The United Kingdom’s economy has been underperforming for nearly twenty years, with some indicators, such as public sector productivity, performing particularly badly and actually being lower than they were in 1997. In this period, there are two coincident factors that are blamed for this weakness. One is Brexit and the other is high energy prices.
The consequences of Brexit are inevitably hard to judge. The counterfactual cannot be proved, so the best approach is to examine the UK against other economies. This has been done by leading Remain economists, to show Brexit-related underperformance. But they compare this country to other economies, including the United States, outside the European sphere, which have performed well not just since 2016 or 2020, depending on when you wish to start, but have consistently done better than Britain since 2008 or even 2000.
It seems to me that the more obvious comparison is to the other European economies, because it is inherently unlikely that we could have outperformed those nations had we remained in the EU, as they were our major market and suppliers. In this context, the UK’s performance is reasonably good.
Our GDP has grown by more than Germany, France and Italy since 2016, and on all measures has outperformed Germany in this period from 2020. Some of the small countries have done better than the UK, but as the German economy has historically been the driver of the EU economy, it would be surprising if we had done even better against it than we have, had we remined a member.
We do less well in GDP per capita terms, because some of our growth has come from unskilled immigrant labour, boosting the total size of the economy but not on a per person basis. Trade is the one area where the Remainers predicted the worst disaster for Britain outside the EU, but here the picture is remarkably strong. Since we voted to leave, total exports have risen by 23% in real terms, from £735 billion in 2015 to £905 billion in 2025, as noted by Emmanuel Igwe in The Critic recently.
