The references to liberty and equality in the Declaration have been contested from the very beginning. Although some have argued that they had no application to slavery, many people in the late eighteenth century perceived them as clearly inconsistent with slavery. These references have triggered equally conflicting responses from courts, where judges have relied on them to abolish minimum wage laws and to strike down regulations of businesses. Other judges have invoked these references in support of more equal legislative chambers and same-sex marriage. Supporters of every conceivable position have relied on this part of the Declaration. These references have become in effect a national Rorhschach test – one sees in them what one is already inclined to see. Given this contested history, courts invoking this language should do so with caution.

We are living through a period of growing global disorder. There are various causes, but one is the declining unity and efficacy of the political ‘West’ – the coalition of countries, including the UK and led by the United States, that came together after the Second World War to defend and promote liberal democracy at home and open markets abroad. For countries like ours, in a changed and changing geopolitical landscape, the challenge is not to build a single new world order, but instead to contribute to what the historian Adam Tooze calls ‘world ordering’. This means coalitions of the willing, on a range of issues, to meet the challenges that people and nations need to face together. This imperative makes Britain’s relationship with other European countries, and the EU, more important, not less. These countries, and the EU, have shared values and interests with the UK. We face a common threat from an increasingly anarchic form of ‘might makes right’ globalisation. So we need to renew our cooperation that was sabotaged by Brexit.

Americans looking back at the Declaration did so through court cases, political debate, and celebrations in popular culture. Numerous judicial decisions beginning in the late eighteenth century and continuing through the twentieth century have upheld the view that the Declaration of Independence created one nation, the United States of America. This was also the view of some of the greatest lawyers of the mid nineteenth century: Joseph Story, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln. Even Andrew Jackson, largely seen as a proponent of states’ rights, embraced this view in the nullification dispute with South Carolina. And ordinary Americans have celebrated the Fourth of July as the birth of a nation from the very beginning. For the thirteen independent nations view to be correct, all of these decisions, statements, and celebrations would have to be wrong. (They are not.)

It is possible to pinpoint the moment it became clear that Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party was not going to try very hard to repair the economic damage done by Brexit. It came on the evening of 18 April 2024 when the European Commission published an expansive proposal for a youth mobility scheme to allow young Brits and Europeans to live, work and study freely in each others’ countries for two or three years. One EU official in Brussels – keen to emphasise the willingness to rejuvenate the EU–UK relationship under a future Labour government – excitedly described the envisioned scheme as ‘like free movement for young people’. Several European governments, including the mighty Germany, had even suggested that a youth mobility scheme could even provide a gateway to easing restrictions on the movement of business professionals. But the excitement didn’t last out the day. Within hours the Labour Party, then in opposition, rejected the idea out of hand. ‘Labour has no plans for a youth mobility scheme,’ it said in a statement. There was no hedging or hesitation.

We estimate the short-run effects of Brexit border disruption on the UK economy. We estimate relationships for the UK where Brexit effects are identified by the dates of Brexit events, the referendum and the exit from the single market. We find evidence of short-run effects of Brexit: temporary effects on GDP, exports and imports (slightly negative), and on inflation and interest rates (slightly positive). These effects are consistent with modest disruption from introducing a border with the EU, a border due to be made barrier-free and seamless by the UK–EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement. Previous work using other countries as comparators is vulnerable to difficulties in isolating the Brexit effects among numerous other shocks. We also survey earlier modelling work on the long-run effects of evolving policies of free trade, UK-sourced regulation and liberalised immigration. Models of long-run trade suggest the emergence of substantial gains.

Brexit was an act of gross economic vandalism. Many leavers understood that at the time. Most were indifferent. When push came to shove, an economic hit seemed, to those who thought about it at all, to be a price worth paying for autonomy. ‘Take Back Control’ proved to be a winning formula. Ten years on, we are in a better position to decide how much control we have really gained, and how much it has been worth to us. Control and autonomy are legal and constitutional concepts, but their value depends on political realities. In a world of huge nations like the United States and China, it is in the interest of smaller nations to join together in powerful multinational blocs like the European Union. Its members have more control and more global power collectively than they can ever hope to have individually. Britain’s own ability to exercise ‘control’ over its own fate is inevitably more limited outside the European Union.

