Starmer, Brexit and British Ungovernability: the United Kingdom Ten Years On

Ten years after the referendum of 23 June 2016, the United Kingdom appears as a country that has formally regained portions of sovereignty, but has lost an essential part of its political stability. Brexit had been presented as an act of liberation: taking back control of laws, borders, public money and the national destiny. Ten years later, the most serious question is not whether London has left Brussels, because that has happened. The question is whether the United Kingdom has become more governable. The answer, to date, is no.

The story of Keir Starmer is emblematic. Coming to power in 2024 with the promise of ending the season of Conservative chaos, Starmer embodied the figure of the sober jurist, the pragmatic reformer, the man called to "repair" the country after years of institutional turbulence. His leadership, however, has not succeeded in transforming the parliamentary majority into a true political and social majority. His resignation, announced on 22 June 2026, on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the referendum, thus took on an almost symbolic value: not only does a prime minister fall, but yet another illusion that changing leaders is enough to cure a deeper constitutional crisis.

The United Kingdom is heading toward its seventh prime minister in ten years. In a parliamentary system this is not, in itself, illegitimate. The British prime minister is not directly elected by the people, but is appointed by the Sovereign in the person who appears able to command the confidence of the House of Commons. Internal succession within the majority party can therefore produce a new head of government without immediate general elections. It is a dynamic perfectly compatible with the British constitutional framework. The point, however, is not only formal legality. The point is the democratic resilience of a system in which governments with large parliamentary majorities prove incapable of producing lasting direction.

Here lies the core of contemporary British ungovernability: not the absence of parliamentary numbers, but the absence of stable national consensus. The majoritarian electoral system can deliver a party a large majority in the House of Commons, but it can no longer guarantee, on its own, a deep political mandate. British society is fragmented by age, territory, income, national identity and relationship with Europe. Brexit did not create all these fractures, but it made them incandescent.

The 2016 referendum, provided for by the European Union Referendum Act 2015, was legally correct but politically devastating in its management. Asking the electorate to decide on a matter of enormous constitutional, economic and international complexity without first defining which model of exit was intended produced a plebiscitary distortion of democracy. The popular vote is sacred, but popular sovereignty is not a slogan: it requires information, responsibility, parliamentary mediation and capacity for implementation.

The Supreme Court's Miller judgment of 2017 recalled an essential principle: the Government could not trigger Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union through the royal prerogative alone, because Brexit affected rights conferred by domestic law and therefore required an act of Parliament. It was a decision of great constitutional significance. It showed that parliamentary sovereignty, so often invoked by Brexit supporters, does not coincide with the immediate will of the executive nor with pure referendary acclamation. Sovereignty, in a state governed by the rule of law, is procedure, limit, guarantee.

Subsequent legislation — from the European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Act 2017 to the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, up to the European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Act 2020 — turned Brexit into a gigantic legislative construction site. Leaving the EU was not a single act, but a restructuring of the legal order. The promise to "simplify" collided with the need to preserve, adapt, replace or reformulate thousands of rules derived from European law. It is a harsh lesson: legal interdependence cannot be erased with a political formula.

The Northern Irish question then revealed the impossibility of conceiving Brexit as a pure territorial reassertion. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998, the Northern Ireland Act 1998, the obligations deriving from the European Convention on Human Rights and the need to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland made it clear that British sovereignty could not be exercised while ignoring peace, cross-border cooperation and the protection of fundamental rights. The Northern Ireland Protocol first and the Windsor Framework later were attempts to reconcile hardly reconcilable needs: leaving the single market and the customs union, but not rebuilding a political and physical border in a territory marked by the memory of conflict.

Starmer had understood part of the problem. His "reset" with the European Union was not a return to the EU, nor an overcoming of Brexit, but an attempt to make the post-Brexit situation less irrational. Cooperation in security, energy, sanitary and phytosanitary controls, youth mobility, Europol, civil justice and the fight against transnational crime: these are all sectors in which isolation is simply inefficient. Sovereignty in the twenty-first century does not consist in doing everything alone, but in choosing with whom to cooperate and under what conditions.

