LONDON — Brexit fractured the European Union, and broke British politics.The U.K.is about to get its seventh prime minister since June 23, 2016, a decade ago Tuesday, when the country voted 52%-48% to leave the EU after more than four decades of membership.
Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, who called the referendum but campaigned for the U.K.to stay in the bloc, quit the next day.His successors have all grappled, largely unsuccessfully, with the consequences of that rupture.
The latest is Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who announced Monday that he was stepping down after two years of a sluggish economy, malfunctioning government and a divided and jaded electorate — all legacies, at least in part, of Brexit.Though the decision has faded from headlines, "the subterranean trace of Brexit" still runs through Britain's increasingly unruly politics, said Chris Grey, an academic who has studied the fallout from Britain's EU departure.Campaigners for Brexit promised that leaving the then-28 member political and economic bloc would let the U.K."take back control" of its laws, economy and borders.While the "remain" campaign focused largely on the economic downsides of exiting, the "leave" side was emotive."We can see the sunlit meadows beyond.
I believe we would be mad not to take this once-in-a-lifetime chance to walk through that door," Boris Johnson, a leading Brexit campaigner who later became prime minister, said a few weeks before the referendum.Margaret MacMillan, emeritus professor of history at the University of Toronto, said Brexit was fueled by a bundle of motives including nostalgia "for an imagined past.""It was against what people saw as unrestricted immigration.It was against what they saw as EU regulations.
And then there was this mix of nostalgia — 'We fought alone in the Second World War.' Which was of course not true."It was never clearly explained what Brexit might entail."Hard reality soon collided with Brexiteers' bold promises o...