UK haunted by Johnson’s ‘botched Brexit deal’ and Labour’s plans don’t go far enough | Anand Menon and Joël Reland
UK haunted by Johnson’s ‘botched Brexit deal’ and Labour’s plans don’t go far enough | Anand Menon and Joël Reland
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Five years on, it’s unclear how a proposed UK-EU relationship reset would repair damage to the economy. Five years since Brexit, the UK wants to reset the EU relationship. A simple question of sitting down with the EU and negotiating, surely?. Sort of, though not quite. It’s easy to see why a self-professed growth-obsessed government might seek to be closer to the EU. It’s less clear why it’s seeking what it is, or whether achieving any of it will be easy.
There is one debate we can now surely put to bed. Brexit has had, and is continuing to have, a negative impact on the UK economy. It’s more complicated and costly to do business with a bloc that accounts for over half of all our trade. That plays out in investment, and, perhaps most strikingly, in goods trade. All of this was predicted, but now the data is supplementing the forecasts.
No surprise then that the government wants to improve what it calls the “botched Brexit deal” negotiated by Boris Johnson. But that’s when things get harder. The measures specified – a veterinary deal, recognition of professional qualifications, and a better deal for UK creative artists wanting to tour in the EU – will not make much of an impact in macroeconomic terms, if they can be obtained at all.
Ultimately, the real economic gains from a closer relationship with the EU reside in either some customs arrangement that reduces or removes the need for time-consuming and expensive paperwork at the border, or from UK participation in the single market, meaning British firms could sell goods freely in the EU without the need for conformity checks.
