Britain’s Total World trade balance is much worse than in 2016
(Also and on your mentioning of falling EU trade, it’s hilarious that you think that “losing more of those clients we’ve already been losing” is somehow a good thing. Yeah, sure, that makes total business sense mate … wanna buy this river crossing property I have for sale in a major US city?)
You see, Non-EU Trade was also affected by Brexit due to the loss of all those Trade Treaties that Britain had via the EU and which the country had to try to replace because it left the trade block. Back in the Referedum days we were all told how “sovereign Britain” would be able to negotiate even better trade terms than the EU and here we are, almost a decade later, and Britain failed to negotiate replacement for all those trade treaties, much less get better trade terms in those it did (as expected: the other countries will concede much better trade terms for access to a trade block of 540 million people than for access to a country of 40 million), hence its trade balance with the World has never been this bad.
(Surely, “The Brexit Dividend Is Just Around The Corner And Will Begin At Any Moment Now” just like Brexiters have claimed since 2016)
The CAP stuff is also a hilarious obcession, given that British agricultural products are part of those “goods” where trade balance has worsen steeply, so clearly leaving the EU and the CAP didn’t turn out so great for British farmers.
Also, it’s been hilarious to watch Britain weaken it’s own food safety legislation rules - “overregulation” being the main argument from Brexiters for the CAP being a horrible thing - further shafting the entire Food Production For Export sector in the UK AND weakening the quality and safety of the food that Britons consume thus also shafting everybody living in Britain (all of which, on a personal note, periodically reminds me that leaving Britain after Leave won was one of the best decisions in my life).
Trully an amazing Leave achievement!
Congratulations for shafting British food safety and the trade prospects of the British Food Sector including British Farmers so as to get rid of pesky EU Agricultural Regulations. Brits finally will get to enjoy the pleasure of eating Hormone Beef and Chlorinated Chicken (with its many times higher rates of Salmonella)!
The Brexit debate is still a complete mess, people like you just spout numbers with no effort at any level of understanding and just throw boring insults, assuming everyone is a looney brexiter, when a third of the left voted to leave. Have you never listed to Tony Benn?
Your arguments rely on vibes from 2016 and a refusal to engage with what the UK is actually doing now. There are always costs, but you are stitching those costs together with outdated claims and calling it analysis.
Yes, the UK’s trade balance looks worse than it did pre-2016 if you squint at the headline and ignore what’s underneath. In Q2 2025 the deficit was about £9.2 billion. Cue the usual inane victory lap with zero understanding of how margin gets added to that deficit in goods, and resold as services.
What gets quietly skipped is that this is overwhelmingly a goods problem, driven by energy prices and a collapse in EU goods trade that was replaced by non-EU trade or was just fucking whelks and other dead stuff that was zombie trade that should have died anyway.
Meanwhile the services surplus keeps trucking along and hit roughly £52 billion in the same period. That’s the 80% of the economy we’re actually good at, is margin rich, clean GDP, and it hasn’t mysteriously died because we upset Brussels.
The “we lost all our trade deals” line is just wrong. Almost all the EU agreements were rolled over, and then we layered new ones on top with Japan, Australia, India, (how are those EU deals coming on lol) and CPTPP. The real issue, which everyone sensible understood from day one, is that no amount of shiny far-flung trade deals can fully replace frictionless access to a massive nearby goods market. That’s not a scandal, it’s geography. Pretending this proves Brexit “failed” is like being shocked that Heathrow is busier than Inverness.
And no, nobody thinks losing customers is a good thing. The point is that the EU is a low-growth, fragmented services market that is borderline hostile to the sectors the UK dominates. Chasing it as the sole anchor of future growth would be fucking idiotic. The UK is instead pointing itself at faster-growing global markets where services and digital trade matter and there is fuck all trade gravity, and where it actually has an edge. Mocking that as losing clients is like mocking a software company for not doubling down on fax machines.
On farming, the CAP obsession misses the point entirely. The issue was never that farmers got support. It was that the EU spent roughly a quarter to a third of its entire budget propping up a sector that accounts for under 1 percent of UK GDP, in a system designed to protect incumbents and keep everyone dependent and has destroyed biodiversity. Leaving the CAP lets the UK target funding at public goods and use agricultural access as leverage in wider trade deals. That doesn’t magically make life easy for farmers, but it does at least make the policy coherent.
