Ten Years of Brexit. I Was Never Asked.

Today, 23/06/2026, is exactly ten years since the UK voted to leave the European Union. I was ten years old. There's no ballot paper to point to, no polling station memory, because the threshold for actually deciding this was eighteen and I wasn't within a decade of it on any count that mattered. I want to write something for the anniversary anyway, because being too young to vote on the thing that shaped your entire adolescence doesn't mean you don't end up with an opinion on it. I have one. It isn't complicated: I'd have voted Remain, I think leaving was a mistake, and I would like to rejoin.

That's the whole position, really. Everything below is just me explaining why a decade hasn't talked me out of it.

Born Premature in Zaragoza

There's a more literal reason behind all of this, and it predates the referendum by about a decade. I was born premature, in Zaragoza, while my parents were on holiday — nowhere near home, nowhere near anything that was supposed to happen there. Premature birth meant an intracranial haemorrhage into my own ventricles, my first brain surgery, and five months in the NICU at Lozano Blesa before anyone was confident enough to let me leave it. That's the kind of bill that bankrupts a family when it happens to the wrong nationality in the wrong country.

It didn't bankrupt mine. Being British in Spain at the time meant carrying an EHIC, which got us treated under the same terms a Spanish national would have been, not billed as a foreign emergency with a private insurance cap buried somewhere in the small print. That wasn't a courtesy. It was what EU membership actually did, mechanically, for a family in exactly that situation. The UK's since replaced it with the GHIC, which covers similar ground but on thinner, separately-negotiated terms rather than automatic EU-wide coordination — close enough that most people won't notice the difference, right up until they need it not to be different.

I don't have a tidy abstract argument for why that matters to me more than the GDP figures or the polling do. I have the fact that I exist without my family owing money over it, and a fairly direct sense of which set of rules made that true.

Whatever came out of that early start didn't stay behind in the NICU, either. The medical needs that followed me out of Lozano Blesa are still ongoing, and they're not the sort of thing you uproot lightly across a border on a whim. I'm essentially trapped on this island because of them — not by Westminster's choice this time, just by biology's. Which makes losing the version of "easy to leave" that full EU membership would have given me a more pointed loss than it might be for someone who could just pack a bag and go.

A Decade I Didn't Vote For

There was a reasonable argument going around in 2016 that 16- and 17-year-olds should have had a vote on this one, given they'd just been given one for the Scottish independence referendum two years earlier. Parliament voted that argument down. Whether it would have changed the result is genuinely contested and I'm not going to pretend I can settle it from here. But it isn't really my grievance to claim either way — I was ten, not sixteen, and no extension of the franchise was ever going to reach me.

Mine's blunter. Nobody my age got a say in a decision that has since shaped, in fairly literal ways, the entire adult life I'm currently trying to start. The people who could vote chose the conditions I'd be growing up under. I just had to grow up under them.

Seven Prime Ministers Later

Yesterday, 22/06/2026, Keir Starmer resigned as Prime Minister — almost exactly ten years to the day since the vote that's been quietly wrecking British governments ever since. David Cameron resigned the morning after losing the referendum he called to settle an argument inside his own party. Theresa May spent three years trying to negotiate a version of Brexit that a divided Parliament could never agree on, then resigned too. Boris Johnson rode the "get Brexit done" mandate into Downing Street and was eventually forced out by an unrelated scandal. Liz Truss lasted forty-nine days. Rishi Sunak inherited what was left of all of it. Starmer's exit has its own specific causes — Cabinet resignations, a row over defence spending, a US ambassador scandal that wouldn't go away — but the timing still landed on the eve of the referendum's tenth anniversary, which feels less like coincidence than a decade finally collecting on what it's owed.

Seven leaders in ten years, with Andy Burnham the overwhelming favourite to become the eighth. I don't think that instability is entirely Brexit's fault. I do think it's a stretch to call it unrelated.

What Ten Years Actually Cost

Polling released around the anniversary has 52% of people in the UK now wanting to rejoin the EU, against 33% who don't. 48% think Brexit has gone worse than expected; 9% think it's gone better. 48% would back another referendum on EU membership; 27% wouldn't. Economists marking the same anniversary have been putting the UK economy somewhere between 4% and 8% smaller than it would have been had the country stayed in — and pointedly not blaming COVID or the ongoing Iran war for that gap, because the trade, investment and productivity losses are too specifically shaped like Brexit to pin on either.

I'm not going to pretend I have a sharper model of the UK economy than the people whose job this is. But a decade in, the people who measure this for a living keep arriving at the same answer: smaller, poorer, and not because of the things you'd like to blame instead.

The Marches, and the Men Who Won't Say It

On 20/06/2026, a Rejoin march went through central London ahead of the anniversary. One organiser put the decade plainly: harder, more expensive, more bureaucratic, with the people carrying the longest consequences being the ones who never had a vote on it to begin with. That part I don't need convincing of.

Boris Johnson marked the same anniversary from the other direction, telling supporters to "stop fearing the freedoms won through Brexit" and waving off any talk of rejoining. Fine — he was always going to say that. The more interesting refusal came from the other side. Andy Burnham, about to become Labour leader and very likely the next Prime Minister, was asked about rejoining while campaigning for the Commons seat that's now got him there. "I am not proposing that the U.K. considers rejoining the EU," he said, citing respect for the original result. Even with a majority of the country now telling pollsters they want back in, the most Europhile-friendly figure with a real shot at Downing Street still won't say the actual word.

That's the gap I keep landing on. 52% isn't a fringe opinion. It's a majority. There is still not one major party prepared to act on it.

