Brexit is more unpopular than ever five years on

UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves has sought to pull various growth levers, but Brexit’s economic impact remains something of an elephant in the room, the Institute for Government wrote. The UK was the only G7 country in 2023 to have not recovered its GDP to pre-pandemic levels, an economist at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research wrote, because Brexit created various “structural barriers” including labor shortages, reduced investment, and trade frictions. The Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts that UK imports will be 15% lower in the long run, and productivity 4% lower, than had the country remained in the bloc. Analysts are “reasonably confident” that smaller companies have fared worse than larger ones, the BBC noted.

The Labour government has vowed to fix former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s “botched Brexit deal” and hopes for a “reset” with the EU, but the bloc’s response has so far been muted, two Carnegie Europe experts wrote, with no clear path forward on hot-button issues like free movement. US President Donald Trump could leave the UK stuck between a rock and a hard place as it tries to avoid choosing between the US and EU, British political scientist Anand Menon argued at a recent LSE event: If Labour strikes a deal with Trump to avoid tariffs, the EU will likely dismiss the UK as “the Americans’ trojan horse in Europe,” he warned.

Leave voters are not so much experiencing buyer’s remorse as they are blaming the government for doing a bad job, Joël Reland, a researcher at UK in A Changing Europe told Semafor: “They are still attached to their identities as Brexit supporters, and any radical attempts to get closer to the EU may not go down well.” The government is now being forced to walk a “tightrope” by finding ways to boost economic growth without alienating new voters in the recent election, including working-class Brexit supporters, he added. Some in the UK government are reportedly pushing to reset ties with the EU this year itself, “to get the political pain out of the way” before the 2027 general elections, The i Paper wrote, with the hope that there is enough economic growth to appease Leave-backing voters.