This is part two of our special Brexit series, exploring the referendum's legacy 10 years on

The Europe of the past is a foreign country – they did things differently then.

Once Britain had voted to leave the EU, both sides stopped paying attention to what was happening across the Channel.

Yet in the 10 years since the Brexit vote, the EU has changed beyond all recognition.

As old battles are refought, as we debate what has prospered and what has declined over that torrid decade since 2016, it is high time also to reconsider how it has affected the other side – of the Europe we left behind.

Remainers in particular have an idealised view of the EU that is stuck in 2016, fossilised around images of all-powerful Angela Merkel shaking hands with David Cameron or news bulletins from outside the Berlaymont.

While most Britons today believe that Britain is "broken" – a recent poll by Ipsos shows 68pc of the population believe the UK is going "in the wrong direction" – they tend to assume that Europe is still functioning pretty well.

After Brexit, a spate of books about Europe's supposed superiority – such as John Kampfner's Why the Germans Do Things Better or Susan Neiman's Learning from the Germans – flew off the shelves, reinforcing the perception that Britain was missing out.

It's not helped by the fact that however they may have voted in 2016, most Britons love aspects of Europe: the culture, the food, the weather.

Yet myopic Rejoiners are blind to the fact that in 2026, the good ship Europa is holed below the waterline.

Rejoiners such as Sir Keir Starmer, Wes Streeting and Andy Burnham and so-called "Bregreters" – Britons who say they regret having voted for Brexit and now wish to rejoin – have hardly noticed how European politics has changed since 2016.

It is time to look again at the other side of the Brexit equation. The EU today is a shadow of its 2016 iteration thanks to the referendum, all at sea politically and economically.

Even on the Continent, there is a growing realisation that Britain's departure was the worst setback to befall the European project in its 75-year history.

Today, Britain looks like a strong, liberal society after lancing the boil of the EU membership debate. Instead, it is Europe, beset with populist rage and riven with division, lurching into anarchy.

Crime and punishment

Britain was always the bad boy of Europe, and Brexit was the original sin of populism.

The rage unleashed by the referendum was alleged to be symptomatic of a nation simultaneously in thrall to atavistic insularity and imperial nostalgia.

At the time, Brexit was treated as a perverse act of self-harm rather than the more obvious explanation: that a mutual parting of the ways was a natural consequence of incompatible interests.

According to the latter, Britain opted out because playing to its strengths required more freedom of manoeuvre than the EU was prepared to concede.

Punishing a nation for pursuing its rational self-interest is foolhardy, but those who only see Brexit as the height of irrationality have sought to penalise it.

Fearful that other nation states might follow suit, those who adopted the punitive approach were keen to ensure that Brexit failed.

They tried to deter others from leaving by punishing the UK.

But the EU has damaged itself at least as badly by imposing unnecessary restraints on trade, commerce and cooperation.

Indeed, the most intelligent players on the EU side have always rejected the punitive response to Brexit.

Wolfgang Schäuble, one of the wisest German statesmen from the Helmut Kohl era, was one of those who could see the pitfalls for the EU of punishing Britain.

"It is idiotic of some people in France and Italy to say that it was a good thing for the UK to leave," he told author David Marsh, quoted in the book Can Europe Survive?.

"We need the UK in Europe, especially in defence, security, foreign policy and migration. We can do things together in a 'coalition of the willing', provided the electorates are basically in favour."

Others such as Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission during the Brexit process, are less willing to forget.

He said last week that most member states would "cold-shoulder" any British application to rejoin.

"We are wounded to some extent ... by this historic step the British have taken," he told the Financial Times. "The British are very close to the US, whereas the US is not very popular for the time being inside the European Union."

Alongside the Covid pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Brexit was the first of three seismic shocks that interrupted the EU's political expansion and economic integration.

Since then, powerful centrifugal forces such as the resurgence of nationalism on the Right mean that the peoples of Europe are more inclined to confrontation than to convergence: the Brexit rage which once engulfed Britain is now sweeping Europe.

