Nigel Farage, the main driver of Brexit, now admits it has been a failure

Nigel Farage is not the last voice of a shrinking camp, that of British Eurosceptics. But he was the most relevant protagonist in that 2016 campaign, full of demagoguery and lies, which managed to convince a majority of Britons to support the United Kingdom's exit from the EU. So for Farage to now acknowledge that Brexit has been a failure, even if he blames it on the Conservative Party, has some poetic justice – or revenge – for all Britons who fought to remain.

"What Brexit has shown, I'm afraid, is that our politicians are just as useless as the commissioners in Brussels. We have handled this matter absolutely badly," admitted the popular former politician and today commentator for an ultra-right channel such as GB News. "Brexit has been a failure, we have not been able to deliver what we promised, and the Tories have disappointed us deeply," Farage said. Although he assures that he will not return to the political scene – although he has not ruled it out completely – after having managed to disrupt the strategy of the conservatives and instill fear in their leaders with the threat of UKIP and then the Reform Party, the most popular eurosceptic in the United Kingdom next to Boris Johnson refuses to leave the front line and stop squeezing the wreck.

Brexit has largely been to blame for the UK economy lagging behind Western countries on its post-pandemic recovery path. It has not yet recovered to pre-COVID-19 levels, and the OECD forecasts a growth path for the country barely similar to that of Russia. The Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility no longer use euphemisms or detours to blame Brexit for an economic decline that will amount to about 4% of GDP in the coming years. "We have not been able to benefit from Brexit, even though we could have," Farage said. "In theory, we have regained control (take back control was the successful slogan of the referendum campaign), but we are regulating our companies more zealously than if we were members of the EU. In that sense, Brexit has been a failure," he said.

Farage defended at the time an ultraliberal vision of the divorce of the United Kingdom from the EU that would have turned the country, and especially its capital, London, into a "Singapore on the banks of the Thames", an expression popularized then by some eurosceptics and that harbored the idea of a savage deregulation of the economy. Neither did that prediction – in which many conservatives did not believe or dare to put into practice – nor was the control of the borders promised by the defenders of Brexit achieved, as the recent crisis of irregular migrants arriving on the shores of southern England has shown.

Sunak's challenge

The spark that has made Brexit fanatics like Farage, silent until now, make noise again, has been the decision of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to delay his promise to expel from British law all the regulations of the acquis communautaire incorporated for almost four decades. The Retained EU Legislation Removal Act (REUL) continues through the House of Commons, and there is not enough rebels to stop the amendments incorporated by Sunak. But his decision to maintain, for the moment, more than 3,000 of the 4,000 EU laws that he had promised to remove from the British legal framework has been interpreted by the most radical, such as Farage, as the definitive betrayal.

It was raining on wet. Sunak's maneuver to negotiate with Brussels the so-called Windsor Framework Agreement, which ended the conflict with the EU over the fit of Northern Ireland in the post-Brexit era, has already been poorly received by the most recalcitrant eurosceptics. Their weight, increasingly diminished, was evident when they voted against the text in the British Parliament and barely managed to add 22 rejections. At its best, the hardline Eurosceptic wing could muster more than a hundred votes among Conservative MPs.

Sunak's spokesman has limited himself to denying Farage's pessimistic statements and recalling that the prime minister was among the first to defend Brexit, which he considers to have been a success in his final balance.

Follow all the international information on Facebook and Twitter, or in our weekly newsletter.