Was Concorde Really the Flying Brexit? " History# " Cambridge Core Blog

A Cambridge Core blog post revisits an argument about Concorde as a “flying Brexit,” published earlier in 2017 in The Guardian. The author says both projects were driven by national ambition but ended up with costs hard to reconcile with promises. The piece argues the comparison holds at a high level: Concorde, like Brexit, turned ideas of national greatness into politically sustained programmes whose economics deteriorated. It also stresses differences in political economy. Concorde, a Franco-British collaboration, is portrayed as ultimately curtailed by the British state and associated with “British engineering,” while Brexit, the author writes, was rooted more in economic liberalism—reducing European regulation and pursuing trade deals globally.