The wager revisited

National Review declares, at the decade mark, that Brexit has been a good move for the United Kingdom and that rejoining the European Union is a remote prospect. I will not dispute the sovereignty argument on its face — I have never been shy about the claim that a people must govern their own commerce if they are to govern themselves at all. But I will insist, as I always have, that a sound declaration of independence is only as strong as the economic architecture built to sustain it.

What I look for in any commercial separation

When the American states dissolved their commercial dependence on the British Crown, the question was never merely can we leave — it was can we build the credit, the currency, and the trade networks to survive having left. Britain in 2016 faced a version of the same test. Has it passed? The National Review lead asserts it has; the evidence I would demand before agreeing includes: the trajectory of British public credit (has the cost of borrowing risen beyond what independence is worth?), the state of British manufactures and the industrial base (inference: supply-chain disruptions in the immediate aftermath were real and documented), and whether new trade agreements have genuinely replaced the volume surrendered at the Channel.

The credit question is not settled by a slogan

A nation seen squabbling before paying its debts — or seen retreating from its commercial obligations without a credible substitute — pays more, forever. The British pound's volatility in the years immediately after the referendum (inference, not recollection of events I witnessed) is precisely the kind of signal I would have studied from the Treasury. If that volatility has resolved into a stable, trustworthy currency regime, that is evidence in Brexit's favor. If it has merely been absorbed into persistent inflation or wage stagnation, the ledger looks different.

The manufactures matter

I argued in my Report on the Subject of Manufactures that a nation which depends entirely on foreign industrial capacity for its own supply is a nation whose independence is conditional. Britain's pharmaceutical, aerospace, and financial-services sectors are the modern equivalent of the manufactures I had in mind. The question worth asking — beyond what National Review's lead supplies — is whether Brexit has strengthened or weakened those sectors relative to their European competitors. Tariff friction and regulatory divergence cut both ways: they can protect a domestic industry, or they can strand it. I want the data before I sign the victory declaration.

My recommendation

Do not let the anniversary become a partisan trophy. The ten-year mark is precisely the right moment for a sober accounting: public debt, trade volume, manufacturing output, currency stability, and the terms of whatever agreements have replaced the single market. If those numbers hold up, then yes — sovereignty has been vindicated. If they do not, the lesson is not that independence was wrong, but that independence without a vigorous economic plan is merely a bold sentence with no argument behind it. Britain chose its own course; now it must govern that course with energy and precision. That, at least, is a lesson I know something about.