Ten years ago today, Britain voted to take back control. Since then, it has burned through seven prime ministers, torched its economy, and just watched the guy elected specifically to calm everything down resign after less than two years on the job. Happy anniversary, everybody.
Seven Prime Ministers. One Catastrophic Decision.
Let's just sit with that number for a second. Seven. The United States has had two presidents in that span. Germany had one chancellor for most of it. Canada had two. Britain had seven prime ministers, each one arriving as the solution to the last one's wreckage, each one adding to the pile.
According to Axios, Keir Starmer resigned on Monday, less than two years after leading Labour to what was described as a historic landslide election victory in 2024. He was elected to be the grown-up in the room. The steady hand. The guy who was so deliberately boring that being boring was basically his whole campaign platform. And it still didn't work.
That's not a Starmer problem. That's a Britain problem. When the most competent and stable option you can field lasts 23 months before the whole thing falls apart underneath him, you don't have a leadership crisis. You have a structural collapse dressed up as a leadership crisis.
What Brexit Actually Promised
The pitch in June 2016 was simple and seductive. Take back control. Reclaim sovereignty from Brussels bureaucrats. Restore British greatness. The bus said there'd be 350 million pounds a week for the National Health Service. There was a very clear implication that things would get better, quickly, for ordinary people.
What followed was ten years of things getting worse for ordinary people while the people who sold them the promise got book deals and TV contracts and consulting fees. Boris Johnson, who did more than almost anyone to make Brexit happen, lasted three years as prime minister before resigning in disgrace over a party scandal during his own pandemic lockdowns. That's the Brexit decade in one sentence.
Axios notes that the Conservative governments that followed the referendum spent those years consumed by austerity, ideological civil wars, and the grinding bureaucratic nightmare of actually executing the EU exit. The promised sunlit uplands kept not appearing. Prices went up. Trade got harder. The NHS did not receive the bus money.
Starmer Inherited a Dumpster Fire and Couldn't Put It Out
To be fair to Starmer, and fairness requires acknowledging what he walked into, the man inherited an economy that had been through austerity, a pandemic, a cost-of-living crisis, and the full economic consequences of leaving the world's largest trading bloc. That's not a governing challenge. That's a hostage situation.
His 2024 landslide looked enormous in terms of parliamentary seats, but the actual vote share told a more complicated story. Britain's first-past-the-post system can hand you a massive majority on a relatively thin mandate, and governing confidently from that position requires a political dexterity that the situation simply didn't allow for. The economic inheritance was brutal. Public patience was already gone.
Axios frames his resignation as evidence that Britain's chronic instability has simply outgrown any individual leader's ability to manage it. That's a generous reading. Another reading is that Brexit broke something fundamental about British political governance, and no one has figured out how to fix it, because fixing it would require admitting what caused it.
The Populist Tide That Swallowed Everything
The Brexit vote didn't just change Britain's relationship with Europe. Axios describes it as having "unleashed a populist tide that rewrote the rules of Western politics." That's not hyperbole. June 23, 2016 was five months before Trump's first election. It was the proof of concept. It showed that you could win on pure sentiment, on anger and nostalgia and the desire to blow something up, without having a coherent plan for what came next.
The lesson got exported immediately. The American right watched Britain vote Leave and understood that the same mechanics could work anywhere an enough people felt left behind and ignored. The difference is that Britain had to actually implement what it voted for, and the implementation revealed every flaw in the original argument in real time, in public, over the course of a decade.
America, for its part, has been running its own version of this experiment. Trump came back for a second term. The parallels are uncomfortable and exact. Populism makes an extraordinary promise, installs itself in power, and then the question becomes whether anyone can govern the mess it creates.
Prime Minister Number Eight, Whoever You Are
Britain will now begin the process of finding its eighth prime minister since the referendum. This is a country of 67 million people and one of the world's largest economies, and it is lurching toward its eighth head of government in ten years like it's changing shift managers at a Pret a Manger.
Whoever takes the job next inherits everything Starmer couldn't fix, plus the political damage of another leadership change, plus the ongoing reality that Brexit's economic costs are structural and will not go away because someone new showed up. The trade friction is permanent. The labor shortages in key sectors are real. The financial services that quietly moved to Dublin and Frankfurt have not moved back.
The next prime minister will be greeted as a fresh start. There will be speeches about turning a corner. There will be careful language about moving forward. And in approximately 18 to 36 months, we will be back here again.
The Dingo Take
Here is the simplest possible summary of the last ten years of British politics. A referendum was held on a complex economic and geopolitical question that took decades to build and would take decades to unwind. It was decided by a simple majority, on the basis of promises that were false, after a campaign that was partly funded illegally. The side that won had no actual plan. The country has been paying for that in every conceivable way since, and the bill is still running.
The tragedy of Keir Starmer is that he was genuinely trying to govern. He was not performatively incompetent like Johnson or ideologically reckless like Truss. He just couldn't outrun the gravity of the situation, because the situation was created by forces larger than any one prime minister could manage. Seven prime ministers into this experiment, that should not be a surprising conclusion. And yet here Britain is, surprised.
The Brexit vote turned ten years old today. It has nothing to show for the decade except instability, economic contraction, and a seventh prime minister heading for the door. The people who sold it are still on television. The people who voted for it are still waiting for the 350 million pounds a week. The bus has left. There is no bus.
