The British received a cruel slap

The British economy has lost 500,000 workers in recent years, and the value of investments has stagnated since 2016.

In Great Britain, a referendum on EU membership was held in 2016, in which a narrow majority of participants, 51.89 percent, voted to leave. Following the result of the referendum, Great Britain left the European Union three years ago, and at the end of the 11-month transition period after the termination of EU membership, it also left the EU’s single internal market and customs union. The conservative British government did not want to fulfill the conditions – above all the right of EU citizens to settle and work freely in Great Britain – which are inextricably linked to these two integration organizations.

The estimate cited by the head of the OBR that half a million workers have left the UK economy since then is grimmer than the most recent independent analysis on the same topic published recently.

Jonathan Portes, professor of economics at King’s College London, and John Springford, deputy director of the Center for European Reform (CER), a strategic research workshop in London that conducts EU analyses, showed in their joint study that

by the middle of last year, 460,000 EU workers were missing from the British economy compared to pre-Brexit levels.

The improvement in the productivity of the British economy also slowed down “dramatically” after the 2008 global financial crisis, and has not returned to the previous pace since then.

When asked how much stronger the British economy would be if Great Britain had remained a member of the European Union, the head of the economic forecasting institute said: according to the OBR’s calculations, the value of the British gross domestic product (GDP) will be approximately 4 percent due to Brexit lower than the level that Britain could have reached in the longer term as a member of the EU. According to Hughes, this means that Brexit caused a shock to the British economy comparable to the impact of the coronavirus epidemic.

According to the OBR’s estimate, the standard of living of the British population will not return to the level before the spread of the coronavirus epidemic – and the Brexit process that took place at the same time – before the end of the current decade.

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