I stand by what I said 10 years ago. We were right to leave the European Union | Larry Elliott

The Brexit vote showed that class still matters in British politics, and the changes needed are ones the EU would never have allowed

Read more from the Brexit Vote: 10 Years On series

On the morning after the vote for Brexit, the Guardian’s newsroom was deathly quiet. There was disbelief that the public had voted the way it had, and the place was in mourning. With one exception the paper’s columnists had backed remain, and the shock of defeat was all the harder to bear because they had expected their side to triumph.

The exception to the house view was me, and I certainly received some old-fashioned looks from my colleagues that day. Judging by my inbox, both then and thereafter, my colleagues were more in tune with the readers than I was, but the editor thought it important that my leftwing case for Brexit should be given a hearing. Ten years on, that case is worth restating.

The first strand in the argument is that Europe isn’t working, and hasn’t been working for a long time. There has always been an economic case for EU membership but it has become harder to make down the years. When Britain was first applying to join what was then the European Economic Community, the major European economies were growing a lot faster than Britain, and were also closing the gap with the US. That is no longer the case. In the more than 17 years since the financial crisis, the US has grown by 87%, compared with the EU’s 13.5%, more than six times as fast.

True, the Office for Budget Responsibility has estimated that the economy will be 4% smaller in the 15 years after the referendum than it would have been had the UK remained in the single market, but this finding should be treated with some scepticism. As Jeremy Hunt, who campaigned for remain, told the BBC last week, for the economy to be 4% bigger today it would have had to have grown as fast as the US, something the former chancellor finds implausible.

The second is that Brexit highlighted the weaknesses of Britain’s financial services-dominated economic model, and provided the opportunity to try something different. While it would be wrong to blame Brussels for all Britain’s economic woes, any serious repair job requires a freedom of manoeuvre that EU membership made more difficult.

The government’s decision to impose tariffs to protect Britain’s steel industry and to cut duties on 100 imported food products to ease the cost of living crisis are examples of that freedom being used. If Andy Burnham is serious about reversing “40 years of neoliberalism”, that will require curbs on the free movement of capital, goods and people, all expressly forbidden by single-market rules.

And third, Brexit was a howl of anger from those parts of Britain that felt marginalised and forgotten. It was a vote for a different economic settlement to put right the damage caused by deindustrialisation and globalisation.

Larry Elliott is a Guardian columnist

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