What the UK could learn from the European nation that dodged its 'Brexit' moment

As the UK marks the tenth anniversary of the referendum on whether to leave the EU, voters in Switzerland have just rejected a similar proposal dubbed the “Swiss Brexit”.

Citizens were asked whether to cap the country’s population below 10 million by 2050, with the campaign centering heavily on immigration and the debate drawing comparisons with Britain’s Brexit-era politics.

The proposal led by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP) would have forced Switzerland to abandon its free-movement agreement with the EU, had it passed.

New EU border checks should be suspended before peak summer, aviation industry leaders have said, after Brits reported huge delays due to the new Entry/Exit System (EES). 

The system, rolled out fully in April, involves people from the UK having their fingerprints registered and photographs taken to enter certain countries.

The EES is used to enter the Schengen Area, which consists of 29 European countries, mainly in the EU.

For most UK travellers, the process is done at foreign airports.

Severe operational consequences disrupting passengers and putting border authorities, airports and airlines under unsustainable pressure.

Senior figures at three major aviation industry bodies wrote to Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission warning waiting times at border control had “increased significantly, now reaching up to five hours”.

Since it’s implementation, the EES has caused travel chaos for Brits.

Russia launched a large-scale attack on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv with missiles and drones, killing at least 13 people and injuring dozens more.

Russia launched a series of strikes on Kyiv, hitting residential ⁠buildings and ⁠triggering ​a fire in a hotel on a central boulevard.

Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko has said 13 people had been killed, ⁠with about three dozen locations across the city damaged in the attacks.

Many residents took shelter at metro stations after the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, issued the first warnings of the attack.

Zelenskyy was forced to cut short a trip to Dublin on Wednesday, citing intelligence reports of a large-scale Russian attack.

Ukraine said on Tuesday it hit one of Russia’s largest satellite communication centers in north Moscow for the second time in just over a week.

Russian president Vladimir Putin also recently admitted Russia is facing fuel shortages after Ukraine launched repeated strikes on oil refineries, while Kyiv notably launched a large-scale attack on Moscow last month.

Sir Keir Starmer’s much-delayed Defence Investment Plan had one big bet at its heart: drones are the future of warfare.

American company Anduril makes the “Seabed Sentry“- a weighted cylinder that uses sensors and AI to monitor what is happening under the sea. They could be used to listen out for spying and sabotage by Russian submarines. They are far cheaper than crewed submarines using traditional sonar.

A dozen of the cylinders can be dropped onto the seabed at a time by an autonomous submarine, with the devices forming a network which communicate between themselves and listens out for undersea activity.

The UK is woefully unprepared with the Royal Navy in a desperate condition. Whoever sits in Downing Street come next September will need to address matters of defence, homeland and cyber defence especially, with urgency.

Officials have drawn up contingency plans to cut further green levies from energy bills if prices remain high this winter, The i Paper has been told.

Several options are now circulating among Burnham’s transition team who are believed to be weighing up how to deliver on that pledge. A Treasury source said work on a package was ongoing to help with rising costs.

Burnham could remove remaining green levies from energy bills, funded through general taxation instead.

One proposal would be to raise the bank surcharge from its current 3 per cent.

Replace stamp duty, loosen fiscal rules and tax the capital gains uplift on inherited assets.

A written statement published by the Chancellor said the remaining sum would be “confirmed at Budget 2026, in a fair and balanced way”.

The coronation of Andy Burnham is fraught with dangers. Never will a prime minister have arrived in Downing Street with so little scrutiny of what he wants to do.

Electric flying taxis could be above the streets of London by 2028, a manufacturer has claimed. Here’s what you need to know.

Vertical Aerospace is still testing the aircraft and it will need to be approved by both the approval from the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and the European Aviation Safety Authority (EASA). But the company says the aim is for air taxis to become as cheap and convenient as ordering an Uber to the airport.

As with the Brexit vote, the results showed clear geographic divides, with urban areas tending to favour openness, while smaller towns and rural regions were more likely to back restrictions.

The vote raised questions about national identity and the pressures of population growth, with SVP politician Thomas Matter arguing immigration should be “moderate and controlled”.

