Brexit isn’t what’s dragging Britain down

Funny how a country can vote to run its own affairs and then get blamed for its own government's mistakes for a decade straight. That's basically the Brexit story now. Britain's growth has been sluggish, its energy prices are painful, its housing stock is a mess, and every time, some columnist reaches for the same one-word explanation. Never mind that the actual policy choices made in London, tax hikes, regulatory drag, a planning system that treats new construction like a crime, had nothing to do with Brussels.

The Brexit-Trump pairing was always more about vibes than substance anyway. Two populist revolts against technocratic consensus, filed under the same mental folder, then blamed for whatever goes wrong afterward regardless of the actual mechanism. It's lazy analysis dressed up as historical insight. If Britain's economy is underperforming, ask what British chancellors have actually done with the freedom voters handed them. Spoiler: not much. Leaving the EU gave the UK the power to set its own trade policy, immigration rules, and regulatory structure. What they did with that power is a separate question from whether leaving was wise.

There's a broader lesson here for anyone watching from this side of the Atlantic. Sovereignty isn't a magic wand. Voting to take control back from a distant bureaucracy doesn't guarantee good outcomes if your own domestic leadership squanders the opportunity. That's not an argument against self-government. It's an argument for holding the people actually in charge accountable, instead of letting them hide behind a referendum from 2016.