Why the Brexit debate will never die

Was it ever possible for the promised results to be delivered?

By the time Brexit sort-of actually happened, five years ago today, most people were already sick of talking about it. Most people had been sick of talking about it in June 2016, when a body of voters equivalent to 27 per cent of the population rewrote our geopolitical and economic status.

This, aside from the fact that most people didn’t want Jeremy Corbyn to be prime minister, was the winning insight of the 2019 election: most people also wanted to forget about Brexit. To a certain extent that was achieved by the pandemic that arrived shortly after Brexit Day in 2020. But it’s also true that many people will not be able to stop talking about Brexit for a long time, because it has changed our country in some fairly significant ways.

In a decade of talking about Brexit, nothing has been more popular that dodgy claims about economic impact. There was Vote Leave’s famous bus-emblazoned bullshit about losing £350m on EU membership, and George Osborne’s economically illiterate claim that Brexit would deflate the housing market (it’s a pity it didn’t). So far the most convincing model for the overall cost to the economy has probably been that of the economist John Springford, who used a “weighted basket” of other countries to model how a counterfactual, remain-voting UK would have performed after 2016. It looks like this:

Springford’s model sensibly stops in 2022, where the energy price shock makes further comparison tricky, but it seems fair to say that by late 2021 the gap in actual GDP growth between Brexitland and Remainia was somewhere between £30bn and £40bn per year. This is a long way from being a crippling blow to the UK’s £3trn economy. But it’s also not great, and it’s not a single shock – it’s a long-term drag, particularly on goods exports, 41 per cent of which went to the EU in 2023. And it is very much not over, because there are parts of Brexit that are only just being implemented; the third phase of the post-Brexit border regime has just begun today, and the cost to UK exporters of the new safety declarations has yet to be absorbed.

We can therefore thank Brexit for sharpening our economy to become more dependent on services (of which our exports have increased) and less dependent on goods (of which exports have decreased). So a Leave vote was a vote for a wealthier London full of office workers and against manufacturers and farmers. Remind me, was it sold like that?

A major reason many people voted Leave was to “take back control” of the UK’s borders, which was widely understood to mean increased control of immigration. The UK’s immigration certainly has changed since Brexit Day. In the year to June 2019, around 347,000 people came to live in the UK from outside the EU; in the year to June 2024, this had risen to more than one million people from outside the EU. More than twice as many people came to the UK from India in year ending June 2024 than came from the EU.

At the same time, people born in the EU represent the largest component of people leaving the UK; 44 per cent of long-term emigration is by EU nationals and 16 per cent is by British nationals.

Obviously, if people arrive to do the same jobs then there is no reason an economist should care what country they come from. According to Oxford University’s Migration Observatory, however, people who arrived from the EU in 2022 mostly came for work, whereas people from South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and other non-EU regions came mainly for family reasons.

I’m not sure putting off Portuguese plasterers and attracting Indian in-laws was an explicit selling point of the Leave campaign. By June 2023, 72 per cent of Leave voters thought non-EU immigration was too high.

That is why Brexit will never be done. It didn’t deliver the results it was supposed to. Economists will continue to point out that this is because it introduced more hurdles for businesses to jump through and took a further £10bn a year of investment (according to some estimates) out of an economy that was already dangerously under-investing. Populists will continue to claim that Westminster has betrayed the will of the people and that Brexit must be “saved”, because it is obviously much easier to pretend this than to come up with a coherent plan for the economy. Brexit is either an ongoing frustration, or the gift that keeps on giving, and we will probably still be talking about it in another five years.

This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here