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Brexit

withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union

Brexit (a portmanteau of "British" and "exit") is the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union. Following a referendum held on 23 June 2016 in which 51.9 percent of those voting supported leaving the EU, the Government invoked Article 50 of the Treaty of the European Union which started a two-year leaving process which was due to conclude with the UK's exit on the 29 March 2019 and then, after an extension, on 31 October 2019. The UK left the EU on 31 January 2020.

The British people have voted to leave the European Union ~ David Cameron
What happens at 11pm this Friday the 31st of January 2020 marks the point of no return. Once we’ve left, we’re never coming back and the rest frankly is detail. ~ Nigel Farage

Quotes about Brexit

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Pre-referendum

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2004

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2011

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2012

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2013

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2015

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2016

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  • The Leavers​ don't seem to have much clue about what is to happen afterwards. Curious, considering so many of them have spent their adult lives agitating for this moment. Their approach appears to be a version of Napoleon's battle strategy: 'On se dégage, et puis on voit.' What exactly is Out supposed to entail? How do they picture Britain's relationship with the EU, and with the rest of the world, after they’ve secured a vote for Exit on 23 June?

Post-referendum

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2016

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  • The referendum is not binding.
  • Yes, on November 8, you Joe Blow, Steve Blow, Bob Blow, Billy Blow, all the Blows get to go and blow up the whole goddamn system because it's your right. Trump's election is going to be the biggest "fuck you" ever recorded in human history and it will feel good — for a day. Maybe a week. Possibly a month. And then, like the Brits, who wanted to send a message, so they voted to leave Europe, only to find out that if you vote to leave Europe, you actually have to leave Europe. And now they regret it. All the Ohioans, Pennsylvanians, Michiganders, and Wisconsinites of Middle England, right, they all voted to leave and now they regret it. And over 4 million of them signed a petition to have a do-over, they want another election, but it's not going to happen. Because you used the ballot as an anger management tool. And now you're fucked. And the rest of Europe. They're like, "Bye Felicia!" So when the rightfully angry people of Ohio and Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin find out after a few months in office that President Trump wasn't going to do a damn thing for them, it will be too late to do anything about it.
  • Being a member of EU comes with rights and benefits. Third countries (non members as the UK will be after Brexit) can never have the same rights and benefits since they are not subject to the same obligations. The single market and its four freedoms (which includes freedom of movement) are indivisible. Cherry picking is not an option.

2017

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  • There are two kinds of European nations. There are small nations and there are countries that have not yet realized they are small nations.

2018

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  • As Europe struggled to recover from recession, in 2015 the British prime minister David Cameron tossed Brussels a grenade. He said he would hold a referendum on the UK’s continued EU membership the following year. The torch of British Euroscepticism had passed from left to right. It was now Conservatives rather than Labour who were most anti-European. Cameron’s attempts to appease his ‘leave’ voters by negotiating reforms to the EU were dismissed by the ever cautious Merkel and, in June 2016, to Cameron’s surprise and dismay, the British electorate voted narrowly to leave the EU. The vote was taken as binding by the government. The date decided by Parliament for departure was March 2019.
    • Simon Jenkins, A Short History of Europe: From Pericles to Putin (2018)
  • Britain’s departure could not lightly be dismissed. Its economy was second only to Germany’s in size, and contributed twenty per cent of the EU budget. The UK might long have been half-hearted in its commitment to European union, but now it was not alone. A Pew survey in mid-2016 was one of many showing disapproval of the EU as high in Germany and the Netherlands as in Britain, and higher in France and Spain. Few governments dared imitate Britain and hold an open vote on continued membership. Union might be popular but the EU was not.
    • Simon Jenkins, A Short History of Europe: From Pericles to Putin (2018)
  • Brexit has been pushed by certain people who predicted easy solutions. Brexit has shown us one thing - and I fully respect British sovereignty in saying this - it has demonstrated that those who said you can easily do without Europe, that it will all go very well, that it is easy and there will be lots of money, are liars. This is all the more true because they left the next day, so they didn't have to manage it.

2019

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  • We've got to a stage where we feel that any deal is so controversial and may well be so far from what people voted for when they voted to leave, that we think that it is probably appropriate… that we say to the people, 'Is this what you wanted?' We just want to check. Because if it isn't, then let's stay.

