Mark Damazer – Brexit ten years on

Brexit ten years on - How on earth did we end up here and is there any way back?

The result of the 2016 Brexit referendum was nowhere near as surprising as has been constantly asserted. The polls had suggested a narrow win for Remain – instead it was a narrow win for Brexit. But if you look at the opinion polls now – there’s a different story. A very clear majority would like to reverse the Brexit decision. And yet there is no real chance that it will happen. The UK government is petrified of being seen to be interested in the idea and none of the major European powers is devoting any effort trying to entice the UK back. Ten years on – do the big European powers wish they had made more of an effort to keep Britain in the EU? Or was it that the Brexit vote was less about specific economic and political issues and more about an idea of British history that is still potent – dating back both to empire and World War Two – an idea that would haunt any future vote?

Now the UK is stuck outside – despite the fact that virtually nobody is arguing that Brexit has delivered any significant benefits to Britain. Even its supporters hardly make the argument – they say instead that Brexit has not been ‘done properly’ and that successive governments have frittered away the opportunities that Brexit presented. So we limp on – both the UK and the EU – trying to sort matters out on trade, students, qualifications, immigration – all the while bewildered at the increasing strangeness of America. But we need to acknowledge that not even Trump’s wildness has forced the continent of Europe to pull itself together more effectively.

So Brexit is an unhappy story. Can anything be rescued?

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Mark Damazer CBE is currently Chair of the Booker Prizes Foundation – the world’s leading literary prize for a single novel. (One prize is for fiction in English, the other is for translated fiction).  He is a Trustee of the Carnegie Corporation in New York, and Chair of The Winston Churchill Fellowship - which supports individual UK citizens to follow their passion for change, through learning from the world and bringing that knowledge back to the UK.   He is on the British Jury for the Praemium Imperiale - awarded since 1989 by the Japanese Royal Family  in the fields of painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and theatre/film.

He spent the bulk of his career at the BBC – as Head of Television News, Head of Current Affairs and as Head of the BBC’s principal speech radio station - Radio 4 . (He later went back to the BBC to sit on its Governing Body as a non-executive). In 2010 he became Master of St Peter’s College, Oxford – leaving at the end of 2019. He has written for various magazines – including The Times, The New Statesman, Prospect, The Observer and the Italian newspaper ‘Il Foglio.’ He broadcasts from time to time on the BBC - about language and politics and, most recently, about the US Supreme Court.