I have spent 25 years working inside public sector delivery. I know what governance failure looks like up close. I know the smell of it: a decision made without proper evidence, blessed by people who will not bear the consequences, and celebrated before anyone has measured the outcome.
Brexit was the largest governance failure in modern British political history. And we have spent a decade calling it democracy.
The UK joined the EEC in January 1973. Bar the first month of my life, I have been a European citizen for the whole of it. That citizenship was not given to me by politicians. It was the condition I grew up in, worked in, and built a career inside. In 2016, a narrow majority of voters in an advisory referendum, operating inside a demonstrably corrupted information environment, handed a government the pretext it needed to remove that status from me without my consent. I did not assent to it. Nobody asked me to. And unlike the architects of the decision, I had no second passport to fall back on.
The process was corrupted before the vote was cast
A well-governed decision is traceable. You can follow the evidence chain from the problem to the options to the decision to the outcome. You can identify who was accountable, what they knew, and whether what they claimed was accurate.
The 2016 referendum fails every one of those tests.
The vote was declared advisory. That single fact should have ended the discussion about mandate. An advisory vote is not a binding instruction. It is a signal. Treating it as an irrevocable command was not democracy. It was the abuse of democratic language to foreclose democratic deliberation.
The information environment around the campaign was demonstrably corrupted. The Information Commissioner's Office found that Cambridge Analytica had harvested and misused personal data from tens of millions of Facebook users to build political targeting profiles. The Vote Leave campaign was fined £61,000 by the Electoral Commission for breaches of electoral law related to campaign spending. The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee concluded in 2019 that foreign interference in UK democratic processes required urgent legislative response.
These are not accusations. They are findings from the institutions we built to protect the integrity of our own governance.
The architects of the decision did not live with the consequences
Here is the thing about governance that every board member knows. The people who make decisions should be subject to the same consequences as the people who live under them. When the board votes to offshore production, the board does not lose its salary. That asymmetry is a governance risk. At scale, it is a corruption of accountability.
The architects of Brexit were, in a remarkable number of cases, personally insulated from its consequences. Several of the most prominent Leave campaigners hold dual citizenship or have since relocated to EU member states. Their children attend schools in countries that remained part of the single market. Their financial interests are held in structures that operate across European jurisdictions.
They voted to remove a right from 67 million people. They kept the equivalent right for themselves through the back door of ancestry, heritage, or a second passport. If a board director voted to strip the workforce of a benefit whilst quietly retaining it personally, we would call that a conflict of interest at minimum. We would call it a resignation matter.
We called it Brexit.
James Acaster put it better than most political commentators managed. His tea bag analogy from Mock the Week is two minutes long and describes the structural logic of the Leave campaign's self-serving incoherence with more precision than a Select Committee report. Watch it. Then consider that the people who made the decision mostly kept their tea bags.
The public sector absorbed the damage
I did not work in Westminster. I worked in public sector digital delivery, in data systems, in the infrastructure that holds health and care services together. I watched what happened to the institutions around me when Brexit landed.
The NHS lost approximately 9,000 EU workers between the referendum and 2020, with nursing and social care among the hardest hit sectors. Recruitment pipelines that had been built over decades were severed. Services that had been under strain since 2010 through fourteen years of real-terms funding reductions had that strain compounded with a workforce crisis that was, in part, self-inflicted.
The digital transformation programmes I worked on operated in a European regulatory and standards environment. GDPR, which was transposed into UK law, preserved some of that alignment. But the drift has been constant. Every technical standard, every data-sharing agreement, every research collaboration now carries an additional layer of complexity that did not exist before 2016. That complexity has a cost. The cost lands on the people delivering the service, not on the people who made the decision.
No tangible benefit to UK citizens from Brexit has been independently verified and evidenced at the level a board would require before signing off a major programme. The promises that were made, the £350 million per week for the NHS being the most notorious, were not delivered. A programme that promised those outcomes and delivered these ones would not survive board scrutiny. It would be closed, the sponsor would be held accountable, and the lessons would be documented.
Anger is the appropriate response
I am not neutral on this. I am not going to pretend that a decade of watching public services deteriorate, colleagues leave, and institutions weaken in the name of a decision that was corrupted at its root leaves me balanced and contemplative.
My anger runs in two directions, and I want to be precise about that. I am furious at the government that allowed my rights to be stripped from me through a process it knew to be compromised. But I am equally angry at the European Union for having no meaningful mechanism to protect those of us who did not consent. Fifty-two percent of voters chose Leave. Forty-eight percent did not. Millions of British citizens living in the UK had their European citizenship removed without remedy, without appeal, and without the institution that citizenship belonged to lifting a finger on their behalf. The EU's inability to act for its own unwilling former citizens is a governance failure of a different kind. It does not excuse what happened here. It compounds it.
I am angry. The anger is not nostalgic. It is not about Europe as an idea. It is about what it means to govern well, and what it means to be accountable for the decisions you make in other people's names.
A board that makes a major strategic decision based on false information, with corrupted governance, and then insulates its own members from the consequences whilst the workforce bears them, does not get to call that leadership. It does not get to call it the will of the people. It gets called what it is.
We have been very polite about this for a very long time. That politeness has cost us more than the anger ever would.