A decade has passed since the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, yet we find ourselves in a landscape that feels strangely detached from the democratic process. Looking back, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the 2016 referendum was fundamentally flawed because it lacked a clear destination. Voters were asked to cast a ballot on a concept rather than a concrete plan; we were given the choice to leave, but no one knew what that “leaving” would actually look like. Because the outcome remained undefined, the original vote was essentially a vote for a mystery—which means, by definition, the electorate never had a legitimate or informed choice to begin with.
The tragedy of the last ten years is the assumption by political leaders that the public had granted them a universal, blank-check mandate to shape Brexit however they saw fit. While many argued that the “will of the people” was absolute, this ignored the distinct possibility that the public might have felt differently had they seen the finished product. We were steered by politicians who claimed to channel the national mood, yet they treated the destination as a secondary concern. By the time the actual shape of Brexit became clear, the power to choose had already been stripped from the hands of the people, leaving us to navigate a path that many never actively desired.
This entire period has been trapped in a toxic, false binary: the idea that Brexit was a singular, sacred commitment rather than a complex political process. Slogans like “Brexit means Brexit” and “Get Brexit done” were never intended to provoke debate; they were linguistic tools used to paralyze it. By repeating these tautologies, architects of the movement discouraged the very scrutiny required for a functional democracy. They effectively silenced the question of whether, upon seeing the reality of our new position, the nation might decide to stop and re-evaluate its direction.
The dishonesty at the heart of this movement is a bitter pill to swallow. As many experts on misinformation have noted, the Brexit campaign reached a level of deception that was both unprecedented and, quite frankly, brazen. When people invest their hopes in a false prospectus, they are not really choosing a future—they are being defrauded. To suggest that those who voted for a vision that turned out to be a fiction “chose” their reality is a distortion of the truth. Much like someone who unwittingly buys a counterfeit watch, the voter was sold something that did not exist, and blaming the buyer for the deception is a cruel misdirection.
Moving forward as a nation requires us to be brave enough to confront these uncomfortable truths about how we were led astray. We have spent years suffering from a collective psychological burden, where acknowledging that we were tricked feels like an admission of failure. However, continuing to operate under the delusion that our current reality was a fully informed, free, and fair choice only serves to trap us further in the grip of the original deceivers. Unless we confront the dishonesty that defined the Brexit era, we leave ourselves vulnerable to the same manipulative tactics that eroded our political discourse in the first place.
Ultimately, we are living in an era where misinformation has become a dangerous, global currency. As we face urgent, existential threats like climate change and international instability, the need for transparent, truthful leadership has never been greater. We cannot hope to mend our national divisions or reclaim our place in the world while clinging to the fictions that brought us here. The path toward a healthier future begins with a simple, honest admission: that we were misled. By calling out these lies, we can finally break the cycle of deception and start building a path that is based on facts rather than slogans.