Starmer's political problem was precisely this: telling an administrative truth without managing to transform it into a national narrative. The United Kingdom needs Europe, but a significant part of public opinion continues to perceive any rapprochement with Brussels as a betrayal. At the same time, an increasingly large part of society considers Brexit a historic mistake and would like a much closer relationship with the EU. In between, the government remains paralyzed: too pro-European for the sovereigntists, too cautious for the pro-Europeans, too technical for those demanding immediate social protection.

The economy has aggravated this crisis of legitimacy. Brexit is not the only cause of British stagnation: the 2008 financial crisis, austerity, the pandemic, inflation, the war in Ukraine, energy tensions and the deterioration of public services all weigh heavily. However, Brexit has added trade costs, regulatory uncertainty and a loss of attractiveness for investment and productive sectors. When a country grows little, every distributive choice becomes more painful: financing welfare, supporting the health system, investing in defense, reducing debt, lowering taxes. Starmer found himself trapped in this contradiction: promising social reconstruction without having the fiscal and political space necessary to achieve it.

Immigration also shows the gap between promise and reality. "Taking back control of borders" was one of the most powerful slogans of the referendum campaign. But managing migration flows does not depend solely on national will. There are international obligations, from the 1951 Geneva Convention to the European Convention on Human Rights, particularly with regard to the prohibition of torture and inhuman or degrading treatment under Article 3 ECHR, as interpreted also in matters of non-refoulement. There are economies that demand labor, geopolitical crises that produce flight, transnational criminal networks that exploit desperation. Reducing everything to the border means oversimplifying a phenomenon that requires law, cooperation and effective administration.

The British crisis is therefore a crisis of promise. Brexit promised control, but produced complexity. It promised unity, but accentuated fractures between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. It promised global centrality, but forced London to laboriously renegotiate spaces of commercial and diplomatic influence. It promised democratic stability, but inaugurated a decade of fragile leadership.

This does not mean that the United Kingdom is a finished country. That would be a superficial judgment. The United Kingdom retains robust institutions, excellent universities, diplomatic capacity, military strength, an authoritative judicial system, civil pluralism and a still significant international role. But no democracy can live long on imperial nostalgia, a rotation of leaders and emergency rhetoric. Governing requires direction.

The most important lesson concerns all of Europe. A constitutional democracy cannot be reduced to the opposition between "the people" and "the elites," between "popular will" and "legal constraints." Constraints, when grounded in law, are not chains: they are architectures of coexistence. Parliament, judges, international agreements, the protection of minorities, devolution and fundamental rights are not obstacles to democracy; they are its supporting structure.

Starmer falls because he failed to give the United Kingdom a new political grammar. But his fall says much more than the failure of one man. It says that post-Brexit Britain has not yet found a balance between sovereignty and interdependence, between national identity and European cooperation, between electoral consensus and responsibility in government. Ten years on, the United Kingdom must not only decide what relationship to have with Brussels. It must decide what relationship to have with truth.

The truth is that no European country today is truly sovereign if it is alone. Sovereignty is not isolation, but the capacity to have an impact. It is not closure, but negotiating strength. It is not the denial of constraints, but the intelligent governance of constraints. If the United Kingdom wants to emerge from ungovernability, it will have to stop treating Brexit as an identity myth and begin to treat it for what it has been: an enormous political choice, with legal, economic and social consequences that cannot be removed.

The tenth anniversary of Brexit is not just a commemoration. It is a warning. Democracies do not always collapse through sudden ruptures. Sometimes they wear away slowly, when they promise simple solutions to complex problems and then lack the courage to explain to citizens the price of reality. The United Kingdom can still rebuild a season of stability. But it will have to do so not against Europe, not against the law, not against its own internal articulations. It will have to do so by returning to governing complexity, instead of denying it.