The British government calculates Brexit has
knocked about 4 per cent off its long-term growth, with the U.K. now forecast to be the worst-performing economy
in Europe relative to where it was before the pandemic. This surprises nobody except the Brexiters: Europe is the much larger economy and consequently took a much smaller hit from the loss of market access. The Brexit vote was thus akin to Canada leaving the North American trading bloc to stick it to the United States.
The
economic squeeze has resulted in an annual loss of £32-billion ($55-billion) in tax revenue – as it happens, about twice the amount Boris Johnson’s infamous campaign bus said Brexit would yield for the country’s National Health Service. Instead, just to keep the NHS from collapsing under the weight of its backlogs, the same Tory government that promised to use the supposed Brexit bonus to cut taxes has instead jacked them up to levels last seen
in the 1950s. Meanwhile, the vast trove of new trade deals that Brexiters promised the newly liberated country have amounted to, well, almost nothing. When Justin Trudeau said Britain
lacked bandwidth for negotiating trade agreements, he knew what he was talking about.
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