I think we're underestimating the sense of rage and political humiliation which may well actually drive Britain and these other middle powers and the European Union to do something which JD Vance and Rubio thinks will never happen, which is to try to develop genuine strategic autonomy away from the United States.

So I think the big story of the next two, three years from Britain is the question of sovereignty.

Hello and welcome to GZERO World, I'm Ian Bremmer, and midway through a summer dominated by headlines out of Iran, Ukraine and Washington DC.

You might have missed a political milestone, the 10-year anniversary of Brexit.

That referendum reshaped the United Kingdom's relationship with Europe, and foreshadowed the equally unexpected election of President Donald Trump just a few months later in the United States.

In the decade since Brexit, the UK has cycled through six Prime Ministers, none of whom has been able to deliver on its central promise, a wealthier Britain unshackled from Brussels and in control of its own borders.

Now, British politics are shifting once again.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham, number seven, is for the moment giving the centre-left new energy, while Nigel Farage, the face of Brexit, faces corruption charges and diminished influence.

After years of turning inward, are we seeing the return of a pro-European Britain, joining me to discuss all of that and more, Rory Stewart, the former diplomat and Tory MP, who railed against Brexit before leaving politics altogether in 2019.

He remains one of Britain's leading political commentators.

Don't worry I've also got your puppet regime.

We're going to have a working group meeting for the next hour.

If we call you back after we use still be Prime Minister.

But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

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Cox is investing in the future, working to create an impact in advanced recycling and an emerging technology companies that will help shape tomorrow.

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And, As dawn broke across London on June 24th, 2016, there was little indication that a political storm had just rocked the British Isles.

It was, in fact, a mild, mid-summer morning when a bleary-eyed Nigel Farage, the face of Britain's leave movement stood in front of Westminster Abbey and declared absolute victory.

There are 17 million people that voted for Brexit.

It's a victory for ordinary people, decent people, that I'm proud of everybody that had the courage in the face of all the threats everything they were told, they had the guts to stand up and do the right thing.

A 17 million levers, not to mention US presidential candidate Donald "Mr.

Brexit" Trump celebrated an unshackled Britain, millions of others feared that a narrow majority had just voted for for the greatest national act of self-harm in modern history.

A decade later, has Brexit delivered on its promises.

If the goal was to restore British sovereignty, then the answer is yes, Britain now controls its own immigration policy, its trade agreements and its regulations.

Nor did the immediate recession that British Treasury forecasters warned of come to pass.

But the referendum was also supposed to unlock faster economic growth, bring about greater prosperity and create, and I quote, "Singapore on the Thames."

And in that respect, Brexit has been a right mess.

Nearly every major indicator today concludes that Brexit has left Britain poorer than it otherwise would have been.

The UK's Office for Budget Responsibility, yes, that's a thing, estimates a long run hit to GDP of about 4%.

Other economists put the loss at 6% to 8% of GDP per person.

Business investment is estimated to be nearly 18% lower than if Britain had remained in the EU.

Politically Brexit settled nothing.

Britain has had seven prime ministers since the referendum, about as many as in the previous 40 years.

Today 57% of Britons say leaving the EU was the wrong decision.

Nearly two thirds believe Brexit has indeed damaged the economy.

Even immigration, the defining issue of the referendum, has taken an unexpected turn.

Governments across Europe have embraced tougher border and asylum policies, leaving the EU more aligned on immigration than many Brexit supporters could have imagined possible.

And Europe never followed Britain out the door.

There was no Frexit, no Nexit, no Italexit.

Instead, Russia's invasion of Ukraine brought the EU closer together, deepening cooperation on defense, and paving the way for new member states.

For 10 years on, if you ask the average Briton what gets their knickers in a twist, they are likely to complain about how little of any of this was thought through.

Take Scott Bishop.

He's a Brexit supporter in 2016, interviewed on the morning, the referendum passed.

- Surely there's a plan in place.

There would've been a robust plan in place.

They wouldn't have just sat there and gone, "Do you know what we're going to do?

We're going to Brexit."

Well, they call it Brexit.

"Let's get out now."

The majority spoke, the country spoke.

We want out, so they left.

There surely is a plan in place.

Surely, if you listen closely, you'll notice that the gentleman never really finishes his thought.

Neither we know now did Britain's leaders.

What could possibly go wrong?

They all seem to be asking and it turns out quite a bit.

Joining me now to talk about Brexit's legacy and Britain's new government, Rory Stewart, former British cabinet minister, and one of the UK's leading political commentators.

Rory Stewart, great to have you back on the show.

Thank you very much, Ian.

