BoE chief: Brexit impact on UK economy negative for foreseeable future | Hacker News Reader

BoE chief: Brexit impact on UK economy negative for foreseeable future

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18 pointsteleforce23 comments

Even if the UK were to rejoin the single market to try address this, I don't even think it would help much, people won't invest in the UK given the polls look like the next party would just yank the UK back out again.

They don’t care. None of the Brexit protagonists were doing it because they thought the country would be better off financially; it for them was a philosophical point about governance.

No it was just a lever to make the people they hate unhappy.

There was a tiny group who cared about the philosophy of governance, but they were massively outnumbered by the wingnuts who thought we'd somehow be better off. But all that was completely drowned out by the avalanche of pure hate.

Fair point, maybe I’m giving them too much credit.

I thought it was more a case of making a few people a lot of money and then being able to drastically reduce human/worker rights so that company bosses could extort more money from their employees

Ok, but at least we set the shape of our own damned bananas!

Bailey claims two things:

1. Negative impact for foreseeable future.

2. That he has always been carefully neutral, and is suddenly being forced to give his opinion.

If you look at the actual data, which everyone should, it doesn't support claims like these and never has. There is no visible impact of Brexit on the economic figures. UK GDP growth hasn't departed from the other big countries in western Europe, the lines move in sync as they always did:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-worldbank-constant-us...

You can see COVID, and the 2008 crash, but you can't see Brexit. The same happens if you look more directly at the trade figures, which does show a negative impact for about a month or two just after the new trading rules were implemented, but then immediately goes back to where it was after people figured out the new system. In most graphs you can't even see this transition period unless you zoom in, that's how short it was, and so there's just no impact on economic growth. So it turns out that single market membership had no benefit to the British economy, which is mostly services based and the single market only really tries to standardize trade in goods.

This was not predicted by anyone in the media/economics profession. Academics, British government, central bankers, journalists, IMF, EU ... all of them got this dead wrong. None of them have any credibility left on the matter, yet they never show contrition. Only a handful of Brexit campaigners did correctly predict it and they get given no credit. Paul Krugman made all the usual wrong predictions before the vote, but to his minor credit did admit immediately afterwards that economists were engaged in "motivated reasoning" (i.e. lying).

This is a specific example of a more general problem with the British establishment: they are willing to abuse legacy respect for institutions in order to advance their personal agendas, especially on Europe. Bailey really loves this line about how he has never taken a position. He uses it all the time. That's a good example of the kind of lying civil servants have often engaged in, this pretending to be neutral whilst actually being very biased. In reality he has criticized Brexit in the past, always with the same line about how he never takes a stance whilst simultaneously doing so.

Here he is doing it in May:

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/speech/2025/may/andrew-baile...

And in November 2024, where he "takes no position" but simultaneously "urges ministers to rebuild relations with the EU".

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/nov/14/bank-of-eng...

He wants to be seen as neutral whilst making claims about economics that he must know aren't true. But he's a BoE lifer and like many civil servants struggles to handle cases when reality departs from academic modeling predictions. Model says leaving EU should have a negative economic impact, no such impact is visible, model must therefore be correct. Nobody should listen to him.

> If you look at the actual data, which everyone should, it doesn't support claims like these and never has. There is no visible impact of Brexit on the economic figures.

That isn’t true… Goldman Sachs and others have stated Brexit has shrunk the UK economy by 5%

https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/business-economics/economi...

And there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence of many small producers suffering as they can no longer afford to export to Europe

Yes it is true. Once again, look at the data. Where is this 5% shrink? Do not listen to discredited people who have an axe to grind. Every single claim that Brexit affected the British economy turns out to be false when checked.

The Goldman Sachs claim is no different. It's full of flatly untrue statements about public data, rather incredibly.

They say: "The UK has significantly underperformed other advanced economies since the 2016 EU referendum"

Actual data: UK growth has tracked that of France and Germany. So which "other advanced economies" are they comparing against? The answer is we don't know because their paper compared the UK against synthetic countries that don't exist and they didn't reveal their method. If you want to see the effects of leaving the EU, you need to look at trends and compare against other (western) EU countries. Not a secret list of fictional countries that appear to be the result of playing games with the data until it fits what the author wanted.

They also say "UK goods trade has ‘declined significantly’ and has ‘underperformed other advanced economies by roughly 15%’ since the referendum." Goods trade is down 2% since 2016 which is not "significant", as the UK is specialized in services. Trade in general has grown strongly. Measured annually, using Chained Volume Measures (CVM) total UK trade was 11% higher in 2023 than in 2016. Trade with EU vs ROW continued on its long term trend, also unaffected by Brexit.

