Zehn Jahre nach dem Brexit-Referendum geht es Großbritannien schlechter

> #Ten years after the Brexit referendum, Britain is worse off
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> **A decade after the referendum, the UK has still not decided what sort of relationship it wants with the EU**
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> Published 19 February 2026 6:46am GMT
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> How’s it going? Not well at all, is the almost universal verdict.
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> It was 10 years ago this week that David Cameron announced the date for a simple in/out referendum vote on membership of the European Union.
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> It was a gamble on Cameron’s part. He’d already won the plebiscite on Scottish independence, and was confident that he could do the same on Brexit – calculating that when push came to shove, voters would favour the status quo over the great unknown.
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> His mistake was a failure to recognise the extent of public disillusionment with the mainstream consensus. And it proved his undoing.
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> Inept scaremongering and complacency were the defining characteristics of the subsequent Remain campaign; it was no match for the populist “take back control” messaging of Vote Leave.
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> But Brexit was never likely to be a solution to the underlying complaint, and so it has proved. Ten years on and the economy is in even more of a mess than it was back then. Immigration has surged, the public finances are in a state of ruin, and many public services appear to be broken beyond repair. Voters are angrier than ever.
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> None of this is the fault of Brexit as such. In the end, many of the blood-curdling warnings of “Project Fear” proved incorrect.
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> The sky didn’t fall in, and after a brief few days of market turmoil – as investors came to terms with what right up until the last moment was a largely unexpected outcome – things settled down much as before.
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> But nor did Brexit prove the moment of national renewal cheerleaders had promised. And nor was it ever likely to.
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> The great bulk of the trade deals since struck with other jurisdictions are simple copy-and-paste exercises from pre-existing EU arrangements. Genuinely new deals are relatively few, and in any case fall a long way short of compensating for loss of the frictionless trade once enjoyed with Europe.
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> Erecting a border with our European friends wouldn’t be a problem, we were assured by Brexit campaigners, as the required paperwork would be conducted automatically at lightning speed by computers, allowing trade with the EU to continue uninterrupted.
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> Ten years later and £110m down the drain on consultancy and outsourcing fees, plans for a shiny new “digital border” have been quietly shelved.
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> This failure may say more about government incompetence than it does Brexit shortcomings. Even Pakistan has successfully managed to install such a system, and at a fraction of the cost run up by British efforts.
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> But it is also yet another example of the reality of life outside the EU falling well short of starry-eyed promises.
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> Estimates of the economic costs of Brexit vary. The Office for Budget Responsibility has estimated the damage at 4pc of GDP. One recent study – under the auspices of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) – found it to be much bigger at between 6pc and 8pc.
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> Given that the UK economy has grown roughly in line with France and by more than Germany since leaving the single market at the end of 2020, this latter estimate looks far too high.
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> That the UK would have outperformed these two economies by as much as implied in the NBER study had it remained in the EU doesn’t seem plausible.
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> What’s more, today’s sluggish growth in GDP and productivity long predates the vote for Brexit.
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> The big slowdown took place at the time of the financial crisis in 2008-2009, and has continued that way ever since.
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> Further confusing the picture is the effect of the pandemic and the following energy price shock. Disentangling Brexit effects from these much bigger events is virtually impossible.
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> All the same, to lightly dismiss Brexit as an irreverent bystander in this wider picture of decline is too easy an excuse.
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> Brexit was meant to galvanise positive change, but it hasn’t. In terms of its economics, it has simply made a bad situation even worse.
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> The negative effect on trade, employment and productivity has self-evidently been considerable, even if putting exact numbers on it is always going to be open to challenge.
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> If it hasn’t damaged trade, how come the UK’s export performance has been so much weaker than other G7 countries since 2019? In volume terms, UK exports of both goods and services are still struggling to get back to pre-pandemic levels.
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> Donald Trump’s tariffs may be part of the explanation, but they also highlight another Brexit fantasy – the idea that the rest of the world will be just dying to trade with the UK once it has been freed from its EU shackles.
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> Sadly, free trade Britain has set forth on the high seas just as the world is engulfed by a protectionist tidal wave. For all its faults, Europe’s single market seems a comparative haven from these storms.
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> But it is the effect on investment which gives the greatest cause for concern. Poor in the first place relative to other developed economies, investment has further suffered since the vote for Brexit.
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> The big negative here is uncertainty, which has been turbo-charged by the protracted nature of the Brexit process and has acted like an energy-annihilating black hole on political and corporate life alike.
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> This should not have surprised since even among Brexit campaigners there was no plan for how Britain should pursue its divorce, or even what manner of divorce it would be seeking.
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> The result was years of navel-gazing, all-consuming introspection, during which nothing else was done and the UK’s many pathologies – from the increasingly parlous state of the public finances, rising benefits dependency, desperately high youth unemployment, and a healthcare system that belongs to a bygone age, to name but some – were left festering and unaddressed.
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> Even today, we seem unsure of what we want from Brexit.
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> The Labour Government is pursuing closer relations with Europe after the acrimony of recent years, but with Nigel Farage’s Reform breathing down its neck, no “reset” in relations can ever be more than skin deep.
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> The bottom line is that 10 years after the referendum, Britain still cannot make up its mind on what sort of relationship it wants with the EU.
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> If the vote for Brexit was a vote against immigration, it has in practice had the opposite effect, with a post-Brexit surge in migration of unprecedented proportions.
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> Observing the dire state of today’s UK labour market, it would indeed be nice to have the luxury of Europe’s free movement to help ease some of the pressures.
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> This is particularly the case for younger cohorts, now trapped in a UK labour market which seems increasingly incapable of accommodating them.
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> Maybe one day over the rainbow, there’s a crock of gold awaiting Brexit Britain. For now, it’s just struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night. Economic salvation seems as far away as ever.
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No shit?

Who could have seen this coming? /s

Edit: adding the /s since I’m getting a lot of serious replies

Water is wet. 

They were worse off from when they announced such referendum.

Ahh, the Telegraph. The article is as expected: Brexit is still great, we would have been worse off if we hadn’t done it, and it failed because weak politicians spent too much money on peasantry things like the NHS and welfare instead of affording bigger tax cuts for the rich.

“I don’t need nobody” right wing mentality eventually shows that you… need everybody.

Now that the Torygraph is German-owned, this message might be amplified.

For what it’s worth, their Ukraine: The Latest war coverage podcast has been consistently among the best in the business. A sharp contrast from a lot of their other Little England hysteria.

GDP Growth (not to be confused with GDP level)

The UK from 2016 to 2025 has seen a 1.1% to 1.3% yearly increase verses EU countries that have seen 1.4% to 1.6% growth

Not all EU countries are equal

We are supposedly 6% to 10% worse off without being in the EU. We won’t know entirely as that’s projected numbers

For a country that is independent, it’s not all bad

they can come back to the eu. just dont expect the same terms they had previously

So did the MONEY-to-cronies-back-in-brussels-funded-the-nhs?

To be fair, and as much as I hate the brexit, which country is better now than 10 years ago?

Yes, by every measure that the well-informed use.
Some people feel emotionally satisfied by Brexit but are still very angry, curiously.

Who could have known that that would happen, half the country did, the other half are racist bigots