Many of the new generation of Continental politicians are viscerally Eurosceptic, more akin to the pre-Brexit figures who were cold-shouldered by Brussels.

Attitudes that were once seen as uniquely British are now ubiquitous inside the bloc.

Take one example: Jordan Bardella, the favourite to be elected president of France next year, and at 30 years old, the wunderkind among European nationalists.

He told Politico last week: "The European Union is completely obsolete. In its present form it is no longer capable of addressing any of the major challenges our country will face."

He castigates the EU for its failures on the economy, defence, migration, climate change, AI and space exploration, warning that he will refuse to countenance the "democratic scandal" of budget contributions to Brussels that are projected to rise by a "delusional" 80pc.

Bardella may be a political outsider in Europe, but in public opinion he is not an outlier.

Migration conversion

On the eve of the referendum, Cameron made a last-ditch plea for an "emergency brake" on migration.

This was deemed beyond the pale by Merkel and other EU bigwigs, leaving Cameron with a much weaker deal going into the vote.

Yet this demand – which had so alarmed Brussels – has now been adopted in one form or another by all member states.

At the same time, EU figures such as Donald Tusk have undergone a dramatic conversion.

As president of the Council of Ministers, Tusk was then the scourge of British demands for exemption from the free movement of people.

But now, as prime minister of Poland, Tusk has had no choice but to be far tougher on migration than Cameron ever was – or to be eaten alive by his ethnonationalist rivals.

The anger and extremism sweeping Europe are driven by a relentless decline in prosperity and status.

The World Bank estimates that Europe's share of global economic output fell from a third (33pc) in 2005 to less than a quarter (23pc) by 2024.

Not since medieval times has the cradle of capitalism and Western civilisation been so relatively insignificant.

'Fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists'

Debate rages over why Britain voted to leave in 2016, but a lesser-asked question is why the EU failed to stop the UK leaving.

The most charitable explanation is that in 2016 most Eurocrats had other things on their minds.

Above all, the influx of refugees from Syria and elsewhere in the Muslim world seems to have induced near-panic in the chancelleries of Europe.

This was the year when fear of crime, terrorism and social upheaval crystallised into a new wave of populism, mirroring the rise of Donald Trump across the Atlantic.

In Paris and Berlin, beleaguered bureaucracies had little patience with British demands for flexibility in the application of EU rules, for "variable geometry" in burdens and transfers, or for democratic accountability.

Accustomed to Whitehall and Westminster elites which had adhered to a settled and positive position on Europe since the 1970s, the assumption in Brussels was that a pragmatist like Cameron, armed with a new electoral mandate, would see off the antediluvian insurgency of the Leave campaign.

The Leave brigade, once dismissed by Cameron as "fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists", could safely be ignored.

Yet the referendum campaign exposed the shallowness of support for European institutions across the UK.

Despite vicious infighting on the Leave side, the Remain campaign proved to be a flop.

Britain Stronger in Europe, the official "in" campaign, was successfully labelled as "Project Fear" by Vote Leave's leading lights Michael Gove and Boris Johnson.

Long before Brexit, the UK and the EU were already on different political and economic trajectories and have continued to diverge ever since.

With nobody in Brussels to blame, we have had no choice but to confront our destiny as an offshore island and take responsibility for ourselves.

It is a dangerous illusion to suppose that EU membership would have protected us from being bullied by the likes of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping or Trump.

Anaemic growth

Since Britain left the EU in 2016 the trading bloc has become economically weaker.

There is little to choose between the UK's anaemic growth and the feeble performance of the larger EU countries.

Italy has done slightly better (bouncing back after the disastrous period of the euro crisis), while France and Germany have done slightly worse than the UK. Only Poland has enjoyed a sustained boom, but this is more likely to be in spite of the EU than because of it.

There has been no slackening in the notorious tendency of Brussels bureaucrats to stifle innovation at birth.

Even the most technically advanced European countries still have to contend with high regulatory and energy costs.

