Academics have long since tracked the correlation between economic downturns and antipathy toward immigration. And so it was throughout Europe, with a surge in support for far-right parties that continues today.

In Britain, that manifested itself in the 2016 Brexit referendum, in which a majority of voting British people chose to decouple themselves from the E.U. Trump ally Nigel Farage, now leader of Reform UK, promised them greater control of their borders, and legal and economic freedom from the trading bloc.

In fact, by 2025 Brexit meant the economy was 6%-8% smaller than it would have been otherwise, according to the U.K. in a Changing Europe, a London think tank.

It didn’t lower immigration either, with the decline in European incomers offsetting by those from outside the E.U. and net migration growing from 335,000 in 2016 to 944,000 in 2023.

“Why is the economy so unstable today? Brexit. We might as well say the quiet part out loud,” said Scott Lucas, an international politics professor and longtime Westminster watcher at Ireland’s University College Dublin.

According to Guto Hari, director of communications for Boris Johnson, the Conservative ex-prime minister who backed the project, voters became more impatient after Brexit.

“Whereas we used to be more cool and rational, the electorate is more fickle, it wants more instant gratification, and it gets frustrated more quickly,” he said.

In Brexit, people were “sold the idea that there are simple answers to complex questions — which there aren’t,” Hari added.