Brexit and the Fate of Self-Government
Sovereignty was the central question of Brexit. At any rate, it was what made me prick up my ears. It is unfortunate, however, that the referendum was fought so heavily on the question of immigration. It mattered, of course; no democratic country can be indifferent to the scale and pace of demographic change. But the deeper issue was whether Britain had not only the legal right, but the real ability, to govern itself according to its own needs, resources, landscape, economy, and social obligations.
My support for sovereignty was accompanied from the beginning by a serious misgiving. If Brexit were mishandled, sovereignty might not mean the liberation of the British people, but the transfer of greater and less restrained power to Westminster and Whitehall. To recover sovereignty from Brussels would be no great victory if it merely gave the British state a freer hand over its own citizens. European structures, including the protections associated with the European Convention on Human Rights, placed limits on what British governments could do. Those limits could be irritating, but they were also safeguards.
The central point is simple. Outside the European Union, Britain at least has the formal ability to decide its own business: how it manages food, energy, water, industry, housing, borders, education, and the natural environment. Whether any government has the will to face up to that task is another matter.
Inside the European Union, by contrast, national self-government is necessarily limited. Membership brings advantages, but it also means that many fundamental decisions are shaped by a wider legal, regulatory, economic, agricultural, and political framework.
Sovereignty in itself does not guarantee good government. It only gives a country the chance to attempt those things for itself. Outside the EU, failure clings more obviously to our own government. Inside it, failure can always be hidden inside a larger system.
During the referendum campaign sovereignty was mentioned more often than it was explored. The public was offered simpler and more saleable promises: money for the NHS, control of borders, and release from bureaucratic interference.
The European Union undoubtedly offered benefits: ease of travel, study, trade, health-cover arrangements, and regional funding. These were real advantages. But they came within a broader structure of legal, economic, agricultural, industrial, and regulatory integration. The UK Parliament has long recognised that EU membership involved a loss, or at least a pooling, of sovereignty because EU law had primacy in areas covered by the Treaties. (Parliament News)
So why does sovereignty matter now? It is because the crises now facing Britain require decisive, national direction. Water, energy, transport, farming, housing, education, and environmental protection are not merely market sectors. They are the basic systems through which a country either sustains itself or gradually decays. If those systems are left entirely to private extraction, foreign ownership, short-term finance, or supranational regulation, then democratic government has lost control of essential domains.
Food security is one example. The UK still imports roughly 40% of its food, while domestic production stands at about 62% of all food consumed and 75% of indigenous foods, according to the UK Food Security Report 2024. (GOV.UK) In a settled world, this may appear tolerable. In a world of war, disrupted shipping, climate instability, energy shocks, and fragile supply chains, it becomes a national vulnerability. A sovereign country ought to have a serious farming policy: not a nostalgic fantasy of total self-sufficiency, but a deliberate effort to protect soil, water, biodiversity, farmers, and the capacity to feed the population in a crisis.
The environment is another. Britain is already one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. The 2023 State of Nature report found that the abundance of studied UK species has fallen by 19% on average since 1970, and that nearly one in six assessed species are at risk of being lost from Great Britain. (National Trust) This is not a marginal concern. A country that destroys its own landscape, pollutes its rivers, exhausts its soil, and loses its wildlife is not exercising sovereignty in any meaningful sense. It is consuming its inheritance.
That is why sovereignty must be connected to responsibility. It is not enough to recover powers from the EU if those powers are then surrendered to water companies, energy giants, developers, financial markets, or party machines concerned only with the next election. Sovereignty without public purpose is no more than empty theatre.
The same applies to education. A sovereign country needs citizens who understand duty, place, history, environment, and responsibility. Education should not merely produce workers for a service economy or consumers for a market. It should form people who know what kind of country they inhabit, what has been handed down to them, and what they owe to those who come after them.
This is where Brexit has so far failed. It created an opportunity, but the political class treated it largely as a weapon in the struggle for office. The governing assumption remained what it has always been: that the purpose of politics is to win, by fair means or foul. But if that remains the first principle, sovereignty will achieve nothing. It will merely give a declining country more freedom to mismanage itself.
The tragedy is that Brexit could have opened a serious conversation about national reconstruction: food, energy, water, housing, industry, education, borders, democracy, and the natural world. Instead, much of the debate has remained trapped in an argument between those who grumble about leaving the EU and those who imagine that leaving it required no further action.
