Is Britain becoming harder to govern after Brexit?

MATCH OF THE DAY: Fragile States Index — EU 1, UK 0

Referee: Fund for Peace

Brexit promised that Britain would “take back control” and become easier to govern. Ten years on, the visible result runs the other way: in the Fund for Peace data, Britain’s fragility score rises from 35.3 in 2012 to 40.8 in 2024, while the EU line falls from 38.7 to 33.8 — and on this metric, higher is worse. That matters now because Keir Starmer has inherited not just a weak economy or tired public services, but a state that has become harder to steer. This is the first thing to see: Britain’s problem on governance is not bad luck. It is a mechanism failure, exposed and accelerated by Brexit.

1 PROBLEM

This is not a one-off wobble. It is a broken post-Brexit pattern. In the 2024 Fragile States Index data, the UK scores 40.8 against an EU benchmark of 33.81, a gap of almost seven points in the wrong direction. The rhythm matters more than the snapshot: Britain improves before the referendum, then worsens sharply from 2016 onward, while the EU average keeps improving. The movement line is the whole match: the UK goes from being better than the EU aggregate in 2012 to clearly worse by 2024. Britain is not yet literally bottom in the observed top-five comparator table — Italy is fractionally worse in 2024 — but it has the worst trajectory on the pitch.

Why?

1) PLAN — take back control?

“Take back control” was a promise, not a funded governing mechanism. The Fund for Peace Brexit analysis shows that Brexit exposed deadlock, repeated deadline failures and constitutional stress rather than delivering a clean operating model. Britain’s actual plan arrived late, in pieces, and often as improvisation around the Northern Ireland Protocol, trade frictions and emergency political management.

The EU, by contrast, kept the institutional machine intact and did not have to spend years reinventing its own governing chassis. The kicker is simple: Britain did not lose control because it had too little sovereignty; it lost control because it mistook a slogan for a system. 

Plan score: UK 2/10, EU 7/10 — one side had a governing route, the other had a campaign line. 

2) POLICY — bandwidth was burned, not built

The key policy lever here is state capacity: whether government can turn authority into delivery. Britain spent much of the Brexit decade consuming bandwidth on renegotiation, border politics, constitutional firefighting and policy churn, while the Fund for Peace methodology tracks worsening pressure in state legitimacy, factionalized elites and group grievance.

The EU and its member states were hardly serene, but they were able to use the same period to absorb shocks through existing frameworks rather than dismantling and rebuilding them mid-match. On this metric, policy matters because prosperity and public confidence per person depend on a state that can still deliver, coordinate and settle arguments. Britain kept adding friction to its own gearbox. 

Policy score: UK 3/10, EU 7/10 — the EU used policy to absorb shocks; Britain used policy energy to survive them. 

3) PERFORMANCE — Europe still has working models on the field

The strongest European performance model in this match is not perfection but resilience. Germany improves from 31.7 to 24.0 and France from 33.6 to 28.3 between 2012 and 2024, while the UK worsens from 35.3 to 40.8. That is what a functioning model looks like: different systems, different politics, but better shock absorption and less institutional self-harm. The 2024 Fund for Peace report warns that even established democracies can become more fragile under populism, polarization and uncertainty. Europe’s better performers have still managed to bend the line down. Britain has not matched that. 

Performance score: UK 3/10, EU 8/10 — Europe still has working boots on the pitch; Britain is still arguing with the referee. 

FINAL WHISTLE — what this score really means

Britain’s problem on fragility is not that politics got noisy. It is that Brexit stripped away governing bandwidth and exposed a state with too little mechanism, too little consensus and too much internal friction.

The EU won this match because its institutions proved more resilient under pressure. That is the political test Starmer now inherits: not simply whether he can sound competent, but whether he can show that the British state can still deliver, settle and recover. If he cannot, the risk is not just another ugly Parliament. It is a country that keeps becoming harder to govern even after the Brexit fight is supposedly over.