> If you look at the actual data, which everyone should, it doesn't support claims like these and never has. There is no visible impact of Brexit on the economic figures.
That isn’t true… Goldman Sachs and others have stated Brexit has shrunk the UK economy by 5%
Yes it is true. Once again, look at the data. Where is this 5% shrink? Do not listen to discredited people who have an axe to grind. Every single claim that Brexit affected the British economy turns out to be false when checked.
The Goldman Sachs claim is no different. It's full of flatly untrue statements about public data, rather incredibly.
They say: "The UK has significantly underperformed other advanced economies since the 2016 EU referendum"
Actual data: UK growth has tracked that of France and Germany. So which "other advanced economies" are they comparing against? The answer is we don't know because their paper compared the UK against synthetic countries that don't exist and they didn't reveal their method. If you want to see the effects of leaving the EU, you need to look at trends and compare against other (western) EU countries. Not a secret list of fictional countries that appear to be the result of playing games with the data until it fits what the author wanted.
They also say "UK goods trade has ‘declined significantly’ and has ‘underperformed other advanced economies by roughly 15%’ since the referendum." Goods trade is down 2% since 2016 which is not "significant", as the UK is specialized in services. Trade in general has grown strongly. Measured annually, using Chained Volume Measures (CVM) total UK trade was 11% higher in 2023 than in 2016. Trade with EU vs ROW continued on its long term trend, also unaffected by Brexit.
Their paper is just wrong in so many ways. There's a more detailed writeup here:
HN tends to have a lot of trouble with this idea that the institutions are all systematically lying about this issue because of what it says about our society, credentialing and so on. But the data is public. You just have to look it up instead of trusting "experts".
OBR and others say Brexit has a detrimental effect on the British economy… the evidence you quote to refute that comes from a pro-Brexit site!
> From 2018 to 2023, compared to G7
> UK goods exports performed 15% worse
> Goods imports 8% worse (current prices)
> UK services exports performed better at 17% growth, but behind EU (23%) and Germany (20%)
> Services imports (12% growth) were middle of the G7 pack (above Italy, Japan and France)
OBR is wrong, like the other institutions that embarrassed themselves with many false predictions in the past. How many times must I repeat this? That's why people still arguing against Brexit are forced into manipulative statements like this:
> From 2018 to 2023, compared to G7
You can't measure the impact of leaving the EU by comparing British goods exports with Japan and the USA. That isn't controlling for other factors.
To understand the impact of leaving the EU you have to compare like with like: UK before/after and UK with nearby western European countries which stayed in. Not "all EU members", which includes post-Soviet states still catching up to western GDP levels. Not the G7, which includes members that were never in the EU to start with. You can compare to places like France, the Netherlands, Germany, and as your own citation shows, there's no significant difference when you do that. That is the final and full story. Zero effect of leaving.
The only axe being ground here is the people who still, ten years on, cannot accept that the anti-Brexit arguments were wrong. All I'm doing is responding to these false claims.
I don’t think we wanted to leave the single market and I’m unconvinced that people actually wanted to leave the EU — mainly because they didn’t know what it meant and even the Brexit promoters said a Yes vote wouldn’t mean leaving the EU
What they wanted to do was give the Establishment / Tories a black eye but ended up enabling the people what who were pushing for a hard Brexit that worked against most people’s interests
One of the things that I detest about the Brexit referendum was that "Brexit" wasn't at all defined (apart from leaving the EU). There were lots of hot air about Brexit not at all meaning a "hard" exit from the single market, and yet here we are.
My favourite analogy on the referendum is having people vote on whether to have "meat" or "vegetarian" dinner:
Suppose 40% of people enjoy vegetarian food, 20% only eat pork, 20% only eat beef and 20% only eat chicken.
Then, after "voting", the results come in as 60% for "meat" and 40% for veg. However, what meal can you prepare to satisfy the "meat" vote considering that you can only satisfy 20% of them?
(By the way, I was thrown off by your use of "As a Britain" rather than "As a Brit")
Britain isn’t part of the single market or customs union anymore so it’s treated like every other “third” country
As a Britain it was obvious this would happen when we left the EU and the paperwork / costs involved with trading with the EU would rise and damage our economy
We had liars and charlatans saying “we held all the cards” and leaving wouldn’t affect things and a lot of gullible people believed them
Thos same liars and charlatans are now complaining about how many civil servants the UK has while neglecting the fact that we had to hire 100,000 to cope with the effects of Brexit
The were arrested for encouraging people to burn down hotels with people inside… they went to prison because they pleaded guilty to racial hatred offences
> we chose instead to run our test client directly in AWS's us-east-1 datacenter, invoking Vercel instances running in its iad1 region (which we understand to be in the same building).
There’s interdependence, which is a system that benefits the world and the US. The US taxes the world with inflationary currency, and most of the planet has been relatively peaceful.
That isn’t true… Goldman Sachs and others have stated Brexit has shrunk the UK economy by 5%
https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/business-economics/economi...
And there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence of many small producers suffering as they can no longer afford to export to Europe
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