The Small Farm Future Blog

Ten years of Brexit: a small farm future special

Posted on June 14, 2026 | No Comments

There are a few anniversaries in the air at the moment. The one that looms in British politics is the tenth anniversary of the Brexit referendum, which was held on 23 June 2016. I daresay the media will soon be full of opinion pieces about it, so I thought I’d get mine in early and move on.

It would be possible to write at great length about the numerous ins and outs of the Brexit process over this last decade. If you don’t believe me, take a look at Chris Grey’s Brexit Blog – a weekly compendium of heavyweight political and economic analysis that makes my posts here look like airy haikus by comparison.

I’m not going to try matching that. Instead, I’ll content myself with a few remarks on some overarching political aspects and then a few more on the agricultural side of things. Finally, to add a frisson of personal interest I’ll wrap up by revealing what I voted in 2016 and what I’d vote in the unlikely event of a future Brentry referendum. No cheating and skipping ahead now…

On the political side of things, Brexit has basically brought chaos. You can almost see the story that was to come in the ashen faces of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove just after the referendum when the leave vote they’d supported out of brinkmanship came to pass. I mean, the electorate wasn’t seriously going to opt for the economic self-harm of Brexit, but in the meantime there was political capital to make out of siding with the outside position, right? Ha ha, think again. The result has been the slow death of the two-party stranglehold on political power by the centre-left and centre-right (strikethrough courtesy of my computer’s grammar checker – “More concise language would be clearer for your reader”).

But, ten years on, I don’t think Brexit was the cause of that chaos, so much as a symptom of deeper underlying change. Which puts me at odds with a lot of left-liberal opinion, along the lines of ‘if only we could go back to the 2000s before the Tories wrecked the country’ or ‘if only we could go back to the 1970s before the Tories wrecked the country’. Right-nationalist opinion has various nostalgias of its own, which often stretch further back historically and are even more implausible: if only we could go back to the age of empire before the socialists and the immigrants wrecked the country, or to the high middle ages before the Protestants wrecked the country, or to the early middle ages before the Normans wrecked the country.

One feature of post-Brexit politics is the advent of supposedly non-serious politicians, who don’t stick to the technocratic script. I wrote about this in Chapter 11 of Finding Lights (hmm, I must get on to blogging about that book soon). But while it’s true that the likes of Boris Johnson indeed are non-serious politicians – albeit ones with serious consequences, who in a sensible world would never get anywhere near political power – there’s a reason they’ve risen to prominence.

Yes, we can talk about dark money, non-state actors, baleful social media and so on, but as I see it the real problem is that the liberal-nationalist modern progressive project (in the broadest sense of all those terms) that defined serious politics up to now has died. Its inadequacy to the challenges of present times is increasingly obvious to most people who aren’t fully engaged in business-as-usual or There-Is-No-Alternative mongering, but unfortunately that latter category involves almost everyone who sets the mainstream political and media agenda. It’s not possible to put forward alternative political-ecological frameworks and be taken seriously in that mainstream culture (I mean, I’ve tried my best). Hence the appeal of comic politicians and magic solutions, which Vote Leave articulated brilliantly. When he later joined the government as the prime minister’s special adviser, Vote Leave’s sometime director promised that a hard rain would fall on the civil service. But he was soon washed away in a light November drizzle, having achieved little of note. Magic solutions don’t work when you’re actually in government. And that, in a nutshell, is the problem of our age.

Oh how good it would be to have some proper grownup populist politics instead of all this nonsense, a populism that was oriented realistically to the wellbeing of ordinary people in present circumstances. Unfortunately, ‘populism’ has been coopted and cheapened by those who claim to speak for the people, but don’t, and by those who use it pejoratively and yearn pointlessly for old certainties.

Eventually, the real problems and the real political choices facing us may become clearer. But I fear there will be a lot more delusion and mischief-making before that happens.

Turning to the agricultural side of things, there was some degree of bipartisan support for Brexit in relation to farming policy. People on the left disliked the protectionism, gigantism and anti-environmentalism of EU agricultural policy, while people on the right disliked the bureaucracy and anti-business elements. In theory, exiting the EU could have been a good opportunity to rethink national food and land-based security, pro-nature farming and job creation in the sector. But who am I kidding? The reality has been hasty neoliberal trade deals, starved funding for anything resembling a coherent food, farming and wildlife policy, a lot of anti-farmer rhetoric and an even worse economic climate for farmers.