- So, Rory, we want to start looking backwards.

It's been 10 years since Brexit.

My perception of these things is that it hasn't turned out particularly well.

If people don't seem happy about Brexit 10 years on, is that what happened?

- No, you're completely right.

The way that Brexit went most wrong was the way that people didn't fully predict 10 years ago.

Brexit happened in an environment where people still imagined a pretty stable world order.

And the story was being driven by the Brexitiers at the time.

We'll leave Europe, which they saw as a pretty stagnant, economy whose demographic growth, whose age profile was going wrong, whose economy was growing slowly.

And we will connect ourselves more closely to the fast growing economies of Asia, the US.

It was a sort of vision which at the time was called Singapore on Thames.

The idea is that Britain would become this sort of deregulated free market, buccaneering, free trading nation.

And of course, it happened at exactly the wrong time because, in fact, the story over the last 10 years is not a world.

It's becoming more globalized, more open, more free trade.

But instead of world, which has been defined by protectionism, by tariffs, and where national security threats means that the idea of completely opening your economy to China or even perhaps for some people, to the US at the moment, doesn't seem as smart.

And in fact, there are many arguments, particularly following Russia's invasion of Ukraine for why you should be closer in every way to your European neighbors.

Now, you've gone through a great many prime ministers since Brexit, both on the conservative side and now on Labour too.

Does the average Brit just see anyone, whether it's on the center right or the center left, as too far from their own sensibilities, as representing a Britain whose time has passed?

- Part of the problem is that people's expectations are completely out of whack with what the country is naturally delivering.

Part of it is that social media helps to whip up real anger.

Part of it is that even when good policy decisions are made, it takes a long time for people to feel the benefits.

And the background story is an economy that's growing quite slowly, a population that's aging, increasing debt, not great productivity.

So the question is, what do you do about this?

And broadly speaking, the only people who've got radical answers to this are of course on the far right, the populist far right, or on the populist left.

So on the populist left, you've got more extreme versions, I guess, of Bernie Sanders in the form of Zack Polanski, the Green Party leader, and on the far right, you've got Nigel Farage.

And broadly, you'd guess what their solutions are.

The right, broadly speaking, thinks the answer is radical, Thatcherite, Reagan style, neo-liberal, make it easier for business, get rid of all the regulations.

Let business drive growth with low taxes, and on the far left, its wealth taxes, its going after the rich, its building a more equal society, its centralized industrial policy.

But what's isn't delivering is the old center ground, which would be, I suppose, the kind of center ground of the Democrats in the US, the kind of third-way consensus, which we associated with Tony Blair or Bill Clinton.

That kind of worldview, a kind of pragmatically regulated free market, is not, people feel, delivering.

So we now have this fellow Andy Burnham, seems to be very different, from what solutions the Brits had been offered by their leaders.

And yet what I hear from you is that we shouldn't probably expect very much from his administration either.

- I don't think you should expect anything startling in terms of unlocking British economic growth.

I mean, what one of the things is that he hasn't actually talked very much about the economy or where the money is going to come from.

What he has done is immediately begun by saying that he wants to do things for adult social care.

In other words, for the vulnerable elderly, he wants to address homelessness, he wants to do radical devolution, he wants to push power down to neglected areas of the north of England, for example.

And finally, he wants to do much better vocational training for the 10-20% of society who really struggle academically and who maybe could be helped a lot by getting high quality skills training.

This is a man who is a Catholic, who guiding question often seems to be, is this decent, is this hospital where I would want to put my mother?

Do I want to see homeless people on the street?

So it's an idea of trying to raise standards, create a Britain that he's proud of, but we don't hear very much about where the money is going to come from to pay for those things.

I mean, Starmer, you got into a lot of trouble in part because he's on the wrong side of the Epstein case and all of the rest.

I'm wondering if Burnham, even if he can't actually deliver, but he is seen as decent as an example of what a British person, a British citizen, a British leader should be.

Is that, can that be enough?

Yeah, it might be.

I mean, I think maybe you're right, Ian, and putting your finger on the fact that in politics, it isn't always all about delivery.

It is partly about values and personality and optimism and communication.

And he is a much, much better communicator.

Keir Starmer was this very, very rigid, wooden lawyer who found it very difficult to talk without sounding like he was reading from a script.

Andy has been the mayor of Greater Manchester, which is a big, big city.

I'm going to be like being, you know, the current being the mayor of Chicago or something.

And so he's coming into it with the spirit of a mayor, much more used to executive power, much more used to dealing with other parties in a pretty non-tribal fashion, in a world in which it's quite difficult to achieve really radical change.

