It’s 2025 and the big news is … Brexit. Still, more than eight years after the original referendum and five years to the month the union jack was lowered in Brussels upon the official withdrawal. In those five years since leaving the European Union the United Kingdom’s economy has stalled. Now, with the return of Donald Trump the White House, Keir Starmer can look forward to aggressive meddling in UK affairs, led by Elon Musk.
With the eighth anniversary of the Brexit referendum past, it seems like it took place several lifetimes ago, so we’d forgotten most of the early details. But way back in 2015 and 2016, brave Brexiteers Nigel Farage, Arron Banks and Boris Johnson were leading us to the Elysian Fields of a United Kingdom liberated from the velvet tyranny of the European Union.
A few business leaders and economists tried to inject reality into the Brexit debate with warnings about the huge dent Brexit would put in the UK’s economy, but they were quickly shouted off the stage with cries of “Remoaners!” and “Operation Fear!”
Alas, business people operate on objective analysis and empirical data while Brexiteers were selling a feel-good return to Britain’s glorious past … which has turned out to be the stiff upper lip England of shortages and sacrifice that followed World War II.
So, we’ve created a regularly updated post documenting the glory as unrelenting waves of greatness wash over the British Isles:
• Brexit is getting the blame for the worst drug shortages in four years. Medications for epilepsy and cystic fibrosis are among those in short supply, according to The Guardian. The shortages are documented in a new report by the Nuffield Trust, an independent health think tank, which obtained the data from the Department of Health and Social Care under freedom of information laws. The report states that while drug shortages have become a global problem, because of Brexit, the UK is facing “a worsening situation” compared with the rest of Europe.
• Pressure is increasing on the United Kingdom to at least partially undo Brexit and draw closer to the European Union. Last week, Germany’s top diplomat in London called on Britain to make a customs union deal with the European Union, according to Politico.eu. Ambassador Miguel Berger usedTurkey’s long-standing customs union with the EU as a potential model, noting that Turkey has been in a customs union with the EU for more than 20 years. The UK.and EU are scheduled to hold their first summit on 19 May.
• Brexit was such a good idea as proven by a recent government report showing it cost British businesses 37 billion pounds per year due to the drop in trade with the EU and the fact that the UK never got any other substantial trade deals. Certainly not with Donald Trump.
• Speaking of Trump, the UK and US are now in a tit-for-tat trade war, each side implementing 25 percent tariffs on steel, all while the Starmer government is trying to negotiate the first post-Brexit trade deal with the US. Since his first administration, Trump’s strategy with the UK is to dangle the possibility of a trade deal “very soon” while doing nothing. His demands of access to the National Health Service and the Brits altering food regulations to allow chlorinated American chicken have been non-starters so far.
Sky News has a detailed look at how US tariffs impact on British steel maker.
• Only now – eight years after the Brexit referendum – do we see coming into focus the worst possible outcome of splitting the European Union. With the United States going from ally to enemy under President Donald Trump, a weakened EU is struggling to cope with trade wars and real wars. The UK was the second-largest EU economy until Brexit and had the most potent military. Now, with Trump essentially surrendering Ukraine to Russia, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plans to render Europe impotent are nearly realized. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is promising to send British troops to Ukraine to enforce a peace deal. European leaders are busy faffing about in Munich after being excluded – along with Ukraine – from peace talks in Saudi Arabia. Suddenly, a world dominated by an alliance between two anti-democratic autocrats is increasingly likely. It is cosmic understatement to say Brexit has made the UK far less secure.
• The BBC has a super-enlightening post about the five key impacts of Brexit. They include interruptions in trade, travel and immigration. But the most interesting promised benefit of Brexit that never really happened is the return of legal and regulatory autonomy. To minimize disruption following the implementation of Brexit in 2020, the UK simply kept thousands of EU laws, known as “retained EU law,” according to the post. The latest government count finds there were 6,901 individual pieces of retained EU law covering employment issues, food labelling and environmental standards. So, basically, the UK “took back control” by just keeping a whole lot of EU rules. Sigh ….
• The Independent has a post about Boris Johnson’s Brexit decision to ban more than 200 million European Union citizens from traveling to the UK using their identity cards and how that impacted the UK’s tourism industry. European tourists can visit dozens of nations, inside and outside the EU, without passports – but not Britain, states the post. The UK’s VisitBritain tourism organization is predicting a record year. But even then, 2025 likely won’t equal tourist revenue pre-Brexit, according to the post.
