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If you’re looking for electoral suspense, don’t look across the pond. Barring a polling error of world historic proportions, 14 years of Conservative rule will come to an end in the United Kingdom on July 4. 

The question isn’t whether Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s party will lose, it’s whether anything will be left of them the day after.

So how, exactly, did we get here? 

Defenders of the Conservatives’ time in office will point to the external shocks the party had to contend with, including the legacy of the 2008 financial crisis, the Covid pandemic, and the economic impact of the war in Ukraine.

But every major economy had to deal with those shocks. Only one country — and one party — chose Brexit. 

This 14-year period of Conservative rule is really two different periods: During the first, from 2010 to 2015, David Cameron’s Conservatives led in coalition with the centrist Liberal Democrats. It was a period in which the party moderated on social issues and also pursued one of the harshest austerity programs in the Western world in order to cut spiraling budget deficits in the wake of the global financial crisis. 

But the Tories’ stint in power is likely to be better remembered for what happened after 2015, when Cameron went into that year’s election pledging that if he won, he would hold a referendum on British membership in the European Union.

Cameron personally opposed withdrawing from the EU — instead hoping to renegotiate the terms of British membership — but was coming under increasing pressure from Nigel Farage’s Euroskeptic UK Independence Party and the right flank of his own party. 

There has always been an undercurrent of Euro-skepticism in British politics, but it grew stronger in the 2000s and 2010s. The financial crisis of 2008 and the eurozone debt crisis that followed undermined the appeal of the EU as an economic union. The unprecedented number of migrants who attempted to reach Europe in 2015 reduced support for the EU’s open border policies.  

In retrospect, it was a perfect storm for Brexit, but it was still stunning when the country voted 52 to 48 percent in 2016 to leave the EU. Cameron, who had campaigned for the “Remain” side, resigned as prime minister. He was replaced by Theresa May, previously the home secretary and a fellow Remainer, who had the unenviable task of negotiating Britain’s withdrawal from the EU while simultaneously presiding over a civil war within her own party over how to do so. 

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Moderates wanted a “soft Brexit” that would preserve Britain’s access to Europe’s common market. Hardliners wanted a “hard Brexit” that would prioritize ditching EU regulations and controlling immigration. European negotiators in Brussels were not going to let the Brits have both. Further complicating the process was an issue that few anticipated before the referendum: the economic and political status of Northern Ireland — the only part of the UK with a land border with the EU. 

May stepped down in 2019, and after an internal party leadership election, was replaced by former London mayor and omnipresent media figure Boris Johnson.

A few months after taking office, Johnson called a national election, campaigning on a pledge to “get Brexit done” — and won a landslide victory. It didn’t hurt that Labour at the time was led by the veteran left-winger Jeremy Corbyn, who had both failed to take a strong stance on Brexit and was beset by accusations of anti-semitism. 

Armed with his new large majority, Johnson did indeed get Brexit done. Britain formally left the EU on January 31, 2020. Just two years later, however, Johnson left as well, forced to resign over a scandal over allegations that he misled parliament over parties held in his office during Covid-19 lockdowns. 

That was followed by the 50-day reign of Prime Minister Liz Truss, which was the shortest in British history — so short, in fact, that she was famously outlasted by a head of lettuce.  Truss is mainly remembered for a proposed set of tax cuts so extreme it triggered weeks of panic in global bond markets and the kind of upbraiding from the International Monetary Fund normally reserved for failed states. 

Truss was then replaced by Sunak, who made history as the first prime minister of Asian descent, as well as the youngest one since William Pitt in 1783. Under Sunak, the lingering effects of the pandemic and the shock to energy markets caused by the war in Ukraine have contributed to a cost-of-living crisis that has disproportionately impacted the poorest Britons. Sunak has tried to make the case that the UK economy is turning the corner — and indeed inflation is now starting to ease — but it’s almost certainly too little too late. 

Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Disentangling the effects of the withdrawal from other post-2020 shocks isn’t easy, but a recent study from Britain’s National Institute of Economic and Social Research, an independent think tank, estimated that the UK’s real GDP is about 2 to 3 percent lower today, compared to a scenario where it stayed in the union. Real income is about 8 to 9 percent lower. 

Ironically, Brexit didn’t even accomplish the goal that motivated many of its supporters to vote for it: Net migration to the UK has actually increased since the withdrawal.

Much of the debate around immigration policy has focused on the government’s bizarre and inhumane plan to fly asylum seekers to Rwanda to have their claims processed, as a means of deterring them from trying. But asylum seekers are only about 11 percent of the UK’s immigrants, and half of those are Ukrainians who entered under a specially tailored system and significantly more public support.

The real driver of migration is economic — including the economic needs of Britain itself. As migration researcher Hein de Haas has written, while “Brexit successfully curtailed free inflows of EU workers, it did not eliminate labor shortages that had been driving increasing migration to the UK ever since the 1990s.”

Brexit’s advocates had argued that the benefits of trade with Europe could be offset by a free trade agreement that a new “global Britain,” unshackled from the EU, could pursue. But other than new deals with Australia and New Zealand, progress has been slow on that front.

Johnson and Truss both promised a new free trade deal with the United States as a benefit of Brexit, but badly misjudged the changing mood in Washington, where both the Republicans and Democrats have taken a turn toward protectionism. (Credit where it’s due: Johnson did get the US to lift a ban on the imports of British lamb.)

More than 60 percent of British voters, including more than a third of “Leave” voters, now say Brexit has been more of a failure than a success. But the damage is done. And given that reversing Brexit in the foreseeable future isn’t on the table, even if Labour gets its expected landslide, it’s likely permanent. 

—Joshua Keating, senior correspondent

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Writer John Ganz joins Sean to discuss the conservative movement of the 1990s and how it foreshadowed the MAGA movement and the hyper-partisan politics of today.

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Today's edition was produced and edited by Caroline Houck. We'll see you tomorrow!

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