Farmers have struggled since Brexit, absolutely. But blaming that on the loss of CAP is lazy. The real hit came from non-tariff barriers with the EU, paperwork, inspections, SPS rules, delays, all the boring friction that kills margins. The early drop in exports of vegetables, food, and drink tells you exactly where the pain came from. This isn’t controversial, it’s proof that the EU is protectionist. If you think protectionism is good, then you agree with your written doppleganger Trump lol
The food safety panic is fucking theatre. The UK kept almost all EU food law on day one and still runs on the Food Safety Act 1990. The precautionary principle didn’t get launched into the North Sea. Yes, there are specific divergences, like titanium dioxide being banned in the EU but not the UK. That’s not the collapse of civilisation, it’s a regulatory choice. Maybe look at the EU rules on pesticides before replying with yet more uninformed wank.
Pretending deregulation is about making food unsafe is super retarded, even for you,
What the UK is doing is based on science not politics, which is speeding up approval of things like gene-edited crops that the EU effectively froze out of existence. That’s about productivity, not poisoning people.
So yes, Brexit came with costs. The OBR’s roughly 4 percent long-run productivity hit from trade friction and investment is fuck all, it’s 0.27% less growth, big fucking deal, regulating using common law is worth treble that.
The UK is now explicitly betting on regulatory agility in high-value sectors like AI, fintech, and bioscience, where even modest gains have massive multipliers. The IMF reckons AI alone could add about 1.5 percent a year to productivity. That’s the game being played.
Brexit wasn’t free, and it wasn’t tidy. But the idea that it’s a one-way economic disaster relies on pretending the strategy stopped in 2016. The measurable cost of EU friction is the entry fee. The upside, if the UK executes properly, is harder to model, harder to meme, and much more uncomfortable for people who decided years ago how this story was supposed to end.
PS I voted for Lexit, with Tony Benn and Mick Lynch. Cheap labour destroys countries.
Again, “strangely” specific.
Britain’s Total World trade balance is much worse than in 2016
(Also and on your mentioning of falling EU trade, it’s hilarious that you think that “losing more of those clients we’ve already been losing” is somehow a good thing. Yeah, sure, that makes total business sense mate … wanna buy this river crossing property I have for sale in a major US city?)
You see, Non-EU Trade was also affected by Brexit due to the loss of all those Trade Treaties that Britain had via the EU and which the country had to try to replace because it left the trade block. Back in the Referedum days we were all told how “sovereign Britain” would be able to negotiate even better trade terms than the EU and here we are, almost a decade later, and Britain failed to negotiate replacement for all those trade treaties, much less get better trade terms in those it did (as expected: the other countries will concede much better trade terms for access to a trade block of 540 million people than for access to a country of 40 million), hence its trade balance with the World has never been this bad.
(Surely, “The Brexit Dividend Is Just Around The Corner And Will Begin At Any Moment Now” just like Brexiters have claimed since 2016)
The CAP stuff is also a hilarious obcession, given that British agricultural products are part of those “goods” where trade balance has worsen steeply, so clearly leaving the EU and the CAP didn’t turn out so great for British farmers.
Also, it’s been hilarious to watch Britain weaken it’s own food safety legislation rules - “overregulation” being the main argument from Brexiters for the CAP being a horrible thing - further shafting the entire Food Production For Export sector in the UK AND weakening the quality and safety of the food that Britons consume thus also shafting everybody living in Britain (all of which, on a personal note, periodically reminds me that leaving Britain after Leave won was one of the best decisions in my life).
Trully an amazing Leave achievement!
Congratulations for shafting British food safety and the trade prospects of the British Food Sector including British Farmers so as to get rid of pesky EU Agricultural Regulations. Brits finally will get to enjoy the pleasure of eating Hormone Beef and Chlorinated Chicken (with its many times higher rates of Salmonella)!
The Brexit debate is still a complete mess, people like you just spout numbers with no effort at any level of understanding and just throw boring insults, assuming everyone is a looney brexiter, when a third of the left voted to leave. Have you never listed to Tony Benn?