But Ali Bannerman, a British engineer who moved to Switzerland in 2015 who voted “no” as a newly naturalised citizen, said the campaign didn’t seem inherently hostile. “It didn’t really feel xenophobic,” Bannerman told The i Paper. “I mean, I’m sure some people did vote that way for xenophobic reasons, but the overall vibe, at least in terms of the image given over, was just, ‘It’s getting a bit much, maybe we should slow it down a bit.'”

The two countries have very different demographics. Around 19 per cent of UK residents were born abroad, according to estimates from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), compared to almost a third of Switzerland’s permanent residents – nearly a quarter of whom have lived in the country for at least 20 years.

Bannerman points to a contrast in the two political systems. “Brexit for a lot of people was a protest vote really, wasn’t it?” he said. “It was a way to stick it to David Cameron after years of frustration with austerity and certain regions going into decline. You don’t have that here.

“Power is shared between multiple parties, so you can’t just blame everything on one politician. It is not ‘everything is Keir Starmer’s fault’ until the next person comes in. It generally creates a much more level-headed atmosphere.”

Migration pressures are higher-profile in the UK, where asylum claims reached record levels in 2024 and about 39,000 people arrived by small boats in the year to March 2026. In Switzerland, immigration is higher overall but mostly job‑driven, with around 77 per cent of migrants in work.

Patrick Leisibach, an economist and co-head of research at think-tank Avenir Suisse, notes that hitting a hard population cap could have forced the government to prioritise which workers to admit, from doctors and care staff to other skilled professionals.

In Switzerland, citizens vote up to four times a year, allowing them to express discontent in stages rather than through a single protest.

The result is a political culture with fewer high-stakes moments. By spreading responsibility across a multi-party coalition system, Swiss politics avoids the personality-driven blame games that can paralyse Westminster.

The UK has only had three nationwide referendums in modern history, in 1975, 2011 and 2016. Over a similar time period, Switzerland has had more than 350. Bannerman says this consistent cycle has helped to create a “build-up” to a less explosive vote in the country.

“Our referendums are almost a bit mundane, and to a certain extent, it was just another box to tick,” he said. “You get used to seeing ‘yes/no’ placards pop up in your neighbourhood every three months. This was certainly more important than many, but it wasn’t anything compared to the bombastic showboating – and promises of the world being your oyster – of Brexit.”

Immigration remains a key issue in Switzerland alongside debates over the country’s ties with the EU. Unlike the single vote that determined Britain’s exit from the EU, Switzerland will hold further referendums in September and November.

Leisibach said he would call the debate “Brexit-lite”.

“Many people in Switzerland found themselves caught in a dilemma: we need migration, but at the same time it’s too much,” he added.

In the end, 54.8 per cent of voters rejected the proposal and 45.2 per cent voted in favour.

The core of the issue lies in a tension between the country’s economic reality and growth fatigue. Switzerland remains dependent on foreign labour, which makes up a third of its workforce overall, and half in sectors such as hospitality and pharmaceuticals.

Cloé Jans, senior project manager at gfs.bern, a leading Swiss research and consulting institute, says the campaign “gave political expression to a very real and widespread unease”. These concerns include the pace of population growth and its impact on housing, infrastructure and public services.

“Support for the initiative was not driven solely by classic anti-immigration sentiment,” she said. “For many voters, it reflected a broader sense of overload, of concerns about quality of life and whether political institutions can manage change effectively.”

Jans notes that backing for the cap was strongest among rural voters, supporters of the SVP and those with lower levels of trust in government. “When that sense of control is perceived to be weakening, economic arguments alone are often not sufficient to settle the debate,” she said.

A key part of the SVP’s strategy was framing the population cap as a “sustainability initiative”.

“From a marketing perspective, it was a very intelligent move,” Leisibach said. “You frame it as sustainability, like green parties do with the environment. It was very intelligent to move the migration topic away from the people arriving here, to some sort of an infrastructure discussion about population growth in general.”

This approach helped the campaign resonate with everyday voters. Since free movement was introduced in 2002, Switzerland’s population has risen from around 7.3 million to around 9.1 million, growing faster than many of its European neighbours. 

But it ultimately wasn’t enough to push it over the line.