Anyone who has watched the current series of Clarkson's Farm will have enjoyed the episode when Jeremy and Kaleb go to the Netherlands to admire Dutch farmers and their impressively futuristic technologies.

Yet one of their hosts explains that he had only managed to use a high-tech drone to spray his potato crops by having his farm officially designated as an airport. Otherwise EU rules would have prohibited his use of agricultural drones.

While Labour figures such as Peter Kyle, the Business Secretary, maintain the single market is "where the magic happens", many of the supposed benefits of membership of a large trading bloc have turned out to be illusory.

While we were inside it, our exports to other member states grew by 1pc per annum, much more slowly than exports to other parts of the world.

To regain "access" we would have to force our entire economy to conform with the Brussels rulebook; the losses for the 92pc of firms that don't trade with the EU would outweigh the gains for the 8pc who do.

In a new report for Policy Exchange, A Triumph of Hope over Experience: Labour's EU Reset, Lord Lilley, the former Conservative Cabinet minister, shows that Sir Keir's Government's pursuit of "dynamic alignment" with the EU will no more work "magic" than it did in the pre-Brexit era.

It also incurs the additional danger of protectionist measures by other trading blocs.

For example: the UK's £11bn annual exports of pharmaceuticals to the US would risk tariffs of up to 100pc.

In many cases, the EU actually sells more goods and services to the UK than the other way round.

This is most obviously the case with agriculture, which is just 0.6pc of our GDP: we buy four times as much food from European farmers as they buy from ours.

As Lilley says, farming regulations have diverged since Brexit "far more than anyone realised. Alignment would outlaw many plant protection products (reducing output by £600-800m per year), gene editing, bovine vaccination, etc".

But this is not all: the EU is still punishing the British.

It imposes unnecessary paperwork checks on 100pc of UK food exports to member states. By comparison, just 2pc of New Zealand food exports to the EU must endure such paperwork.

As Lilley shows, the price of cutting such red tape is exorbitant.

Among other conditions, we would be obliged to join the electricity and carbon markets, adding hugely to the existing cost of net zero.

Single market

In return for participating in the single market, Britain would have to pay a contribution to the EU budget and allow some free movement.

Finally, Sir Keir has promised a blank cheque for the Erasmus scheme, which disproportionately benefits EU students over UK ones.

The annual expense of £570m will soon rise to more than £800m – compared with just £110m for the post-Brexit Turing scheme it replaces, which helped more than twice as many young Brits to study in 150 countries.

In the EU, fears over its relative decline in the global economy are well pronounced.

Stéphane Séjourné, a former French prime minister, now vice-president of the European Commission, warned recently that China was posting a €1bn (£870,000) trade surplus with the EU every day.

"If we do nothing, by 2027, our trade deficit will reach €50bn. That is not economically sustainable. We can't let Europe be the victim of a predatory strategy that is destroying our industry."

A report by the French strategic planning agency warns that 55pc of European manufacturing faces ruin at the hands of Chinese competition.

And it is Germany, the EU's driving force, which is most at risk.

The new "China shock" has devastated export industries such as cars, engineering and chemicals. The German response is to invest in defence, reversing the post-1945 shift from guns to butter.

Four years ago, Olaf Scholz, then chancellor, launched a €100bn initiative to rearm Ukraine and rebuild German defence.

Friedrich Merz, the current chancellor, rewrote Germany's constitution last year in order to borrow 10 times as much, €1tn, to pay for Europe's biggest ever rearmament programme.

This huge public spending stimulus notwithstanding, the German economy has continued to stagnate.

Britain faces many of the same challenges from China, Russia and America.

But in their responses, the UK and the EU have diverged. London remains the financial capital of Europe. On AI, Britain ranks third after the US and China.

Yet the EU is falling behind. The result is an explosion of nationalism.

One only needs to compare the House of Commons with its French or German counterparts to realise that the British have evolved into a more successful multiethnic society than their Continental neighbours.

The most powerful woman in contemporary German politics is Alice Weidel, the co-leader of the nationalist party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD).

