6 hours ago
20
The Guardian has revisited five bellwether constituencies we reported on during the 2016 EU referendum campaign, and asked those we spoke to at the time how they now feel about Brexit a decade on from the vote.
Torridge and West Devon. Voted leave by 57.0%
“Absolute nightmare, shambles, and still is to this day,” says Tony Rutherford a decade after he voted leave to save the British fishing industry.
Rutherford, who since 1979 has run a business in Appledore, north-west Devon, buying from fishers and selling on to wholesalers, even featured on a Ukip poster. “Nobody is listening. They might listen in June,” he said in 2016.
Now he says that Brexit has been a disaster from day one. Under Johnson’s deal, the UK fishing fleet with which Rutherford works achieved barely any increase in fishing opportunities, he ssays. “Sold down the river,” is how Rutherford puts it.
Then there were the huge additional export costs from 1 January 2021. He had “folders after folders” of information about what he needed to do ahead of time, but it all proved to be “useless”.
“I believe it was 4 January we shipped £47,000 worth of our first shipment of largely ray and dover sole,” he says. “The first thing you have to do is be VAT registered in France. You cannot export into France without that. You’ve got to employ a French accountant to do that for you. The cost of that is £2,000 a month. That first load was held up for five days.”
It was ruined. Under a compensation scheme set up by the government as the disaster unfolded, Rutherford got £11,000 back.
“That was our first encounter,” he says. “You have got other costs: you need a health certificate that costs £85 a go. You need a transport company to do the import documents: £245 a go. So every shipment is an extra £330.
“If you ship three times a week it is a thousand quid. There are other costs. Bearing in mind we are really a husband-and-wife team, it is £70,000 right out of my back pocket. It is horrendous.”
Then there is French customs. “On a health certificate, which is 16 sheets long, you have got eight sheets in English and eight sheets in French,” Rutherford says.
“If you miss one digit of a 10-digit code, your whole shipment is condemned the other side. Since Brexit we have lost about eight loads – anything from £15,000 to £50,000.”
He adds: “A lot of merchants in the south-west of England say: ‘I just can’t do it – it is not worth exporting.’ I’ll be exporting this Friday and I will have all the costs and all the worries until I get an email on Saturday saying customs cleared.” Does he regret his vote? “One hundred per cent – anybody would.”
Daniel Boffey
Ceredigion. Voted remain by 54.6%
In 2016, the then Liberal Democrat MP for Ceredigion, Mark Williams, said he was very confident campaigning for remain in the referendum: a YouGov poll at the time suggested his former constituency was the most pro-EU area in the UK.
Not only was the area’s rural economy “heavily dependent” on EU funding, the universities in Aberystwyth and Lampeter meant “we have been an enriched, cosmopolitan community for a very long time”, he said 10 years ago.
Much has changed since. University of Wales, Lampeter has closed; the constituency is now part of Ceredigion Preseli, which includes parts of north Pembrokeshire; and Williams was replaced by Plaid Cymru’s Ben Lake in the 2017 general election.
“The tide had already turned against the remaining Liberal Democrats in office by then but I have no doubt that the Brexit result contributed to me losing my seat,” Williams says today.
He and Lake say the local agricultural sector has suffered from leaving the EU.
Lake says: “Our upland sheep farmers are more dependent on subsidies than arable farms. The funding cycles used to run in five- to seven-year cycles, and now two years is a luxury. Most lamb exports still go to the EU, but now farmers have to get health and sanitary certificates and checks.”
While remain won in Ceredigion, Wales as a whole – unlike Scotland and Northern Ireland – voted leave, possibly because of large numbers of retired English people living there.
Support for Plaid Cymru has soared since. The Welsh nationalist party had its best general election result in 2024, and now leads Wales after sweeping Labour from office in May’s historic Senedd election.
According to Lake, Brexit “drew attention to constitutional matters”.
“It’s obvious that the current setup with a heavily centralised government in Westminster doesn’t work for Wales … or north-east England or Cornwall for that matter,” he says. “Since Brexit people have realised that it is Plaid Cymru that will stand up for Wales.”
Bethan McKernan
Banff and Buchan. Voted remain by 54.0%
In May 2016, David Milne, the chair of the Scottish White Fish Producers Association, leaned against an EU funding sign on the quayside of Fraserburgh harbour and said he hoped Brexit would allow his industry to “manage our own destiny”, but he now feels their livelihoods were “bartered away”.
For Milne, “control” was the main appeal of Brexit. “We are bitter about it because we haven’t gained any,” he now says.
“Near 99% of fishermen voted for Brexit because we wanted more control. We wanted to manage the quotas and effort and have more say as to what happened in our waters.
“We was promised that, but that hasn’t happened. So that’s the thing, it was just lies that was told to us again.”