The Union Frayed Too

Brexit didn't only cost money. Scotland voted 62.0% to remain; Northern Ireland voted 55.8% to remain; only Wales backed leaving, and narrowly. The 2026 devolved elections returned pro-independence parties in both Scotland and Wales for the first time since devolution began, and support for Irish reunification has climbed from roughly 22% in 2017 to 36% in 2025 — with the share of people in Northern Ireland who say Brexit specifically pushed them toward backing a united Ireland more than doubling since 2016.

I've got Glaswegian heritage on one side of my family, so I'll just say the quiet part out loud rather than tiptoe round it: I want the Union to break. I grew up fine with it. I'm not anymore. I want Éire reunified, and I want Alba and Cymru independent of England — actually independent, not "devolved enough that people stop asking." So "Brexit measurably increased support for breaking up the United Kingdom" doesn't read to me as a cautionary statistic. It reads as evidence the rest of the country might eventually catch up to where I already am.

I'll go a step further while I'm at it: I utterly despise the English government, full stop, regardless of which lot happens to be sitting in it any given decade. And I'm fully behind the parties actually doing something about it — the SNP and Plaid Cymru chasing proper independence for Alba and Cymru, and Sinn Féin doing the same for Éire. None of that's a hedge. It's just where I've landed.

If it actually happened, I'd want it to land somewhere closer to the Good Friday Agreement than a clean amputation — a treaty-based settlement that keeps movement between all four nations open by design, the way the Common Travel Area already keeps Ireland and the rest of these islands open today, rather than something that hardens borders just to prove the point was won. Independence with the border left soft is the version I'd actually sign up for.

It's also doing some quiet work on my own plans, if I'm honest. If the rest of the country isn't going to rejoin, then a Scotland visibly drifting toward its own relationship with the EU — pro-independence governments, rising reunification numbers next door, all of it — makes moving there feel less like a whim and more like picking the bit of these islands that's pointed toward a future I'd actually choose. Alba isn't independent of Westminster yet. Nothing in this post changes that, and I'm not pretending otherwise. But I'm more at home in my Albannach heritage and the wider Celtic links than I've ever been in the English side of things, and that's not a coincidence I'm interested in talking myself out of anymore.

If I'm tracing this back honestly, the first nudge predates the boyfriend by well over a decade and is almost embarrassingly small. Wolfblood — the CBBC and ZDF show about teenage werewolves — apparently slipped actual Celtic history in alongside the Vikings and Saxons in its third series, while I was there purely for the werewolves and registered none of it consciously at the time. Small spark. Still the first domino.

Some of the rest is more recent and more specific than "family heritage," if I'm being fully honest. My boyfriend is American, of Irish descent, and a good chunk of the pull runs through him — he's the one who actually helped me learn the dimension of myself I'd mostly inherited as vague background noise rather than sat down and learned properly. I know that comes with rose-tinted glasses built in. I don't think that makes it less real. It still feels considerably more authentic to me than the English 3 quarters of where I come from, glasses or not.

There's a caricature of myself that surfaces occasionally too — the version cosplaying Scottish, playing dress-up in a culture that isn't really his. I don't think it's a fair caricature, and saying so plainly seems like the only real way to get rid of it. I've got solid heritage on that side, not one great-grandparent dug up for the occasion. And my own name is anglicised directly out of Gàidhlig — Ewan, from Eòghann — which is an odd thing to keep forgetting while the voice in my head accuses me of borrowing somebody else's identity.

That caricature has a sibling, if I'm honest: the matching one of internalised homophobia, dressed up as something more respectable than what it actually is. It's not just a tidy parallel, either — England's been feeling steadily less hospitable on that front too, and Reform, or Deform if we're being accurate about it, is a fairly large part of why. Reform UK's manifesto promises to repeal the Equality Act, and Farage has called same-sex marriage "wrong" in not so many words. None of that's a caricature I'm inventing in my own head. It's increasingly just an accurate description of the room I'd be staying in if I didn't leave it.

I'm aware of the obvious irony of writing all this in English. I don't have a tidy way around that one — it's my native tongue, whatever else I might wish, and I'm learning Gàidhlig rather than pretending I've already got it. But the language I write in and the heritage I claim were never going to be required to match, and I wasn't going to hold off saying any of this until they did.

A Capped Visa Isn't Rejoining

The closest thing on the table for people roughly my age is a UK-EU youth mobility scheme — sorry, "youth experience scheme," because apparently "mobility" sounded too much like the thing we used to have automatically. It's been under negotiation since May 2025 and, as far as I can tell, still isn't signed off. The shape of it so far: ages 18 to 30, a hard cap somewhere in the tens of thousands, a fixed time limit, no access to benefits, no dependants, and a fight over university tuition fees that nearly sank the whole thing this spring.

I'm comfortably inside that 18–30 bracket, for what it's worth. And the offer on the table, after a decade of negotiation, is a temporary, numerically rationed visa to do the version of "live and work in Europe" that used to be the unremarkable default for anyone my age before 2016. I'm not saying that to be dramatic about it. I'm saying it because it's an accurate description of what's actually being negotiated, and accuracy feels like the least I owe this topic.

The Vote I Never Got

I can't actually know what ten-year-old me would have done with a ballot in 2016 — that version of me didn't have opinions about trade agreements, he had opinions about which DS games were worth the pocket money. But I know what the version of me writing this thinks, having grown up entirely inside the consequences: it was a mistake, the decade since hasn't made the case any better, and I'd vote to rejoin tomorrow if anyone actually asked.

Nobody's going to ask. Not Burnham, not whoever comes after him, not for a good while yet. Fifty-two percent of the country agreeing with me hasn't been enough to move the conversation past "managed reset" and capped visas. That's fine. I've had ten years of not being consulted about this one. I can wait a bit longer to be properly annoyed about it.

Alba Shaor. Alba gu bràth.