatness, not empire, that sits at the centre of the Brexit psyche. “Put ‘great’ into Great Britain,” Margaret Thatcher famously coined. Her entire project was a narrative of restoration, a narrative that has become the default of the British right since the end of the Second World War. This is what Reform taps into with its invocations of Britain’s “richest history in the world” and its pledge to “restore Britain’s power”. This, too, is what Brexit promised, dressed in the language of sovereignty. The narrative has only metastasised since.

Herein lies the trap of promising greatness: there is no end point. A politics built on restoration cannot, by definition, declare the restoration complete, for to do so would dissolve the very grievance that sustains it. So when does this end? It doesn’t, and it is not meant to. If we are being honest with ourselves, Great Britain is not capable of delivering it.

“To Strive, to Seek, to Find, and Not to Yield.”

10 years on from Brexit, let’s take stock. The nation has only become more troubled and divided. The UK voted to take back control. But you cannot control what you refuse to understand. For a decade, the centre of our politics has been a struggle for identity. So long as we measure ourselves against great powers and an empire that we have never honestly reckoned with, we will keep finding new vessels for the same old longing: Vote Leave, Get Brexit Done, Restore Britain’s Sovereignty. Until the nation is truly honest with itself, it will remain in this feedback loop.

Britain is a middle power, which is nothing to mourn. This country has the talent, the culture, and the institutions—we can still be great. But not while Britain is governed by people who trade in restoration fantasies instead of real ones. We need to stop mistaking the past for a plan.

It is time to be honest about what Britain is, not what it was. The question is not what we were. It is what we choose to become.

Written by Rosey Holland, Edited by Alexandra Steinhoff

Photo Credit: Collage of “Nigel Farage speaking at CPAC” by Gage Skidmore (uploaded 2025, Feb 20), “Boris Johnson signing Brexit Agreement” by U.K. Prime Minister, (uploaded 2020, Jan 24), “Rishi Sunak holds a press conference on migration” by Simon Walker (uploaded 2024, April 22) on Wikimedia Commons.