Don't Look Back in Anger

The Case Against Bregret

It has been eight years since Britain voted to leave the European Union and a new consensus has calcified. Brexit was not just a mistake, but a failure on its own terms. 

Leaving the European Union simultaneously caused a dramatic fall in immigration from Europe and an enormous increase in immigration from non-European countries, all while illegal migration of African and Asian men sailing across the channel grew from 1,843 in 2019 to 45,774 in 2022 and 29,437 in 2023.

Leavers have not just lost the economic argument which they prefer to ignore, but have achieved the opposite of their most simple policy goal. Immigration has increased and changed in composition from comparatively inoffensive Spanish au pairs and French graduates, to Eritrean ‘refugees’ and Bangladeshi delivery drivers. ‘Voting to get rid of Poles because you don’t like Pakistanis’, as Frankie Boyle described it.

Ventriloquy

It’s rarely stated explicitly how Brexit was a causal factor in these developments, so I will reconstruct these arguments. 

Brexit’s only direct effect on legal immigration was to make it more difficult for people from the EEA and Switzerland to move to the UK. In a vacuum it would have produced fewer Europeans and an identical number of non-Europeans. But the changes in immigration patterns since 2016, and in particular since Britain left the European Single Market at the end of 2020, are universally attributed to Brexit.

The story goes that European migrants fulfilled vital roles in the economy, so when European migration fell, non-European migration was needed to plug the gap. Brexit also gave the Tories the political cover to increase immigration, because the public felt that since leaving the European Union the issue had been solved.

The Alternative Hypothesis

The 'replacement ratio' between EU and non-EU migrants was almost 4 to 1¹. And non-EU migrants are compositionally different from EU migrants. They are more likely to arrive via student or dependent visas², earn less money  and are employed in different industries. The ‘substitution theory just doesn’t add up. 

Tory willingness to increase immigration was a necessary factor to use the political cover provided by the referendum result to increase non-EU immigration, so we have to consider how this political desire for increased immigration would have operated in a counterfactual where Remain had won the referendum.  

If Leave had failed, the Tories would have argued this showed the public wanted or were at least tolerant of high levels of immigration, that immigration was a losing issue, and Britain was an open society. Of course these arguments would have been wrong and dishonest, but the excuses to raise immigration employed after the referendum, that ‘the public believe the immigration issue has been solved’, and ‘people wanted control, not lower numbers’, were too. Dishonesty would not have acted as a constraint on policy making.

However, it would have been more difficult to argue that Britain had rejected immigration, even if the margin of defeat was just as narrow. The referendum victory strengthened the premise in public debate that voters wanted immigration to be cut. The rise in immigration is accepted by everyone as a broken promise or a betrayal, and not the expression of public will. 

It’s difficult to imagine a Cameron or Osborne premiership denying BNO visas to Hong Kongers, who have contributed 200,000 to the increase in non-EU immigration, or humanitarian entry to Ukrainians, who have contributed 240,000.  The social care and ‘university’ sectors would still have lobbied for increased immigration in a counterfactual where Britain voted Remain, and Cameron or Osborne limped on. Tuition fees for British undergraduates were set at £9,000 in 2012 and have only risen to £9,250 since, despite their 2012 levels being worth just over £12,500 in today’s terms, creating a funding deficit equivalent to losing one quarter of the UK’s 1.8 million undergraduates. This would precipitate a funding crisis, with or without Brexit.

Selling visas to international students was an easy fix for this problem. It wasn’t something which happened because ‘Global Britain’ became the slogan of government. The number of visas issued was so great because a one year graduate degree is a more surmountable barrier to accessing the labour market than a three year undergraduate degree, meaning universities had to sell three times as many visas for every lost undergraduate equivalent. And to make visas for graduate degrees attractive, the Home Office had to allow typically older ‘students’ to bring dependants.

The social care sector faced similar structural challenges. Local government funding was cut by thirty-one percent during austerity to protect the NHS and pensions. The median hourly wage in social care is £10.11 per hour, which is lower than more than 80% of jobs. Working in the sector is unpleasant even when compared with other poorly paying jobs in retail and hospitality, so people who can avoid working in social care generally do.

Stagnant per capita GDP meant the only way to improve staffing was to raise money with a new ‘dementia tax’, or to allow people for whom helping the elderly to the toilet for ten pounds an hour was a substantial improvement on their previous life to move to the UK. Industry bodies lobbied for the latter solution. Bregretters don’t have a convincing argument for why a Cameron, Osborne or Labour government would have allowed care homes to fail or raise unpopular taxes rather than allowing more immigration. 

These two factors account for almost all of the increase of 737,000 in non-EU immigration not explained by humanitarian routes. The Home Office granted 350,000 ‘Health and Care’ visas (including dependants) in 2023 and the number of student visas (including dependants) increased by 267,000. Despite continuing freedom of movement and no significant legislative changes the number of EU immigration fell from 521,000 in the year ending June 2016 to 316,000 in the year ending December 2020. Emigration increased in the same period from 199,000 to 247,000. Eastern Europe was becoming wealthier and unemployment was falling in the Mediterranean. The changing composition of migrants was a product of demand as well as legislation.

The Uneasy Realignment

The politics of Brexit is often explained through a false parable. The Leave campaign and the political realignment it caused, was built on contradictions, you see. There were the Globalist Brexiteers - Hannan, Carswell and Gove, who wanted a Singapore-on-Thames, inspired by Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph. They left the EU to deregulate the City, scrap tariffs, slash taxes, and open the borders to the four corners of the globe. They didn’t care about a ‘politics of place’.

