During the 1975 referendum campaign, Roy Jenkins spoke of the implications of a no vote: ‘For Britain to withdraw from Europe would be to retire into an old people’s home for fading nations. I do not think it would be a very comfortable old people’s home … I do not like the look of some of the wardens’ (cited in Campbell 2015: 448). Jenkins was prescient. Nearly half a century after Britain’s first membership referendum and close to a decade after it voted, by a narrow margin, to leave the EU in 2016, post-Brexit Britain found itself to be a particularly uncomfortable ‘fading nation’. It lagged behind almost all other advanced industrial economies on almost every relevant indicator, including growth, productivity, real wages and inequality (OBR 2022). As for the wardens, the Conservative Party had elected five different leaders in fewer than ten years, having been consumed with infighting over the terms and content of Brexit. The cheerleaders who once promised to ‘guide Britain to the sunlit uplands’ could not muster a modicum of enthusiasm for the project, instead turning on each other for its failures.

For their part, many on the Eurosceptic British left were suggesting by the mid-2020s that leaving the EU had been a necessary but insufficient step towards transforming the nation into a more inclusive, sustainable and democratic state (see Chapter 2; Cunliffe et al. 2023). But it was not obvious what would constitute a sufficient step, nor how it could actually be achieved. Indeed, the Lexiteers own ‘sunlit uplands’ were apparently, just like those very different uplands of their right-wing Brexiteer fellow travellers, still just over the next hill. At the time of writing in early 2024, there was a very real risk that a Labour government and prime minister in waiting were succumbing to similar wishful thinking. Echoing Boris Johnson’s ‘get Brexit done’ slogan, the Labour leader Keir Starmer promised to ‘make Brexit work’. But it was entirely unclear how it could be made to work in support of any meaningfully progressive agenda.