• There … she said it. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch admitted in January that her Tory party pushed Brexit without any real plan for economic growth outside the European Union. A decision that brought years of economic struggles – and no major trade deals – to the UK. Badenoch said the Conservatives “told people what they wanted to hear first and then tried to work it out later.”
• Could Donald Trump be the person who finally brings the UK and the EU back together? When he’s not busy threatening to take Greenland from Denmark, Trump is threatening to put huge tariffs on goods from Europe with which the US has a substantial trade deficit. In a virtual address to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Trump told the assembled that foreign countries will have to make their goods in the US if they want to sell them tariff-free in the American market. And by the way, Trump never did give the UK that crucial trade deal Brexiteers assured the British public was coming any day now.
• In a large new poll, the MRP survey of about 15,000 people, more Brits in every constituency in England, Scotland and Wales back closer trade ties with the EU rather than more trade with the US. A post in the Guardian notes that even in Nigel’s seat of Clacton, more people think the UK is better off increasing trade with Europe than with the US. EU officials have taken the first steps toward welcoming back the UK, suggesting the Brits could join the Pan-Euro-Mediterranean Convention, which permits tariff-free trade for parts and other goods for manufacturing supply chains to be sourced from across Europe and North Africa.
• The return of Trump has added a weird factor to a situation that was already contradictory and convoluted. Trump co-president Elon Musk is a big fan of English neofascist/part-time common criminal Tommy Robinson. Robinson has been in jail as of late, charged with libeling a young refugee from Syria and a lot of other stuff. Musk has picked up Robinson’s case as a cause célèbre and ordered Reform Party leader and Brexiteer Nigel Farage to welcome Robinson into the Reform Party UK fold. That was too much even for Nigel, who refused. Now, Musk is bankrolling Robinson’s legal cases while calling for the removal of Farage as Reform UK leader. Just when you think it can’t get any crazier ….
• The bad news is that the United Kingdom has a 22 billion pound (26.5 billion euro) “black hole” in its budget. The even worse news is that the UK owes the European Union another 6.4 billion pounds (7.7 billion euros) in its Brexit settlement after already paying out 24 billion pounds (29 billion euros), according to the Independent. The budget shortfall is upping the pressure on British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to cut a deal with Brussels and start reversing Brexit.
• A defining Brexit moment passed without out much notice: London’s centuries-old position as a global banking center took serious hit. Britain’s departure from the European Union cost London’s financial centre about 40,000 jobs, the Lord Mayor of the City of London told Reuters, far more than previous estimates. The previous estimate by EY put the loss at 7,000 jobs lost to Brexit.
Dublin picked up most of those (an estimated 10,000), but other winners include Amsterdam, Paris and Milan, according to the post.
“Brexit was a disaster,” said Michael Mainelli, the ceremonial head of London’s City financial center, which includes the Bank of England. “We had 525,000 workers in 2016. My estimate is that we lost just short of 40,000.” That said, London remains solidly the largest banking center in Europe, according to the Global Financial Centers Index.
Economic output in the heart of Britain’s financial sector, including banks and wealth funds, has fallen by more than 15 percent since late 2019, just before the UK formally left the EU, according to the post. Overall, financial services output in Britain has fallen by 1 percent since late 2019 – a stark contrast with France and Germany, where it has increased by 8 percent, and Ireland’s 18 percent growth.
• It turns out that Brexit added a layer of red tape over the European Union regulations that Brits thought they were escaping. Since the UK left the EU in January 2020, the British government has put in place a number of trade regulations for overseas goods including border controls, customs declarations and health certifications.
The Independent is reporting a survey, conducted by Santander Bank, found that 31 per cent of British companies want to see a reduction in post-Brexit regulatory requirements, including customs procedures and trading licenses. The post quotes Dr. Mike Galsworthy, chairman of the European Movement, as saying, “Far from freeing British businesses from red tape, Brexit dumped previously unimagined new layers of bureaucracy onto them. Having now experimented with life outside the EU, we can clearly see that it is a far worse place to be for UK businesses compared with membership of the Customs Union and Single Market.”