Then there were the heartland Brexiteers. They didn’t like immigration, or trade, or even Westminster. They wanted to slow down ‘globalisation’ (meaning immigration, international trade and supranational government simultaneously), and thought Brexit would be a means to reindustrialise the country and close the gap between the North and Midlands, and London. Some of them were even Labour voters.

But it was the Globalist Brexiteers, the Liberal Leavers, who set the agenda after the referendum. Britain prioritised free trade, and as a logical consequence, opened the borders too, and neglected ‘levelling up’ - a key issue in the referendum campaign. 

The first thing to say is that these two distinct groups do exist, but are not as ideologically incompatible as is portrayed. The ‘Globalist’ Brexiteers cared about sovereignty (and in particular, ‘parliamentary sovereignty’) equally as much as the ‘Heartland’ Brexiteers. Nor were the ‘Labour Leavers’ and ‘Shire Brexiteers’ motivated by protectionism. The arguments made during the campaign were all designed to allay any fears people may have had about losing free trade with Europe. Gove infamously claimed at the start of the referendum campaign that ‘one thing which won’t change is our ability to trade freely with Europe’. He wouldn’t have done this if he felt he was trying to win over supporters of autarky. Nor would the supporters of autarky or protectionism have come out to vote Leave having heard messages like this consistently throughout the campaign.

Several myths are employed to argue that the ‘Global Britons’ were in favour of maintaining or increasing levels of immigration all along. Vote Leave and Leave.EU proposed a points based immigration system. Cameron and Osborne claimed this would increase immigration because Australia had both a points based system and higher levels of immigration, an argument which has been repeated since. But this is entirely because Australia sets the points required to enter the country very low. Any government could increase the points threshold until only the desired number of people qualified to immigrate, or impose a cap on visas in addition to a points threshold, as Nigel Farage explained during the referendum. The fact we did not was a deliberate political choice motivated by the Conservatives’ open borders extremism. 

Farage himself is used as evidence that Leavers actually wanted to increase immigration from Africa and Asia because he once said so during the referendum campaign. But this ignores the fact Farage was walking a rhetorical tight rope during the campaign. He said this while defending himself from accusations of racism relating to a claim he made the previous night that Muslim men might commit ‘Cologne style’ sexual assaults in the UK. He then released the infamous ‘Breaking Point’ poster attacking non-European migration just a week later.

Reducing net migration below UKIP’s 50,000 target would inevitably have resulted in lower African and Asian migration, as non-EU net migration alone was already close to 100,000. Farage and UKIP’s meritocratic points based system would also have shifted the composition of non-European immigration from Africa and South Asia, to the Anglosphere and China³.

The Vote Leave campaign claimed Turkey was about to enter the EU because they knew people feared the possibility that 76 million Muslim Turks would have an automatic right to move to the UK. They also claimed the EU’s tourist deal with Turkey would expose the country to migration and terror threats from Iraq and Syria. Farage evoked the Great Replacement during the 2014 European elections when UKIP produced a leaflet of a forlorn looking Native American with the text ‘He used to ignore immigration. Now he lives on a reservation’. The idea that he or Vote Leave supported increased immigration from Africa because of a piece of political triangulation by Farage is not defensible.

But the argument fails on its own terms. The Liberal leavers never conducted the circus. Theresa May, an establishment Tory and Remainer, grabbed the reins in July 2016. Nor did the Liberal Leavers get what they wanted. Britain and the Conservative party have lurched to the left since 2016. The government has pursued neither unilateral free trade nor an EEA/EFTA solution, and services regulation remains unbudged. Daniel Hannan and Barry Stanton both remain unsatisfied.

Hindsight Bias

The popularity of the Bregret story can be attributed to two factors. The first is that posting a graph of immigration over time is a much simpler argument to make than the counterfactual thinking above. The second is an extreme case of hindsight bias.

Bregretters often furnish anecdotes of Indians or Nigerians who voted for Brexit because they believed it would make it easier for their family or countrymen to move to the UK. But in 2016 an overwhelming majority of BAME people voted to Remain because they believed the opposite would be the case, and saw the referendum as a nationalist revolt which cast Britishness more narrowly, and in terms of its historic demographic majority.

The left supported Remain because they thought Brexit would make it harder for Britain to become more ethnically and racially diverse, not easier. Liberal economists supported Remain not just to retain our trade links with Europe, but also because they believed Brexit would reduce immigration and thereby hurt our economy. The vote to Leave was accompanied by mass hysteria about ‘racism’. If you had told someone on the 24th of June 2016 that Brexit would be followed by a doubling of immigration, they would have looked at you incredulously. It was neither obvious, nor inevitable, this would happen.

The only immigration policy which flowed inexorably from Brexit was the equalisation of treatment between EU and non-EU citizens wishing to immigrate into the UK. Though this alone is objectionable, there are a number of permutations of this policy, some of which would have been preferable to the status quo ex ante. The Conservatives could have equalised treatment while also raising the bar for entry, and reduced both EU and non-EU immigration. That they chose the opposite policy was a deliberate and voluntary choice. Had Brexit not happened, we would likely be in the same position, as are Ireland⁴, Canada and many other European countries. Increased migration wasn’t caused by a points based immigration system, or the need to replace European workers. It was caused by the Tories, and they will likely be wiped out by Nigel Farage’s Reform Party for doing so.

1. EU immigration declined by 190,000 between 2020 and 2023, while non-EU immigration increased by 737,000 in the same period, see Table 1

2. See Tables 4 and 5 here

3. Many readers and I would obviously have issues with high levels of mertitorious immigrants from China and the upper crust of India, but these are the only people of non-European descent who would plausibly find it easier to immigrate to the UK under a strict points based system

4. When subtracting Ukrainian migrants from the totals, total and net migration to Ireland is broadly similar to the UK, see 2022 and 2023