\”You can’t keep insisting that Brexit is a success\”

Brexit is a failure. Even Nigel Farage, as party leader of the Brexit Party, now thinks so, himself one of the founders of the British exit from the European Union. Debt? It is not with him, but with British politics. Hendrik Vos, political scientist at Ghent University, explains.

Listen to the full interview with Hendrik Vos here:

The essence: Farage has undoubtedly taken a close look at the state of the British economy.

• “You can’t miss it. GDP per capita in Great Britain will gradually fall to the level of Slovenia. You can see that the economy is not doing well, that the migration problem has not diminished, that there are labor shortages. Inflation is also higher than in many other places on the continent. You have shortages, for example of fresh vegetables, fresh fruit and so on. Anyway, everything shows that there are problems that are bigger than elsewhere. And that all has something to do with Brexit”, Vos makes the analysis.
• “You cannot keep insisting that Brexit is a success. And that’s what Farage does too, say it failed. But, he then adds, ‘it’s because of the British politicians at the wheel, they got it wrong’.

Wrong choice?

And internally: Do the British people also think that Brexit was the wrong choice, in retrospect?

• “It remains a theme that divides British politics and the British population very strongly,” says Vos. “You still feel that today. You still have people who believe very hard that it was the right thing to do. That things may not have turned out the way people had dreamed, but that regaining that sovereignty was and remains very important.”
• On the other hand, you also have more and more people who realize that it has turned out to be relatively disastrous economically and that regaining that sovereignty is also a bit of an empty box in practice. The whole idea of ​​’we’re going to be the masters of our own country again’. In a world where you are so connected and you have to deal with problems with other countries, that is an illusion,” the professor explains.

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