Your arguments rely on vibes from 2016 and a refusal to engage with what the UK is actually doing now. There are always costs, but you are stitching those costs together with outdated claims and calling it analysis.
Yes, the UK’s trade balance looks worse than it did pre-2016 if you squint at the headline and ignore what’s underneath. In Q2 2025 the deficit was about £9.2 billion. Cue the usual inane victory lap with zero understanding of how margin gets added to that deficit in goods, and resold as services. What gets quietly skipped is that this is overwhelmingly a goods problem, driven by energy prices and a collapse in EU goods trade that was replaced by non-EU trade or was just fucking whelks and other dead stuff that was zombie trade that should have died anyway.
Meanwhile the services surplus keeps trucking along and hit roughly £52 billion in the same period. That’s the 80% of the economy we’re actually good at, is margin rich, clean GDP, and it hasn’t mysteriously died because we upset Brussels.
The “we lost all our trade deals” line is just wrong. Almost all the EU agreements were rolled over, and then we layered new ones on top with Japan, Australia, India, (how are those EU deals coming on lol) and CPTPP. The real issue, which everyone sensible understood from day one, is that no amount of shiny far-flung trade deals can fully replace frictionless access to a massive nearby goods market. That’s not a scandal, it’s geography. Pretending this proves Brexit “failed” is like being shocked that Heathrow is busier than Inverness.
And no, nobody thinks losing customers is a good thing. The point is that the EU is a low-growth, fragmented services market that is borderline hostile to the sectors the UK dominates. Chasing it as the sole anchor of future growth would be fucking idiotic. The UK is instead pointing itself at faster-growing global markets where services and digital trade matter and there is fuck all trade gravity, and where it actually has an edge. Mocking that as losing clients is like mocking a software company for not doubling down on fax machines.
On farming, the CAP obsession misses the point entirely. The issue was never that farmers got support. It was that the EU spent roughly a quarter to a third of its entire budget propping up a sector that accounts for under 1 percent of UK GDP, in a system designed to protect incumbents and keep everyone dependent and has destroyed biodiversity. Leaving the CAP lets the UK target funding at public goods and use agricultural access as leverage in wider trade deals. That doesn’t magically make life easy for farmers, but it does at least make the policy coherent.
Farmers have struggled since Brexit, absolutely. But blaming that on the loss of CAP is lazy. The real hit came from non-tariff barriers with the EU, paperwork, inspections, SPS rules, delays, all the boring friction that kills margins. The early drop in exports of vegetables, food, and drink tells you exactly where the pain came from. This isn’t controversial, it’s proof that the EU is protectionist. If you think protectionism is good, then you agree with your written doppleganger Trump lol
The food safety panic is fucking theatre. The UK kept almost all EU food law on day one and still runs on the Food Safety Act 1990. The precautionary principle didn’t get launched into the North Sea. Yes, there are specific divergences, like titanium dioxide being banned in the EU but not the UK. That’s not the collapse of civilisation, it’s a regulatory choice. Maybe look at the EU rules on pesticides before replying with yet more uninformed wank.
Pretending deregulation is about making food unsafe is super retarded, even for you,
What the UK is doing is based on science not politics, which is speeding up approval of things like gene-edited crops that the EU effectively froze out of existence. That’s about productivity, not poisoning people.
So yes, Brexit came with costs. The OBR’s roughly 4 percent long-run productivity hit from trade friction and investment is fuck all, it’s 0.27% less growth, big fucking deal, regulating using common law is worth treble that.
The UK is now explicitly betting on regulatory agility in high-value sectors like AI, fintech, and bioscience, where even modest gains have massive multipliers. The IMF reckons AI alone could add about 1.5 percent a year to productivity. That’s the game being played.
Brexit wasn’t free, and it wasn’t tidy. But the idea that it’s a one-way economic disaster relies on pretending the strategy stopped in 2016. The measurable cost of EU friction is the entry fee. The upside, if the UK executes properly, is harder to model, harder to meme, and much more uncomfortable for people who decided years ago how this story was supposed to end.
PS I voted for Lexit, with Tony Benn and Mick Lynch. Cheap labour destroys countries.