Brexit Plus Ten Years Equals Six PMs

A towering wave of optimism crashed over Great Britain as it voted to leave the European Union a decade ago. It has now receded. The Brexit campaign promised a new era of absolute sovereignty, lucrative global trade deals and rising wealth. Instead, the tide went out and revealed bureaucratic overregulation, economic stagnation, and a nation more adrift than ever that no one can seem to lead.

The political establishment never truly accepted the Brexit result. Instead, it quietly continued many of the EU’s stifling economic policies in all but name. As a result, the only meaningful change since Brexit is that Britain lost full access to the European market while retaining much of the bureaucracy.

The result? Think tanks estimate that Britain’s gdp is 6 to 8 percent lower than it would have been had it remained in the EU. Public frustration over this reality has now toppled six prime ministers.

Today is the 10th anniversary of the Brexit vote, and yesterday Keir Starmer became the sixth prime minister to step outside 10 Downing Street and announce his resignation. His net approval rating has plummeted 45 points since he took office two years ago. Yet in his speech, he took no responsibility for his many political failings. He boasted of his achievements. He praised his Labour Party. He choked up as he spoke of putting the country he loves first.

Nigel Farage, leader of the Reform UK party, described the situation plainly in the aftermath of Starmer’s announcement: Britain’s national debt is rising faster than that of any other country in the world except Botswana. Boats full of illegal immigrants are still crossing the English Channel almost daily. And Britain’s political establishment still refuses to act like a sovereign country instead of an EU province.

The public has had enough, but they just get more and more of the same. Britain is controlled by a cabal of “deep state” agents, not elected officials and certainly not the people they are notionally representing.

Andy Burnham, the favorite to succeed Starmer as Labour leader, will almost certainly become Britain’s seventh post-Brexit prime minister. Yet there is no indication that Burnham will fare any better than Starmer or the five Conservative prime ministers who preceded him. He is a new face on an old and broken system.

Think about that for a minute. Britain has had six prime ministers from two different political parties in the 10 years since the British people voted to leave the European Union, and none of them have made a difference. Each one arrived promising stability. Each one left a nation more broken than the one he or she inherited. And the next man in line, the former mayor of Manchester, will be no different.

Britain is broken.

This type of revolving leadership is on par with Italy, which has also had seven prime ministers in the past 10 years. EU membership was just one of Britain’s problems, and it was not the root cause. The British people have allowed their nation to be hijacked by an EU-style bureaucracy more interested in perpetuating its own authority and power than delivering on the change the British voted for.

The Trumpet predicted this dire outcome in our August 2016 issue, published just weeks after the historic Brexit vote. “Is this a new birth of freedom for Britain?” we asked. “At the Trumpet, we have certainly pointed to the flaws in Britain’s relationship with Europe. We have lamented the loss of sovereignty to Europe. So is it sunlit uplands from now on? Sadly, no. While the EU has certainly caused problems for Britain, the biggest wounds are self-inflicted and won’t go away even when this divorce is finalized.”

We then pointed to many of the same problems that Farage is pointing to now: namely, Britain’s huge debt problem, dire trade situation, and catastrophic family breakdown. These problems are the result of a spiritual sickness that was not cured when Britain left the EU. Britain’s problems didn’t just go away after Brexit. In fact, many of them have gotten much worse. The astronomical debt, the broken families, the gender ideology moral confusion, the social rot—none of that came from Brussels. That came from within.

The Bible diagnoses Britain’s actual condition. Hosea 5:13 says, “When Ephraim saw his sickness, and Judah saw his wound, then went Ephraim to Assyria, and sent to king Jareb: yet could he not heal you, nor cure you of your wound.” Those who have read Herbert W. Armstrong’s classic, The United States and Britain in Prophecy, know that Ephraim is Britain in Bible prophecy and Assyria is Germany. So, this verse in Hosea is about a national sickness in Britain that the German-led EU cannot cure or heal.

Britain was called the “sick man of Europe” in the 1960s. Mr. Armstrong repeatedly prophesied that Britain would eventually leave the European Economic Community after it joined in in 1973. The reason he prophesied Britain’s exit from the EU, however, was not because he believed the British people needed independence to fix their country, but because Bible prophecy says a German-led European Union was going to invade Britain. It wouldn’t make sense for the EU to invade itself, so Mr. Armstrong knew Britain would eventually leave.

“[T]he soon-coming resurrected ‘Holy Roman Empire’—a sort of soon-coming ‘United States of Europe’—a union of 10 nations [will] rise up out of or following the Common Market of today (Revelation 17),” Mr. Armstrong wrote in his 1985 book Mystery of the Ages. “Britain will not be in that empire soon to come.”

This prophecy was dramatically fulfilled 10 years ago today. But it was never a sign that things were about to get better in Britain. Rather it was a sign of impending invasion, captivity and enslavement.

My father, Gerald Flurry, said Britain’s demise would accelerate after Queen Elizabeth’s death in 2022, because of another prophecy in Hosea 3:4 about Britain abiding “many days without a king, and without a prince, and without a sacrifice, and without an image, and without an ephod, and without teraphim.”

Subsequent events have proven these forecasts correct. Britain’s demise has accelerated. Frustration over mass immigrations was a major catalyst for Brexit, but has Brexit fixed this problem? An independent report backed by British MP Rupert Lowe estimates that up to 250,000 British girls may have been victims of organized Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs over the past several decades. The EU didn’t cause this problem; the weak character of the British people did. Every one of the six prime ministers who have run Britain since the Brexit vote is partially complicit in these crimes.

There is only one solution. Not a new prime minister, a new political party or a new trade deal with America. God’s people have always known the answer: repentance. 2 Chronicles 7:14 says, “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”

If Britain will not repent nationally, the Bible makes plain that this course ends in the Great Tribulation. But you can repent individually. Do not be lulled to sleep; don’t ignore the problems. The signs are there for those with eyes to see. Britain needs to repent toward the only Leader who can truly govern it and lead it to safety, power, peace and purpose.