That red tape is having an ever-increasing dampening affect on the British economy, according the BBC.
• The Brexit border checks on food still haven’t gone into effect four years after they were scheduled to begin. The first delays were do to the fact the Tories never actually bothered to build the necessary infrastructure. This time, the Labour government is delaying controls on fruit and vegetables to July 2025 rather than January because these controls will add 200 million pounds in extra costs to industry and consumers, pushing up already inflated grocery prices. Our guess is, the border checks will never go into effect as the United Kingdom moves toward reintegrating into European Union trade.
• Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has the audacity to say that Brexit has accomplished the worst possible outcome on migration. In an interview with the Independent, Blair said the UK traded the young (legal) migrants from the EU its economy needs in tech and the hospitality sector for boat loads of older migrants from Asia and Africa. Unfortunately, Keir Starmer has rejected calls for youth mobility scheme. “Personally, I think youth mobility within Europe would be a good thing for us, but, you know, the government’s got to take a view on that,” Blair said.
• Are we finally seeing the outline of a Brexit reset?
Britain’s business class is officially fed up with all the onerous new border checks for goods entering the United Kingdom, according to the Financial Times, calling them a “big expense for nothing.” That’s just the beginning.
Customs agents and businesses are complaining how they’re being charged for checks on goods that never took place after post-Brexit controls on food and plant imports from the EU were imposed on British importers. Among other things, businesses are charged for physical inspections that are actually done by automated systems.
In some cases, British commercial aircraft have to fly to the U.S. for routine maintenance and pilots have to be certified in multiple countries, all because Brexit made the UK a party of one.
The added costs have prompted calls on the UK’s Labour government to fast-track agreements with the European Union that could reduce or remove the need for inspections and paperwork. We’ll see ….
• Business could just be the beginning. EU leaders are using the Labour victory to say out loud what everyone knows needs to happen – the UK needs to be integrated back into the European community if for no other reason than its capacity for military projection and what military strategists call “interoperability.”
Brexit ended Britain’s security agreements with the EU, effectively reducing Europe’s military might at a time when Putin is increasingly aggressive. At least that part of Brexit could soon be reversed with a German proposal.
“…. I would call it a Security and Cooperation Agreement between the U.K. and the European Union,” Germany’s ambassador to the U.K. Miguel Berger told POLITICO.
By most objective measures, and including air and naval forces, the UK has the second-largest military behind France. Taken in aggregate with France, Germany, Poland and the rest of Europe, Britain represents about one-third of military airlift including C-17s and Airbus A400Ms. Not as exciting as fighters, transport aircraft are essential to power projection should the Russians move into NATO nations in the Baltics, or into Finland or Poland. But compared to the US, European forces are anemic, at best, though the U.K. does have – in our opinion – the best special forces units in the world.
The unserious Brexiteers never gave a thought to how they were weakening their own national security. And some, such as Nigel Farage, are Putin sympathizers. With the war in Ukraine getting ever more unpredictable, Europe and the 32 NATO countries need all the help they can get.
• Well, here’s something that no one told us would happen: The United Kingdom kicked out the Tories after 14 years of misrule, choosing to go left with the Labour Party as the rest of Europe goes right. Despite what new Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer says, Brexit played a role simply by taking the collective focus off sound internal policies and focusing them on Brexit issues such as where customs and immigration checks would be on the Irish border. Like, for years. Or as MP Robert Jenrick states in the Times of London, “We lost because we got Brexit done but nothing else.”
So, how did our Brexit heroes fare in this Tory dénouement? Well, all but one are gone from government. Even Jacob Rees Mogg, the MP for the 17th century, went down in flames along with PM for a Day Liz Truss and the Wicked Witch of the South, Penny Mordaunt.
The only survivor – and this will surprise no one – is Nigel Farage, who was finally elected to Parliament after only eight tries.
Brexit has so many flaws that it’s hard to point to one cause as its failure. But if we had to, we’d point to the fact the Brexiteers are so unserious. Boris Johnson and his crazy hair, who made exactly one appearance during this recent campaign. Rubber-faced Nigel Farage, who can’t make a speech without a pint in his hand. And of course Rees Mogg, who stepped out of the pages of “Brideshead Revisited” long enough to wreck Britain.