Their paper is just wrong in so many ways. There's a more detailed writeup here:

https://www.briefingsforbritain.co.uk/goldman-sachs-wrong-on...

HN tends to have a lot of trouble with this idea that the institutions are all systematically lying about this issue because of what it says about our society, credentialing and so on. But the data is public. You just have to look it up instead of trusting "experts".

You clearly have an axe to grind…

OBR and others say Brexit has a detrimental effect on the British economy… the evidence you quote to refute that comes from a pro-Brexit site!

> From 2018 to 2023, compared to G7 > UK goods exports performed 15% worse > Goods imports 8% worse (current prices) > UK services exports performed better at 17% growth, but behind EU (23%) and Germany (20%) > Services imports (12% growth) were middle of the G7 pack (above Italy, Japan and France)

https://brexitfactbase.com/5-2-trade/

Yes Services did perform better than Goods exports but the growth is still below the EU average and Germany

OBR is wrong, like the other institutions that embarrassed themselves with many false predictions in the past. How many times must I repeat this? That's why people still arguing against Brexit are forced into manipulative statements like this:

> From 2018 to 2023, compared to G7

You can't measure the impact of leaving the EU by comparing British goods exports with Japan and the USA. That isn't controlling for other factors.

To understand the impact of leaving the EU you have to compare like with like: UK before/after and UK with nearby western European countries which stayed in. Not "all EU members", which includes post-Soviet states still catching up to western GDP levels. Not the G7, which includes members that were never in the EU to start with. You can compare to places like France, the Netherlands, Germany, and as your own citation shows, there's no significant difference when you do that. That is the final and full story. Zero effect of leaving.

The only axe being ground here is the people who still, ten years on, cannot accept that the anti-Brexit arguments were wrong. All I'm doing is responding to these false claims.

All you're doing is asserting people who hold an evidence backed view the Brexit was bad for the UK economy as making false claims

That's right! Because their view isn't backed by evidence. They claim it is. You seem to believe them. But, their evidence doesn't check out.

Plenty of well established credible organisations including many city institutions say Brexit was damaging for the British economy but I’m supposed to dismiss them because some random Brexit supporter on HN says they’re wrong

Yes, the unelected bureaucrats in Brussels will continue their punishment until the English no longer want their own parliament.

> the English

Any particular reason you left the other 3 countries out?

Britain isn’t part of the single market or customs union anymore so it’s treated like every other “third” country

As a Britain it was obvious this would happen when we left the EU and the paperwork / costs involved with trading with the EU would rise and damage our economy

We had liars and charlatans saying “we held all the cards” and leaving wouldn’t affect things and a lot of gullible people believed them

Thos same liars and charlatans are now complaining about how many civil servants the UK has while neglecting the fact that we had to hire 100,000 to cope with the effects of Brexit

And how do those unelected bureaucrats (nice framing, tells a lot about who you are) punish the UK?

It is also ironic framing, because main Brexit negotiator for UK has been unelected bureaucrat Lord David Frost.

I think that you forgot /s

Britain decided to leave EU, yet somehow Brits felt entitled to Single Market. It could have customs union like Turkey has, but that would require some compromises on Brexit, which cult of Brexit did not allow.

As a Britain…

I don’t think we wanted to leave the single market and I’m unconvinced that people actually wanted to leave the EU — mainly because they didn’t know what it meant and even the Brexit promoters said a Yes vote wouldn’t mean leaving the EU

What they wanted to do was give the Establishment / Tories a black eye but ended up enabling the people what who were pushing for a hard Brexit that worked against most people’s interests

One of the things that I detest about the Brexit referendum was that "Brexit" wasn't at all defined (apart from leaving the EU). There were lots of hot air about Brexit not at all meaning a "hard" exit from the single market, and yet here we are.

My favourite analogy on the referendum is having people vote on whether to have "meat" or "vegetarian" dinner:

Suppose 40% of people enjoy vegetarian food, 20% only eat pork, 20% only eat beef and 20% only eat chicken.

Then, after "voting", the results come in as 60% for "meat" and 40% for veg. However, what meal can you prepare to satisfy the "meat" vote considering that you can only satisfy 20% of them?

(By the way, I was thrown off by your use of "As a Britain" rather than "As a Brit")

I never refer to myself as a Brit… I’m British or a Britain or from the UK

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