Ten years after the referendum, the United Kingdom presents a picture that leaves continental observers baffled. British public law expert Aurélien Antoine recently described the enduring success of the political forces behind Brexit as an unsustainable paradox. He's completely right. By any conventional metric of economic health or administrative stability, the architectural breakdown of the British system should have triggered a total wipeout for its creators. Instead, the political class that engineered the split from Brussels has shown a bizarre resilience.
You've probably seen the economic data. The Office for Budget Responsibility has consistently pointed out that Brexit reduces the UK's long-term productivity by about 4%. Trade intensity has dropped. Labor shortages plague the National Health Service and agriculture. Yet, the populist right hasn't been banished to the fringes. It continues to dictate the terms of national debate.
To understand why this happens, you have to stop looking at Brexit as an economic policy. It was never about GDP growth. It was a constitutional coup wrapped in historical mythology. The people who sold it tapped into something much deeper than trade tariffs: the absolute myth of untrammeled parliamentary sovereignty.
The Mirage of absolute sovereignty
If you look at the root of the British system, everything traces back to the Victorian constitutional theorist A.V. Dicey. His core idea was simple. Parliament can make or unmake any law whatever. No person or body is recognized by the law of England as having a right to override or set aside the legislation of Parliament.
When the UK joined the European Economic Community in 1973, this classical concept took a massive hit. The Factortame legal case in 1990 proved that European law trumped British statutes. For decades, English Eurosceptics viewed this as an existential humiliation.
[Classical Sovereignty] -> Lost via Factortame (1990) -> Regained via Brexit?
The paradox that Antoine identifies is that the push to regain this theoretical legal sovereignty has actually crippled the UK's real-world power.
- Legal Sovereignty: The absolute power to write laws on paper.
- Real Sovereignty: The actual capacity of a state to influence global events, protect its borders, and project economic power.
By choosing the former, Britain gave up the latter. Off the coast of a massive trading bloc, you don't get to dictate terms. You become a rule-taker, not a rule-maker. If British businesses want to sell to Europe, they still have to follow European standards. Except now, London has zero say in writing those rules. It's a textbook example of trading real power for an illusion of control.
A Liberal society in peril
The damage didn't stop at the English Channel. To keep the populace focused on the external enemy, the political masterminds behind Brexit had to keep the outrage machine running. Once Brussels was gone, they turned their sights on domestic institutions.
We've watched an unprecedented assault on the rule of law. The Conservative government openly threatened to break international law "in a specific and limited way" during the Internal Market Bill dispute over the Northern Ireland protocol. They curbed public protest rights through the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act. They even went after the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)—an institution the UK helped design after World War II, completely separate from the European Union.
This is where the populist project reveals its true colors. When the judiciary or human rights laws block executive overreach, the executive doesn't back down. It labels the judges "enemies of the people." It devalues the independent counterweights that keep a democracy healthy. The result is a political culture that feels increasingly illiberal, where the ruling faction acts as though a slim referendum majority gives them a permanent mandate to dismantle institutional checks and balances.
Why the voters haven't revolted
If things are visibly worse, why aren't the instigators out of a job?
It comes down to how populism handles failure. When a populist policy flops, the leaders don't blame the policy. They blame the saboteurs. For years, the narrative has been that Brexit failed only because the civil service was too pro-European, or because the "globalist elite" undermined it. It's a brilliant, self-sustaining loop. The worse the outcomes get, the more ammunition the populist right has to demand further, more radical purges of the system.
They also shifted the goalposts from economics to identity. You can't argue with a spreadsheet if your political identity is built on standing alone against the continent. The architects of Brexit understood that emotional narratives beat economic forecasts every single day of the week.
Moving beyond the trap
If you're waiting for a sudden, dramatic public confession that the whole project was a mistake, stop waiting. It's not coming. Even with political shifts in Westminster, the structural damage to the British constitution is done. The threshold for what is acceptable in British political discourse has permanently shifted toward nationalism and institutional defiance.
Fixing this requires more than just changing the party in power. It requires a fundamental reassessment of the British unwritten constitution.
First, stop treating the 2016 referendum as a sacred, unalterable text. Referendums are tools of direct democracy that sit incredibly poorly within a representative parliamentary system. They oversimplify complex legal realities into binary choices.
Second, the UK needs to rebuild its institutional guardrails. The absolute sovereignty of Parliament means that a simple majority can strip away fundamental rights on a whim. Without a codified constitution or a robust, protected bill of rights, the liberties of British citizens remain vulnerable to whoever can whip enough votes in the House of Commons on a Tuesday night.
To break the cycle, the British electorate must start measuring sovereignty by outcomes rather than rhetoric. Until the public demands real-world competence over sovereign theater, the very politicians who broke the system will keep getting elected to fix it.