With farming policy as with a lot of wider policy, there’s been a tendency to blame the EU for things that were entirely within the British government’s control. And then, post-Brexit, there’s been a tendency to blame the EU for operating as an autonomous bloc pursuing its own interests independently from Britain, which you’d think the architects of Brexit might have anticipated.

Maybe in the long run these consequences of Brexit will help British people wake up from their long post-imperial dream that the country is more important in global affairs than it actually is. The example of poorer countries to the east assiduously courting the EU to improve their economies, although perhaps not their agricultures, might have held some lessons, but they were lost on us. Meanwhile Britain’s remaining ‘serious’ politicians keep intoning the need for economic growth at almost all costs – something that I imagine we’ll hear increasingly worldwide as the possibilities for achieving it diminish. Prior to the 2024 election, various ‘progressive’ environmental journalists enthused about the pro-nature plans of the Labour government-in-waiting, only to be shocked about the anti-nature reality of its actual practices. It’s time to realise these reversals are a feature and not a bug. Green Growth is the title of a PowerPoint slide. It’s not an actual thing.

Hopefully, there’ll come a time when this is realised in mainstream, ‘serious’ politics – though that will involve a lot of hard choices (hard rain?) that can probably only emerge out of systemic crisis. In that sense, maybe Brexit has been a mild foretaste or even a necessary midwife of unavoidable difficulties to come.

In 2016, I voted remain. The cooperative aspects of the EU project in the still-bright afterglow of Europe’s grim internecine twentieth-century conflicts swayed me in favour of it, and the antics of the ghastly Nigel Farage and his imitators swayed me against voting leave.

I still think there’s something to be said for the cooperative aspects of the EU project. Its architects like Jean Monnet were influenced by Catholic Social Teaching and ideas like subsidiarity which I’ve embraced in my thinking, and in any case a lot of the Vote Leave rhetoric about the loss of British sovereignty to Brussels was bobbins. But these distributist aspects of the EU were only a sideshow to its main purpose as a self-interested neoliberal trading bloc. Generally, I’m not a fan of self-interested neoliberal trading blocs, so I suppose I have to welcome Britain’s exit from one. I just think we shouldn’t delude ourselves about what a walk on the wild side that is. Boris Johnson’s ‘having our cake and eating it’ shtick was delusional. At its best, Brexit has to mean having a smaller, healthier cake, and sharing it better.

But we don’t seem to be in a position to embrace that truth yet. For now, too many of us are enthralled by the Nigel Farage show, with all the vainglory, scapegoating, incitement and mini-me impersonation of US politics that it involves. These days, I do my best to avoid being too pearl-clutchy and refrain from labelling as ‘far right’ everything that’s happening on the outer shores of the rump that the Tory party has become, and beyond. I don’t always find it easy, especially just now as anti-immigrant demos flare across various British towns. Another proximal indicator of the deeper malaise that’s likely to burn out, or a straw in the wind for what’s to come? Meanwhile, the Brexit induced end of Dublin III only helps the small boats that so inflame the sentiments of a certain brand of Brexiter to grow in number.

What if there were a referendum to rejoin the EU? Well, though I hate to say it, I find it hard to disagree with Tony Blair (!) when he writes “Just as Brexit was never the answer to Britain’s challenges back in 2016, reversing it isn’t the answer to the country’s far worse situation in 2026”. So I don’t think I’d be voting to rejoin. We’ve made our bed, and now we must lie in it – especially, I hope, those who so insouciantly delivered it, and who I doubt ever cared about its impact on ordinary people. The only complicating factor is, as before, if my vote helped to give any political capital to Farage et al, I’m not sure I could.

So that’s me done on Brexit. If I’m still around and blogging ten years from now, I promise another check-in about it. Meanwhile, I offer you this photo from a nearby field in Somerset that bears upon another one of my historic themes on this blog as well as being a metaphor for  Brexit

Two wild perennial grasses flanking a domesticated annual grass. An unfair comparison, perhaps. But as I said above, if we want a walk on the wild side to go well, we need to lower our expectations, and share nicely.