Scottish fishers have continued to voluntarily close spawning grounds in Scottish waters to rejuvenate cod stocks. But Milne says EU boats now sail north to exploit those waters.
“We designed the areas where we knew the time of year the cod was spawning in them. These are things that was taken onboard ourselves, as fishermen, to manage the cod stocks.
“And now we’re seeing EU vessels from Holland coming all the way to Fair Isle and Shetlands to catch cod. It’s a bitter pill to swallow.”
Boundary changes in 2024 mean the constituency of Banff and Buchan no longer exists.
Severin Carrell
Romford. Voted leave by 69.2%
A decade ago, Sue Connelly did not mince her words on Brexit. “We want our country back,” she said in the heat of the EU referendum campaign outside Margaret Thatcher House, the headquarters of Romford’s Conservative Association.
In the years since, the party’s fortunes locally have changed massively. At last month’s local elections, Reform UK took control of Havering council, where the east London town is situated, and completely wiped out the Tories in the process.
But some things have stayed the same. “Romford is very rightwing,” says Michael White, a former Conservative leader of Havering council.
Neither Connelly, who served as the constituency secretary, nor Osman Dervish, the former chair of the Conservative Association, who spoke to the Guardian in Romford during the 2016 campaign, responded to requests to reflect on the result a decade on.
White and Dilip Patel, the deputy leader of the Romford Conservative group, who also campaigned locally for the leave vote, now have “mixed feelings” about Brexit.
Patel says his choice was influenced by his role as a school governor where he could “see the pressure schools were under to accommodate children” who emigrated from Bulgaria and Romania after both countries joined the EU.
He also mentions pressures on the NHS and housing. “I felt that we needed to stop the influx of free movement until we got ourselves sorted,” he says.
White says he voted for Brexit because he “wanted policies for British people to be made in Britain and not in Brussels” and a hope that “the amount of money we were supposed to save could be better used on the NHS”.
But he is sceptical that the health service has seen any money promised as a benefit of Brexit. “In fact, the NHS has gotten worse,” says White.
Patel and White lost their seats as councillors to Reform UK last month, which they believe was partly influenced by Brexit. “I think it’s split the party,” White says.
They were both approached by Reform to switch party allegiances but declined, unlike some Tories. “Was I annoyed?” asks White. “Yes. Lots of people that I’ve counted as colleagues for a number of years decided to cross the floor.”
Among them was Andrew Rosindell, Romford’s MP for 25 years, who defected to the Farage-led party in January. The move has led to a bitter rift between the local Conservative Association and Rosindell, who was locked out of his constituency office located inside Margaret Thatcher House. He launched a high court action in an attempt to be let back in but lost. His name still appears on the door.
White says he was “saddened and disappointed” by Rosindell’s defection. “I’ve known Andrew since 1982 and we’ve been the best of friends. I think I was probably one of the first people he phoned to say he was defecting,” he says.
But party loyalty comes first and he is prepared to campaign against Rosindell. “It’s quite a perdition to go out there and campaign against somebody who’s been a friend for a long time but that’s what I need to do,” White says. “I‘m very unhappy I have to face that choice.”
Sammy Gecsoyler
Kettering. Voted leave by 61.0%
Ten years ago, the then Conservative MP Philip Hollobone – resplendent in a union flag coat – predicted that places such as Rothwell, Northamptonshire, would have a critical say in Britain’s future.
“This is middle England,” he said at the time, as he led his pro-leave canvassers through the town. “This referendum is going to be decided in market towns like this.”
His side won the Brexit campaign – but Hollobone went on to lose his parliamentary seat in Kettering in 2024 to Labour. He believes this was a result of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK eating into his votes.
“The big Reform message in 2024 was real anger about immigration,” Hollobone says. The Conservatives failed to deliver on the promise of tightening migration when outside of the EU, he claims.
“The negotiations were handled really badly and the Brexit deal when it was achieved was suboptimal,” Hollobone says. “The tragedy is that over the last 10 years, the potential for Brexit has not been realised. That doesn’t mean it can’t be. But putting Brexit into practice hasn’t gone nearly as well as it should have done.
“That isn’t the fault of Brexit. That’s the fault of the politicians who are in charge of the process. The big letdown has been over immigration. We had the opportunity to really tighten up our immigration controls but in fact it went the other way.”
Hollobone supported Boris Johnson for Tory leader in 2019 after the fall of Theresa May’s government because of the dissatisfaction with her Brexit proposals. Johnson let him down, Hollobone says.
“Boris Johnson didn’t believe in the tough controls that many others did. Ukip stood down in the 2019 election believing Conservative promises that we would get tough on immigration. And when we didn’t, Reform took revenge in 2024.”
Daniel Boffey