A decade ago, the AfD had no seats in the Bundestag; now it has 151. Since April it has surged into first place on just under 30pc.

The rise in energy costs because of the Iran war is fuelling the rise of the AfD, which has dropped its pro-Maga stance and become hostile to the US.

Merz, whose Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is submerged in unaccustomed unpopularity, has accused the AfD of exploiting anti-Americanism, especially in the former Communist eastern states.

These are largely deindustrialised regions, resentful of the richer West and infused with a toxic blend of nostalgia for the GDR ("Ostalgie"), demands for a return to cheap Russian gas and hostility to Ukrainian refugees.

Tino Chrupalla, Weidel's co-leader, is an Ossi (east German) who taps into latent GDR authoritarianism. Sympathetic to Putin, he calls for the withdrawal of American forces from Germany and accuses Trump of starting a "third world war".

Weidel, too, says that Germany is not an American "slave" and has banned her rank-and-file from enjoying Maga hospitality in the US.

So far Merz's attempt to regain the initiative has failed. Hence the collapse of another German staple: the CDU's reputation for competence.

Now the AfD – which has yet to hold power even at regional level – is seen by voters as more competent than Merz's CDU or his centrist coalition.

Merz is now more unpopular than Scholz at his nadir. Indeed, the bespectacled businessman is as reviled as his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron.

Even Sir Keir is more popular than either leader. Their desperate attempts to woo the public fall flat: when Merz recently told an audience of schoolchildren that Iran had "humiliated" the US, he provoked the Trump administration, but failed to impress the Germans.

Voters are now contemplating the possibility that Weidel will be the first German nationalist chancellor since Hitler.

With her background at Goldman Sachs, her fluent English and her friendships with Elon Musk and JD Vance, she is the cosmopolitan face of a party that is still classified as "extremist" by the German equivalent of MI5.

Her supporters chant "Alice für Deutschland" – a pun on the banned Nazi slogan Alles für Deutschland (Everything for Germany).

She and her party advocate "remigration" – a code word of the European extreme Right, meaning mass deportation not only of illegal migrants and rejected asylum seekers, but also potentially of legal foreign nationals and those with dual citizenship.

Remigration also targets "non-assimilated" and foreign-born Germans – including up to five million citizens of Turkish heritage.

Badenoch vs Weidel

It was only this year that the first German Muslim, the Green politician Cem Özdemir, was elected as premier of Baden-Württemberg. For the AfD, this is not a triumph of integration but an alien takeover.

Weidel's private life is awkward to square with her traditionalist public image. She lives with her Sri Lanka-born civil partner in Einsiedeln, on the Swiss side of the border.

Her lesbianism is, she insists, nobody else's business, but this self-proclaimed patriot is undeniably an expat. Could Nigel Farage have led Reform UK while still living in Brussels?

However, this demure demagogue, an anti-globalist who is funded by and belongs to the global elite, is forgiven everything because she looks and acts the part of a blonde, blue-eyed Valkyrie.

Yet compare Alice Weidel with Kemi Badenoch. Not only is Badenoch, a black woman with Nigerian roots, the second person of colour to lead the Conservative Party, something still almost unthinkable in the EU: that fact is no longer even remarkable in Britain.

Whereas Ms Weidel's AfD shamelessly capitalises on the politics of race and religion, Badenoch's Tories repudiate bigotry and xenophobia, whether the salon anti-Semitism of the far Left or the "pure cold rage" of the far Right.

The contrast in calibre, charisma and credibility between Badenoch and Weidel reflects the difference between a strong liberal society such as Britain and one that, like Germany, has been badly damaged by dictatorships of Right and Left.

As the rise of figures such as Weidel shows, 10 years on from Brexit, Europe looks broken and weak.

Today there remains a nostalgia among Rejoiners for the days when Britain was "taken seriously" in Europe – a far more potent nostalgia, incidentally, than any longing for imperial glory.

The latter is a myth; turning the clock back on Brexit, though, is a widely shared obsession.

Read part one: How soaring migration and political failure destroyed the Brexit dream

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