Just before the referendum vote, on 21 June 2016, Daniel Hannan published this comically misconceived projection of the benefits of Brexit (as seen from June 2025, when a magically transformed Britain is marking its annual Independence Day celebrations with fireworks). Brexit has not just reinvigorated Britain’s economy, her democracy and her liberty. It has restored her mojo, and improved relations with her neighbours.
I say “comically misconceived” because the predictions are so comprehensively wrong as to be funny. But on reflection it is not funny at all. Daniel Hannan (now a Boris Babe in the Upper House, Lord Hannan of Kingsclere) has a reputation as a serious thinker and analyst. He was one of the founders of Vote Leave, and when he wrote this piece he had been a Member of the European Parliament for more than 15 years. He should have understood the basic principles of the Single Market.
Yet in his vision, which has proved so comprehensively mistaken, post-Brexit Britain continued to mirror EU regulation where it happened to suit us. Where we saw prizes to be won by casting off EU regulation we did so, with dizzying advantageous consequences, and the EU happily accepted this, continuing to offer us totally unimpeded access to their market. Hannan must have known that was a pipe-dream. The EU is a legal structure which requires that members follow the same disciplines. It is on that basis that it is able to open borders and do away with non-tariff barriers.
Hannan’s whole fantasy is based on the presumption that, with Brexit, “Britain withdrew from the EU’s political structures and institutions, but kept its tariff-free arrangements in place”, as if we could maintain free access even where we abandoned EU regulation, and as if tariffs, as opposed to non-tariff barriers, were the essential issue.
It is beyond parody – but sadly it fooled enough people (who can’t be expected to follow the EU’s legal processes, and must rely on ‘experts’ like an MEP of 15 years’ standing) to help swing the vote.
Hannan articulated a classic Eurosceptic misunderstanding encapsulated in their constant refrain that “All we ever wanted was a Free Trade Area without the political dimension”. The point is that genuine free trade, overcoming non-tariff barriers, cannot be achieved without a ‘political dimension’, as Mrs Thatcher understood when she accepted the much wider application of majority voting in order to create the Single Market. The principle was baked into the European project from the beginning. It is why the European Free Trade Area (EFTA), which the UK envisaged as a substitute for EEC membership in the 1960s, proved inadequate, and why we applied for membership of the EEC.
Non-expert Eurosceptics could be forgiven for failing to grasp this essential point. But Hannan fancies himself an expert and has no such excuse. Whether through rank stupidity or intellectual dishonesty, he depicted a Britain dotted with unicorns by June 2025. The vision is laughable and it was self-evidently silly not just in hindsight but at the time he was publishing his prediction in 2016.
To take a couple of examples – One of the Brexit benefits that Hannan expects and celebrates from the vantage point of June 2025 is abandonment of “the REACH Directive, limiting the import of chemical products” which “had imposed huge costs on manufacturers”.
Yet he had never tested this thesis on those manufacturers. As things turned out, the FT was reporting, by May 2023, that: “The UK chemicals sector has warned that attempts to create an affordable post-Brexit regulatory regime for the industry are floundering and risk causing irreparable damage to British businesses. After Brexit, the UK quit the EU’s REACH chemical management system but has repeatedly delayed the introduction of its own arrangements after a government impact assessment discovered it would cost the industry £2bn to duplicate the safety data already held in Brussels. Attempts to broker a deal with industry to reduce the cost of re-registering 22,400 chemicals with a copycat UK REACH system run by the government’s Health and Safety Executive are failing to bear fruit, according to senior industry figures.”
The point is that once it had abandoned REACH, either the UK had to duplicate the EU regime at huge cost, or it might seek to “improve” (weaken?) it, in which case chemicals manufacturers who wished to export their products would have to comply with two competing regimes. The same goes, of course, for the UK’s attempt to set up a parallel product standards certification system. This explains why Jacob Rees Mogg’s increasingly desperate pleas to business (and to Sun readers) to come up with areas in which EU rules could be dispensed with drew a blank. Businesses understand that regulation is necessary to protect against unsafe products, consumer exploitation, environmental damage and so on. Given this, it makes sense to have one set of rules for all EU countries, as the EU will remain our largest market. The UK is not big enough to create its own regulatory eco-system to which others will conform.
It was all so predictable and had indeed been predicted (dismissed, of course, as “Project Fear”) but not by Nostradamus Hannan.
Nigel Farage became a Member of the European Parliament primarily, it would seem, to milk it for allowances, to ridicule it and to seek to destroy it from within. I am prepared to accept that he remained ignorant about the workings of the EU. Certainly he never bothered to attend many committee meetings. But Hannan presented himself as a more serious figure: sceptical about the European Union, but from a position of deep understanding. How then did he get it so comprehensively wrong?
To take one further spectacularly false prediction, Hannan imagined that by June 2025 “a points-based immigration system invites the world’s top talent; and the consequent sense of having had to win a place competitively means that new settlers arrive with commensurate pride and patriotism.” What has happened in practice? We are less able to tackle the small boats problem than when we were inside the EU and could return irregular migrants to France under EU rules. We have higher immigration than in 2016, but migrants from Asia, Africa and the Middle East have largely replaced the EU citizens who once contributed so richly to our universities as well as to the care sector, the NHS, fruit-picking and so on. Leave voters were promised that Brexit would enable the UK to “control its borders”. In practice, the succeeding Conservative governments, by promising and failing to reduce migrant numbers, by turning “Stop the Boats” into a fetish, and by inveighing against “lefty lawyers”, pandered to a far right Farragist narrative that immigrants and asylum seekers were an intolerable burden on the country, and constituted a ‘legitimate grievance’. It is all very far indeed from Hannan’s prediction of new control, and an influx of patriotic Nobel prize-winners.
Brexit has been a massive strategic blunder, and remains a drag on Britain’s economy, her international standing and her self-confidence as a nation. The damaging consequences are still accumulating. Sadly, the Starmer Government is unwilling to confront the problem except by way of a “reset” fatally constrained by red lines (on Single Market, Customs Union and freedom of movement) which the Prime Minister keeps unnecessarily re-painting. But the problem itself was not of his making.
Hannan should be truly ashamed for the damage he did. It is almost the stuff of Shakespearean tragedy that he – like so many other leading Brexitists – devoted his life to a cause that has backfired so spectacularly.
Perhaps it was just stupidity, but I am inclined to think he is a villain rather than a fool. At the least he might now apologise.
Anthony Cary is a member of the European & International Analysts Group and former Head of the European Union (Internal) Department, Foreign & Commonwealth Office and British Ambassador to Sweden. He was Chef de cabinet to Chris Patten, European Commission, from 1999 to 2003