2020

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  • So this is it, the final chapter, the end of the road. A 47-year political experiment that the British frankly have never been very happy with. My mother and father signed up to a common market, not to a political union, flags, anthems, presidents, and now you even want your own army. For me, it has been 27 years of campaigning and over 20 years here in this parliament. I’m not particularly happy with the agreement we’re being asked to vote on tonight. But Boris has been remarkably bold in the last few months… he’s promised us there will be no level playing field, and on that basis, I wish him every success in the next round of negotiations, I really do.
    • Nigel Farage, EU Farewell Speech, as quoted in Nigel Farage’s Final EU Speech: Mic Gets Cut as He Waves UK Flag in Victory, Breitbart news
  • What happens at 11pm this Friday the 31st of January 2020 marks the point of no return. Once we’ve left, we’re never coming back and the rest frankly is detail. We’re going, and we will be gone. And that should be the summit of my own political ambitions. I walked in here, you all thought it was terribly funny but you stopped laughing in 2016. But my view of Europe has changed since I joined. In 2005, I saw the constitution that had been drafted… and saw it rejected by the French in a referendum. I saw it rejected by the Dutch in a referendum. And I saw you, in these institutions, ignore them. [You brought it back] as the Lisbon treaty, and boast you could ram it through without there being referendums. Well, the Irish did have a vote and did say no, and were forced to vote again. You’re very good at making people to vote again, but what we’ve proved is the British are too big to bully, thank goodness. So I became an outright opponent of the whole European project. I want Brexit to start a debate across the whole of Europe. What do we want from Europe? If we want trade, friendship cooperation, reciprocity, we don’t need a European Commission, we don’t need a European court. We don’t need these institutions and all of this power. And I can promise you, both in UKIP and in the Brexit party, we love Europe. We just hate the European Union.
    • Nigel Farage, EU Farewell Speech, as quoted in Nigel Farage’s Final EU Speech: Mic Gets Cut as He Waves UK Flag in Victory, Breitbart news
  • I hope this begins the end of this project. It is a bad project. It isn’t just undemocratic, it is antidemocratic. It puts in that front row, it gives people power without unaccountability. People who cannot be held to account by the electorate and that is an unacceptable structure.
    • Nigel Farage, EU Farewell Speech, as quoted in Nigel Farage’s Final EU Speech: Mic Gets Cut as He Waves UK Flag in Victory, Breitbart news
  • There is a historic battle going on across the west, in Europe, America, and elsewhere. It is globalism against populism. And you may loathe populism, but I’ll tell you a funny thing. It is becoming very popular! And it has great benefits. No more financial contributions, no more European Courts of Justice. No more European Common Fisheries Policy, no more being talked down to. No more being bullied, no more Guy Verhofstadt! What’s not to like. I know you’re going to miss us, I know you want to ban our national flags, but we’re going to wave you goodbye, and we’ll look forward in the future to working with you as a sovereign nation… [Farage is cut off by the chair]
    • Nigel Farage, EU Farewell Speech, as quoted in Nigel Farage’s Final EU Speech: Mic Gets Cut as He Waves UK Flag in Victory, Breitbart news
  • In Britain, hard-right revisionism packed itself into the single, self-destructive nuclear option of Brexit. From the 2000s, anti-Europeanism was pursued with skill and determination by the upstart UKIP party (founded 1993) and among Conservatives by the old, unreconciled, Britain-first rump, perhaps a third of the parliamentary party. Shaken by diplomatic failures with his European partners and spooked by the rise of British anti-Europeanism, David Cameron, who was prime minister from 2010 to 2016, called a referendum on British membership of the EU, which he expected to win. On narrowly losing, rather than play for time a shaken Cameron announced within hours that “the instruction” of “the people” should be “delivered.” He resigned, leaving to his successors, Theresa May and Boris Johnson, an anti-liberal, populist discourse of people against elites, democracy against parliament, which May nibbled at and Johnson swallowed whole.
    • Edmund Fawcett, Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition (2020), p. 349
  • The rebellion against membership of the European Union, culminating in the British ‘Brexit’ referendum on 23 June 2016, represents a new highwater mark for anxious and distrustful popular sentiment. A little more than seventy years after the war against extreme nationalism appeared won, a small but clear majority of those who chose to vote essentially reaffirmed the near-absolute primacy of nationalism over internationalism, reversing the political direction in which the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe had appeared to be travelling since 1945. In the United States, a phrase with dubious historical pedigree, ‘America First’, has become current once more. What we are living through is not, of course, precisely a repeat of the 1930s. However, the study of the 1930s reminds us of the dangers of crass inequality, of international ‘beggar-my-neighbour’ competition, of the capacity of marginalized social groups for extreme violence based on the scapegoating of minorities, and of the many other consequences that flow from irresponsible and often sadly misjudged notions of national self-interest.
    • Frederick Taylor, 1939: A People's History (2020)

2022

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  • Also, would a referendum settle this issue (Repeal of Section 377A) once and for all? May I remind Members and the PSP what happened in the UK with Brexit. Both sides campaigned vigorously and bitterly. It created and entrenched polarised identities. [...] In the process, the credibility of the British government was severely damaged. Indeed, it has yet to recover.
    • Masagos Zulkifli, Singapore Parl Debates; Vol 95, Sitting No 77; 29 November 2022.
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