We continue our in-depth column curated by Michele Muratori, group leader of Libera, dedicated to analysing current political affairs, major institutional challenges, and topics of greatest interest to the Republic of San Marino.
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Ten years to the day since that referendum, the memory of those hours remains vivid, but the landscape that settled over the United Kingdom after the electoral hangover is anything but triumphant.
When the boards confirmed Leave’s victory with 51.89% of the vote against Remain’s 48.11%, driven by a turnout that reached 72.2% according to Electoral Commission data, for half the nation it seemed like the dawn of an epic emancipation.
The slogan painted on the side of the now-legendary scarlet red bus, Take Back Control, promised to reclaim the keys to the house, hand £350 million a week to the public health service, and shut off the taps of European immigration.
It was powerful rhetoric, but reality has proven devoid of any poetry whatsoever.
Looking back with the perspective of an entire decade, it is clear that this vote represented a point of no return for Western democracy.
That electoral campaign was the first true large-scale experiment in which digital communication strategies and fake news structurally manipulated public opinion.
The promise of £350 million a week for the health system turned out to be an accounting fiction, swiftly refuted by the Office for National Statistics, which clarified that the real net contribution, after accounting for the historic rebate and agricultural and regional rebates, hovered at just between £170 and £190 million, as documented in analyses of financial transfers.
A wholly marginal figure compared to the economic void that subsequently opened up in the country.
Rather than ushering in a season of renewed efficiency, Brexit triggered a decade of deep political instability and institutional paralysis.
The difficulty of reconciling slogans with the constraints of international negotiations has worn down one governing class after another.
The United Kingdom has seen no fewer than seven Prime Ministers in ten years, from David Cameron to Theresa May, through the trajectories of Boris Johnson and the short-lived government of Liz Truss, up to Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer and the current administration.
This perpetual political emergency has wiped out any long-term strategic vision, turning the management of the state into a continuous exercise in damage containment.
On the economic front, projections circulated through summaries of the economic impact of Brexit and analyses by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research paint a picture of creeping suffering.
The lack of access to the single market has cut GDP growth potential by around four percentage points in the long term, draining roughly £40 billion a year from public coffers.
Administrative costs and customs checks weigh on businesses to the tune of around £7 billion a year, while the promise to seal the borders has produced a striking paradox.
With the closure of European mobility channels, labour shortages in strategic sectors have pushed net immigration from non-EU countries to record figures close to 700,000 arrivals a year, as confirmed by ONS statistics on international migration.
The deepest impact, however, is felt in the realm of geostrategic positioning.
For decades the United Kingdom wielded global influence by acting as a natural bridge between Washington and the European continent.
With its anchoring to the institutions in Brussels gone, the centrality of its relationship with the United States has also collapsed.
The hope of compensating for exiting the single market with a preferential trade channel with the White House has come to nothing, swept away by shifting American priorities.
No longer carrying its former specific weight within the Union and lacking a transatlantic foothold, the United Kingdom now finds itself excluded from the major decision-making blocs of world politics, out of the EU and in nothing else.
It is no surprise that public perception has flipped.
Surveys and publications by the European Council on Foreign Relations indicate that over 57% of Britons now consider the departure a mistake, with more than 60% judging it an overall failure.
Among young people aged 18 to 24, the share who would like to rejoin the Union exceeds 70%, testifying to an increasingly marked generational divide.
Ten years on from that electrifying night, the lesson left by Brexit is merciless.
In the global context of the twenty-first century, sovereignty understood as isolation does not produce independence, but only a slow and inexorable slide towards marginality.