A decade from now, no one will remember anything about them, or Brexit. That’s the good news. The bad news is Starmer says the UK will not rejoin the European Union in his lifetime.
• Politico has a post – an obituary really – for the brave Brexiteers who freed the UK from the heinous tyranny of the EU. Five years after winning a landslide election, Boris Johnson, the aging rock star of Brexit, is out of parliament. Michael Gove quit politics and Dominic Cummings spends his time writing blogs about whatever pops into his bald head.
They achieved exactly none of their promises – no real deregulation; no 350 million pounds per week for the NHS; no fabulous trade agreements with the United States and other giant economies, though there is that agreement to buy more kiwis from New Zealand.
Just trading eight years of economic growth for the gauzy dream of making the UK great again.
Guy Verhofstadt, the former Belgian prime minister of Belgium who represented the European Parliament in talks between London and Brussels, thinks “Peak Brexit” has already been reached, according to Politico: “I think that more and more after the election we will see a growing pressure to step-by-step to go back in a direction of a more sensible approach.”
• Maybe, just maybe, Brexit would have been a good idea if the United Kingdom were self-supporting. Alas, it is not. Fruits and veggies come from the warmer, sunnier climes of Spain, Italy and Portugal, not to mention Dutch greenhouses.
Even Nigel Farage can’t change that.
CNN has a post about how new charges on some imported food products will come into effect just as UK food inflation is dropping from double-digit rates and Britain’s grain harvest is wiped out from heavy winter rains.
It’s a sobering post that really brings into focus the dramatic unintended results of Brexit as we’re weeks away from the anniversary of the vote:
Before leaving the EU, Britain enjoyed unencumbered access to the vast array of food produced in neighboring countries: cheese from France, peaches from Spain, artichokes from Italy. A steady stream of EU agricultural workers, meanwhile, was a boon to British farmers. In the post-Brexit world, Britain’s food supply is more vulnerable to external shocks, even as related labor shortages have at times forced local farmers to leave crops rotting because of a lack of workers to harvest them.
• A few months ago – seems like years – we noted one tangible way to measure the sublime success that is Brexit is increasing amount of sewage on British beaches now that the UK freed from the Draconian restrictions of European pollution restrictions. British officials have used that freedom wisely and turned a blind eye to uncontrolled dumping, resulting in contamination of some of the most popular beaches.
Predictably, the problem has gotten worse. CNN reports that sewage spills increased by 54 percent last year, according to data released in March by the Environment Agency – a UK government-founded public body established to “protect and improve” the environment. A private group – Surfers Against Sewage – is monitoring the situation. You can see their website here for pollution alerts. And it’s not just the sea … it’s the UK’s rivers.
As we wrote back then, nothing screams freedom like swimming in your own sh*t.
• Considering nearly ever aspect of life has gotten worse, it’s not surprising that British public opinion has turned against Brexit. The Economist has an interesting post and an even more interesting chart (right) showing the swing since 2020.
• Back in 2016, the Brexiteers sold Brexit as a panacea for everything that was wrong with the United Kingdom. Then, the pro-Brexit press, particularly the Express, predicted the remaining EU countries would start to leave one-by-one, coining hopeful new words such as “Grexit” and “Nexit.” Well, all these years later, Nexit could be come a reality as Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders is working behind the scenes to free the Netherlands from EU tyranny in order to stop all immigration.
If we could get Mr. Wilders in a room, we might point out how Brexit has been a series of economic disasters for the UK, not a panacea. In a report earlier this year, Wall Street financial giant Goldman Sachs found the UK’s real GDP per capita has barely risen above pre-Covid levels and stands 4 percent above the mid-2016 level, the report found. That compares to 8 percent for the Euro Zone and 15 percent for the U.S. economy. As the economy stumbled, British consumer prices have risen 31 percent since mid-2016 compared with 27 percent in the U.S. and 24 percent in the Euro Zone.
And all those exciting new trade treaties the “Singapore-on-the Thames” has fashioned across the globe … don’t come anywhere close to offsetting diminished trade with the world’s largest trade zone. Even the Brexit mouthpiece Telegraph admits that all these years later, the UK is still heavily taxed, mired in debt, with public services that don’t work and a huge housing shortage.
Some panacea ….