The problem is that, once finance, industry, utilities, housing, and much of everyday economic life have been surrendered to private ownership, government is left managing the social consequences of decisions it no longer fully controls. It confronts the distress produced by the system, but not always the system itself: child poverty, job insecurity, low wages, insecure housing, high mortgage repayments, and the steady replacement of ownership by forms of permanent rental.
The first task of a sovereign government should therefore be to regain control over those essential systems on which national life depends. Water, energy, transport, housing, food production, and key industries cannot simply be treated as markets. They are public necessities. If they are owned, priced, and managed primarily for private return, then the state becomes less a governing authority than an emergency service for the damage left behind.
The second task is to deal seriously with those areas over which government still has direct influence: public welfare, education, wages, housing policy, taxation, planning, health, and the protection of children and families. These are not secondary matters. They are the daily substance of national life. A government that cannot protect its people from poverty, insecurity, unaffordable housing, and the erosion of ordinary ownership cannot claim to have made sovereignty meaningful.
The citizen increasingly rents not only a home, but access to software, banking apps, cloud storage, digital tickets, government portals, health services, payment systems, and the identity-verification tools increasingly required to participate in ordinary life. Ownership has devolved into dependence.
This is why public welfare, rather than administrative control, ought to be the central issue of government. The recent local elections showed how sharply Labour has lost ground, with reports recording heavy Labour losses and large gains for Reform UK, the Greens, and others. But the lesson should not be that government must police speech more aggressively, or tighten administrative control over the population. The lesson should be that many people no longer believe the state is seriously addressing the material pressures under which they live.
Free speech should not be treated as a threat to be managed. Public distress should be. A government that concentrates on surveillance, digital identity, policing language, and administrative systems while neglecting child poverty, insecure work, low pay, housing costs, and the loss of ordinary ownership has misunderstood its first duty. Sovereignty does not mean much if the citizen is formally free but economically trapped.
This brings me back to my original misgiving. The danger was always that Brexit might not liberate the people so much as liberate the state. A country may recover formal sovereignty while its citizens become less free in practice. If power returns from Brussels only to be concentrated in Westminster, Whitehall, databases, surveillance systems, and executive authority, then the democratic promise of sovereignty has been betrayed.
The concern about digital identity belongs within this larger failure. Digital ID appeared explicitly in the King’s Speech of May 2026 through the proposed Digital Access to Services Bill. The Government presents this as a matter of convenience, security, fraud prevention, and easier access to public services. It now says the scheme will be optional. But the fact that digital ID has reached the legislative programme matters because it reveals the direction of political imagination. Where government struggles to regain control over water, energy, housing, food, industry, wages, and welfare, it seems far more confident about extending systems of identification, verification, and administrative access.
This also has a longer Labour history. The Blair and Brown governments pursued national identity cards through the Identity Cards Act 2006, including the creation of a National Identity Register. That scheme was later repealed by the Identity Documents Act 2010, with the repeal taking effect in January 2011. What has returned now is not the same plastic card, but the same underlying instinct by digital means: to make state-administered identity a gateway to ordinary life.
The concern about digital identity belongs within this larger failure. It is not the main issue in itself, but a symptom of misplaced political energy. Britain faces urgent social and economic problems: child poverty, insecure work, low wages, unaffordable housing, high mortgage repayments, weak food security, failing public services, degraded rivers, and essential utilities run too often for private return. These are the matters a sovereign government ought to face directly.
Instead, government often appears weak where it ought to be strong, and strong where it ought to be restrained. It struggles to regain control over water, energy, housing, food, industry, wages, public welfare, and the natural environment, yet seems far more confident in developing systems of identification, verification, monitoring, and administrative control. The issue is not that Britain becomes China overnight. That would be too crude a comparison. The danger is that systems introduced for limited and plausible purposes gradually become the normal machinery through which citizens are managed.
The same danger applies to the proposed EU reset. The Government is not formally proposing to rejoin the European Union, and it has ruled out a return to the single market, the customs union, and freedom of movement. But closer alignment still raises the question at the heart of this article: whether sovereignty is being used to strengthen democratic responsibility, or quietly diluted again through systems of management, compliance, and technocratic control.
This brings me back to my original misgiving. Leaving the European Union was not enough. Sovereignty is only the beginning. If it is not used to restore public control over essential national systems, protect the vulnerable, rebuild social trust, and improve the daily conditions of ordinary life, then it becomes little more than a constitutional possession without moral purpose.
The harder question is not whether Britain is formally sovereign. It is whether any government has the wisdom, courage, and seriousness to use sovereignty for the welfare of its people.