I mean, for example, let's say he wanted to make the entire British education system more like the Swiss education system.

That's not a one year, two year project.

Same with housing, 15, 20 year project.

Getting re-elected or even surviving to the next election may not be about delivering these generational changes, it may be more about seeming to be in touch, seeming to listen to people, seeming to care, may count for a great deal.

I want to move now to one of your favorite topics, which is Nigel.

I mean, he does seem to have blown himself up a bit.

I mean, I have to say I was surprised after someone who took such incredible identity with Brexit.

Given how badly it went, has been, had been able to reformulate himself as such an incredible, incredibly popular force.

So let's first talk about how he managed to do that.

What is it that made Farage a success despite his track record?

- I mean, it is an extraordinary story.

So Nigel Farage came out of the last election, which was only two years ago, with only six seats in Parliament, compared to Labour that got nearly 400 out of 650 seats.

So he was not in a strong position.

Over the last two years, he basically broke British politics, which had been a two-party system, into a five-party system.

So traditionally, Labour and Conservatives, right back in the day, were getting 80-90% of the vote.

Suddenly now, we're in a system where the Greens, Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and Nigel Farage's populist far-right Party, Reform, were on roughly a fifth of the vote, each with Farage leading.

And if you went back six, eight weeks, he was comfortably ahead on the polls and actually looked like the tricks of a first-past-the-post system might have led him to get a staggering majority.

Now that's an extraordinary story.

This is somebody who failed to get elected to Parliament multiple times, who struggled to get one or two MPs in, suddenly turning himself around to look like he was going to end up with over 300 members of Parliament and be in power.

And as you say, given that he was with Boris Johnson, one of the big deliverers of Brexit, how come he wasn't blamed for this?

Well, the answer is that many people who vote for Brexit have been convinced that the problem was not Brexit, but as you can predict that it wasn't delivered right.

And his basic message is the best message of all for any populist, which is there is an out of touch establishment elite.

I represent the real people, we're going to stop immigration, we're going to stop all this politically correct nonsense, and put me in and I'm going to speak for the real British people.

And it's not very different to the message of Giorgia Meloni in Italy, or Donald Trump, or Bolsonaro in Brazil.

It's a classic right wing populist message.

And what's gone wrong for him is now financial scandal.

- Five, five million pounds apparently that he, that he received, and he received apparently illegally as a campaign contribution, yeah?

Yeah, it's, I mean, the whole thing is getting murky or in murky, but there was a five million pound donation that he took.

He claims personally just as a gift from a friend.

And who, who of us doesn't receive gifts like that?

Absolutely.

And then, you know, who of us would feel that when we were about to run for Parliament or became mayor politic, we might want to declare that we just received a five million pound gift from a friend.

The result is that Nigel Farage has finally done something where his base can no longer buy the story that he's the great anti-elite, anti-establishment campaigner.

If he's taking millions of pounds, hanging out with these kind of crypto gambling dudes flying on private jets to Montenegro, the story that he's the ordinary man on the pub with the pint of beer is beginning to look a bit flaky.

So, in order to avoid the continued negative attachment of him being perceived as this dodgy elite, he says, "I am going to take this directly to the people.

I am going to resign my seat, and I will call a bi-election, and the people will show that they still support me.

And I'm going to have this election."

And that does not appear to have been a very wise decision for Nigel.

No, you're right, Ian.

It was amazing.

So, the vision was exactly as you say.

And he thought that all the other parties, Conservative, Labour, etc, would run candidates against him, and he would beat them.

Instead of which all the party leaders immediately said, "This is a stunt.

We're not going to facilitate this.

We're not running any candidates against you.

You can run on your own."

And suddenly, the leading candidate who pops his head up against him is a man called Count Binface.

And Count Binface is a dustbin, a trash can, with a large cloak behind it, and a dark suit.

Here's in other words, a novelty comedy candidate, whose major campaign province is to move the position of the hand dryer in the men's washroom in the Oxbridge pub.

- To be less inconveniently located.

- Right, exactly.

- But that's something I mean, unlike healthcare, right?

I mean, you know, this is something that one can deliver on.

Fairly, fairly expeditiously.

Absolutely.

He also, when he ran against Andy Burnham, his promise was that if he was elected, he would build one affordable home.

Which is quite a good line because all these politicians I mean, promising to build two million affordable homes.

And as far as we can see, they haven't managed to build any.

Now, so the result, though, is you get that is that instead of Farage running against all the establishment parties and showing that he's the people's choice, he's now running against a trash can with a cloak, a sort of mixture between a trash can and a Darth Vader.