On the night of 23 June 2016, gathered together in the Thatcher Study at No. 10, the Cameron team saw the results in. I sat next to the Prime Minister, David Cameron; his daughter, Nancy, in her pajamas and cuddling a favourite toy, was under the round oak table made purposely to seat the G8 leaders at Lough Erne. ‘Dad, we are losing,’ said Nancy, as the results began to trickle and then pour in. Around 2am, when Sunderland declared a decisive result for Leave (61 per cent to 39 per cent), the trend was clear. John Curtice called it for Leave – who won by 52 to 48 per cent – roughly 17 million to 16 million (600,000 votes between the two) with a strong turnout of 72 per cent. At 3am, Cameron gathered a small group of us in his Den; it was game over. The answer to the question of whether the British people wanted to stay in the European Union was ‘no’. The decision to give them that choice was made by Cameron in a speech made at Bloomberg HQ on 23 January 2013, unleashing one of the most divisive periods we have known.

Civil service headcount expanded, but, as it grew, relationships between civil servants and ministers deteriorated and individual civil servants became targets as perceived blockers to true Brexit. Stasis in decision-making in Theresa May’s carefully balanced Cabinet degenerated into public disagreements between ministers as collective responsibility disintegrated. Ministerial churn accelerated. Ministerial frustration at Parliament’s refusal to pass any sort of Brexit agreement under the May government boiled over, and judges found themselves in the firing line as the process of exiting was litigated. The devolved governments were reminded that conventions were just that, without legal force. Northern Ireland suffered two Executive collapses in the Brexit period, the second a direct result of Brexit tensions, which left it governed by civil servants for half the time between 2017 and 2024. Under Boris Johnson, ministers went further – prepared to embarrass the Queen over the prorogation that the Supreme Court eventually found unlawful, introducing legislation to allow them to break international law and flirting with breaking domestic law.

The UK government’s handling of Northern Ireland exposed serious failings in UK state negotiating capacity as well as its relative weakness not only to the EU, but also in relation to even one small EU member state, Ireland, which played a far stronger hand far better, even if it ultimately overplayed it. The UK pushback was politically costly to the Johnson government at home and with the EU, but demonstrated at last its ability to win a diplomatic victory. Though it was clear, to those who paid attention, that there were serious implications for Northern Ireland in the event of Brexit, it did not figure much in the question of continued membership or in the campaign. Those implications were much more serious once Theresa May, in her 30 June 2016 leadership speech, stated that ‘Brexit means Brexit’, and this meant ending freedom of movement. That alone determined the kind of future relationship the UK would have with the EU – outside the Single Market – with huge implications for Northern Ireland and Ireland. Yet few recognised then just how much these would come to define Brexit and post-Brexit policy.

This introduction to Part One introduces the topic of why the ceremonial parchment in the National Archives should not be considered the definitive text of the Declaration of Independence.

The parchment copy of the Declaration of Independence, enshrined in the National Archives, is not the most relevant text of the document. The correct text is the text distributed to the American people – the Dunlap Broadside, which was printed on the night of July 4, 1776. The parchment copy was not created until later, for ceremonial purposes, and its eccentric handwriting should not be taken as definitive, a mistake that many historians have made.

It started with good intent; the battleground a different and older Union and an earlier referendum in 2014 over Scotland, not Europe. I didn’t see this at the time, but think if it hadn’t come hot on the heels of the Independence Referendum the civil service would have taken a different and more careful approach in 2016. We would have been more protective of the principle of impartiality and seen the EU Referendum as the deeply political and divisive vote that it turned out to be. It had been okay in Whitehall to express a view in the Scottish Referendum – we wanted the Union to stay together. So, just as we were happy in September 2014, people were upset at the result in June 2016. It was normal to express views in the open that leaving the EU would have grave and damaging consequences, especially economically, as it had been normal in 2014 to say the same about Scotland. For both the commonplace presumption was that the people who had voted to leave had not understood how things worked. We rolled from default remain to default remain.

This Part introduces the argument that the Declaration created an American nation – the United States of America – that became a distinct juridical entity in the world community as of July 4, 1776. That is, the states entered into the world confederated with each other. The United States had a constitution as of July 4, 1776, but it was an unwritten constitution based on tacit popular consent. The Articles of Confederation would later specify much of the internal structure of that confederation, but the Articles did not form the confederation – there was already a de facto confederation at the time of the Declaration. This nationalist reading of the Declaration of Independence is far more consistent with text, history, law, and popular understandings than the view that the Declaration created thirteen completely independent nations.