Today is the 10th anniversary of the EU Referendum

Ten years ago, many of our readers will have voted and would have been working hard for the previous few months to help make the argument for the United Kingdom’s place in the European Union.

Ultimately Britain Stronger In Europe didn’t win and like many people at the time, I remember being at a count, seeing the Sunderland result come in and the scale of the win for leave and thinking we’re f****d. This was not out of a sense of I told you so, more out of a growing realisation that the progressive, internationalist outlook that made me proud to be British had been largely shattered over the course of an evening.

In the decade since that day, things for our country have lurched from bad, to worse. We have missed out on roughly 6-8% of growth and have left ourselves exposed to the whims of an increasingly erratic USA. We also cut off our trading relationships with our friends and neighbours in the EU, causing both parties harm in a race to show some sort of Churchillian machismo. Needless to say the poorest in British society paid the price for this.

Over the next decade many of us fought hard for our place in Europe. for example I took on the mantle of standing for the Liberal Democrats in Clacton on Sea, many others laid the groundwork for future success, winning back councils and providing an alternative to the chaos of the Conservatives. The aim was that by showing them that Brexit could cost the conservatives seats and power, we could force them to rethink. Sadly, as the fact we left the EU tells us, we were wrong.

Ten years on we have spent a lot of time having to work around the effects of Brexit whilst fighting off a cost-of-living crisis. The cost-of-living crisis alongside the issues such as covid, government incompetence and Trumps trade wars have coalesced to eat away at our national prosperity. The effect of this is quite simply that things are getting worse and show no signs of abating.

The public want investment in public services and they want lower taxes but our national decision making over the past ten years has made that nearly impossible. 

Therefore, it seems apparent that we need an honest, open conversation about the cost of poor decision making over the last decade and part of that conversation needs to be a discussion about our future relationship with the European Union.

This is not because I am nostalgic for the past, or even because I naively believe that we will get the same deal we had in the past. This is really because our economy is struggling and the cost of the state is booming, if we want to genuinely give people a better deal then we have to look at ways to boost our growth significantly.

The best way to do that is to open up discussions about how we can rejoin the European Union. The Liberal Democrats have a moral duty to lead that discussion.

* Callum Robertson is a teacher and member of the Federal Board. He is a Watford Borough Councillor.