The UK is in a deep economic slump and so now the elites in Europe and London are blaming Brexit and the British voters.

But that’s a laughable misreading of history. When the Brits wisely ditched the EU, the hope was that the UK would adopt the U.S. economic freedom model and elect power-to-the-people leaders like Donald Trump, while cleaning its hands of the socialists in Germany and France and the heavy-handed  bureaucrats in Brussels.

That clearly hasn’t happened. But as our friend Jim Piereson of the Manhattan Institute notes, Britain’s growth is STILL higher than that of most of the moribund European economies:

From 2017 through 2025, the British economy grew at a rate of 1.5 percent per year, Germany at 0.7 percent, and France at 1.5 percent. It is then wrong to argue that, after the Brexit vote, the German and French economies performed at higher levels than the British economy. Indeed, all three economies are stagnating, for reasons that have little or nothing to do with Brexit…

Political leaders in all European three countries have adopted ruinous economic policies: heavy regulation, overly generous welfare programs, and (especially) wrongheaded climate policies that drive up energy prices without doing much to improve the environment…

Europe’s troubles might be fixed, albeit slowly, by new leaders with new policies, as happened with Margaret Thatcher’s revolution in Britain in the 1980s. In practice, this means lower taxes, limits on government spending, encouragement of business and investment, and more realistic climate policies.