Britain Declares Independence

The Tories should now strive to make the U.K. a pro-growth model.

The United Kingdom has always had Europe’s most robust democracy, and with Thursday’s vote to leave the European Union it has given its Continental peers a powerful example of the meaning of popular rule. Now we’ll see if the British have the wisdom to make the best use of their historic choice.

We argued earlier this week that Britain should remain in the Union. But we also acknowledged that it was a close call, and we did so more out of concern for the EU’s future than for Britain’s.

The Brexit vote deprives the EU of its second-biggest—and most dynamic—economy, with the strongest growth rate among Europe’s major economies and a record-setting employment rate of 74%. Government spending as a percentage of GDP has also come down to pre-financial crisis levels, again disproving the Keynesian doomsaying about the perils of fiscal “austerity.”

Brexit may encourage other states—the Netherlands is often mentioned—to debate their membership in the EU, especially if Britain does not suffer the economic and diplomatic catastrophes forecast by the Remain camp, starting with Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne. Norway and Switzerland have shown it’s possible to have prosperity and security in Europe with less nannying by Brussels.

If the EU wants to prevent other countries from catching the Brexit bug, our advice is to avoid the temptation to punish the U.K. with an arduous renegotiation of terms for its re-entry into the common market. The perception of EU high-handedness is what alienates public opinion across the Continent. Brexit ought to be the wake-up call the EU needs to return to serving as a common market that encourages growth and competition, and not—as it has become since the late 1980s—an innovation-killing superstate obsessed with regulatory harmonization, tax hikes, green-energy dogma and anticompetitive antitrust enforcement.

London will have its own challenges. To adapt a line from Margaret Thatcher’s famous 1988 Bruges speech on Europe, Britain has not voted to free itself of a European superstate to see it return in the form of the nanny state exercising dominance from Westminster.

That risk is real. In April former London Mayor Boris Johnson and Justice Secretary Michael Gove, the main Tory leaders of the Leave campaign, promised to spend a supposed Brexit windfall on more money for the state-run National Health Service. On the other side of the debate, Mr. Osborne has warned that Brexit will punch a giant hole in the U.K. budget that will have to be filled with higher taxes.

Brexit will require London to renegotiate trade agreements—with the EU itself and trade partners such as South Korea and Mexico. The U.S. can help by offering to negotiate a bilateral deal with the U.K. or inviting it to join the North American Free Trade Agreement. This is an opening for Republicans and Donald Trump, in contrast to President Obama’s nasty taunt that Britain will be stuck in “the back of the queue” for leaving the EU. The U.K. is the largest foreign direct investor in the U.S., and vice versa, and freer trade between the two countries ought to be an easy call in the mutual national interest.

The greatest danger to post-Brexit Britain is that it will lead to a new era of parochialism in U.K. politics. One threat is another Scottish attempt at secession, which could become acute if Brexit leads to recession or higher taxes.

The Tories will need a unifying leader who can avoid handing power at the next election to a Labour Party that has lurched to the socialist left.

It’s not for nothing that the U.K. has been a great player on the world stage for centuries. Having declared their independence from the EU, the British people can now show the world what a determined democracy can accomplish.

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