And therefore, every hustings he does, every television and few he does, he's having to deal with a trash can.

And he's trying to portray the trash can as the elite establishment.

But he's struggling a little bit.

To make Count Binface the deep state.

Does he actually have a chance of defeating Farage in this odd by election?

The polling suggests that he's an outsider, but I think he'll get many, many more votes than anyone can believe.

I think it's unlikely at the moment that he'll make it into Parliament.

But either way, as you can imagine, is a massive loss for Farage.

You know, either Farage wins relatively narrowly against a trash can or he actually loses his seat to an alien trash can.

To an alien trash can.

So if we look forward, is the big story, post-Brexit that the UK is just destined to become a messy, multi-party democracy with coalition governments coming together and falling apart?

Or having now seen the peak of Farage and Reform, is there an opportunity for the major two centrist parties?

To come back and see post-Brexit business as usual?

I think there is a real opportunity.

I mean, we have a, like an American electoral system, a first-past-the-post system, which favours incumbent parties.

And if these parties can consolidate enough and reform fall away, we would quite quickly, the electoral mathematics will return us back to something that looks like old-fashioned, two-party politics.

And populism in Britain has over the last 20 years tended never quite to peak in the normal European model.

So that is a real possibility.

I mean, I think there's a bigger issue though for countries like Britain.

And I'd say I'd put France, and Germany, and Japan, and South Korea, and Canada, and Australia into this camp, which is the big geostrategic question, is can they really create this alliance of middle powers, which Mark Carney's talking about?

Is it really feasible to imagine that they're not just going to get themselves stuck between the rock of the United States and the hard place of China?

And the big change since 2016 has been that the default setting, which would be, of course, we're on the US side against China, has been shaken very, very dramatically, shaken by Trump's threats against Greenland, threatened by his threats to withdraw from NATO, threatened by his dissabling our access to frontier AI systems, to the general humiliations and tariffs and attacks against what formerly would have been Western allies.

So these are countries that are never going to trust the US structures and systems again in the way that they once did.

The US will be betting, and you hear this from Vance and Marco Rubio, that these countries are too weak and too inept to be able to be able to, foster an alternative to the United States.

So the narratives that we hear, we effectively feel like an abused partner.

We feel like we've got some husband saying to us, yeah, you may not like it, I may beat you up, but you're never going to leave because you can't afford to set up your own house, so you just got to suck it up.

And I think we're underestimating the sense of rage and political humiliation, which may well actually drive Britain and these other middle powers and the European Union to do something which, JD Vance and Rubio thinks will never happen, which is to try to develop genuine strategic autonomy away from the United States.

So I think the big story of the next two, three years from Britain is the question of sovereignty.

So I haven't heard anyone on either side of the pond talk about the special relationship in years now.

Shall you and I formally kill it right now.

I mean, not cheerfully perhaps, but nonetheless, I mean, someone needs to.

Yeah, I think Ian, you're the man to do that.

No more special, it's over.

Okay, Rory Stewart, thanks to you so much for joining again on the show.

Good to see you.

- Thank you very much.

Have a great day.

Bye bye.

Now for something that would scandalize even a Cockney cabbie I've got you're a puppet regime.

Look, it's a phone call from London.

Yeah, hello.

- Hi guys, it's Andy Burnham, the new UK Prime Minister.

- Another UK Prime Minister huh?

- Feels like Starmer was just starting last week no?

- Listen here, Burnham.

We are going to have a working group meeting for the next hour.

If we call you back after we will still be prime minister?

- That was a good one Emmanuel, a working group meeting that lasts only an hour.

Oh, you were born in Liverpool?

Interesting.

That sounds disgusting.

Yeah, I got a reflecting pool, but a Liverpool that just, I don't know if I would get into that.

Mr Burnham, it's Zelensky here.

We met on Monday.

And it's Friday, so I just want to make sure you are still Prime Minister of... Yeah, they didn't even make a puppet of him because they're not sure if he's going to last long enough.

Unbelievable.

Oh, we're still rolling?

That's our show this week.

Come back next week if you like what you've seen or even if you don't, but you want to hear me do a British accent.

Check us out at gzeromedia.com.

[Music] Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes, lower their carbon footprint, and scale their supply chains.

With a portfolio of logistics and real estate, and an end-to-end solutions platform, addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at Prologis.com.

And by, Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

Cox is investing in the future, working to create an impact in advanced recycling and in emerging technology companies that will help shape tomorrow.

Cox, a family of businesses.

Additional funding provided by the Andrew Carnegie Foundation, Koo and Patricia Yuen, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities.

And... [Music]