Did you enjoy the fireworks last night? The ones marking our annual Independence Day celebration? You missed them? That is a shame. Allow me to bring you up to date with some other things you may have missed.
The fireworks were advertised by Daniel Hannan, then a Conservative member of the European parliament, now a Tory peer, in an article he wrote two days before the EU referendum. It began: “It’s 24 June 2025, and Britain is marking its annual Independence Day celebration. As the fireworks stream through the summer sky, still not quite dark, we wonder why it took us so long to leave.”
I don’t know why he chose a date nine years in the future. Perhaps the 10th anniversary of the Brexit vote would have been too decimal and therefore too continental. But the article was an almost religious vision of the utopia that would greet us by… yesterday.
“The United Kingdom is now the region’s foremost knowledge-based economy,” Hannan wrote. “New industries, from 3D printing to driverless cars, have sprung up around the country.”
Leaving the EU had been straightforward. “The last thing most EU leaders wanted, once the shock had worn off, was a protracted argument with the United Kingdom which, on the day it left, became their single biggest market. Terms were agreed easily enough,” he wrote.
Three years of parliamentary deadlock, meaningful votes, Supreme Court rulings, a Tory leadership crisis and two general elections – but perhaps he meant it would be undemanding to be on the EU side of the negotiations.
“In many areas, whether because of economies of scale or because rules were largely set at global level, the UK and the EU continued to adopt the same technical standards,” Hannan said, in a prediction echoing his much-mocked comment during the referendum campaign: “Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market…”
His vision of a post-Brexit land of milk, honey and booming financial services was one in which the legal reality of the single market was irrelevant. No wonder he admitted in 2022: “Staying in the single market, or large parts of it, would have saved us a lot of trouble.”
However, he foresaw no trouble on the eve of the Brexit vote, as he became carried away with his dream of a better future: “Shale oil and gas came on tap, almost providentially, just as the North Sea reserves were depleting … In consequence, our fuel bills have tumbled, boosting productivity, increasing household incomes and stimulating the entire economy.”
On and on it went: “Opting out of the EU’s data protection rules has turned Hoxton into the software capital of the world … The UK has again become a centre for world shipping … Fishing ports such as Hull and Grimsby [which both backed an exit from the union] have become pharma hubs… Our universities are flourishing … The number of student visas granted each year is decided by MPs who, now that they no longer need to worry about unlimited EU migration, can afford to take a long-term view. Parliament sets the number of work permits, the number of refugee places and the terms of family reunification.”
To be fair to Lord Hannan, no one could have predicted what a mess Boris Johnson would make of the “points-based immigration system”.
So attractive is the Shangri-La of life outside the EU that three other countries have followed us to freedom, Hannan wrote: Denmark, Ireland and the Netherlands.
The final paragraph is the sort of thing a skilled satirist would write today about the innocent hopes of the most naive kind of Brexiteer, knowing everything that had happened since: “Perhaps the greatest benefit, though, is not easy to quantify. Britain has recovered its self-belief. As we left the EU, we straightened our backs, looked about us, and realised that we were still a nation to be reckoned with … We saw that there were great opportunities across the oceans, beyond the enervated eurozone. We knew that our song had not yet been sung.”
Well, it has been sung now, and it turned out to be the discordant thrash metal of failure.
As someone whose job it is to make predictions about the future, I almost feel sorry for Baron Hannan of Kingsclere, who, apart from his attempt to justify his comment about the single market, has kept fairly quiet about his rosy vision of post-Brexit Britain.
He is like a preacher who promised the Rapture on a certain date and then has to explain to his disbelieving followers why it hasn’t happened. As sometimes happens with end-of-the-world cults, the followers refuse to adjust their beliefs to the failure of the prediction.
Sometimes they turn to rival preachers, who explain that the promise of deliverance was executed in the wrong way. Hence, Nigel Farage and his claim that the real Brexit has never been tried. Still, they will always have Hannan’s words to remind us of what could have been.
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