The Brexit effect

In Tom Clark’s excellent round-up of the economic effects of Brexit, he noted that exports to the EU “look almost unaffected on the headline numbers” (“The cost of leaving,” June). As ever with statistics, it depends on how you cut it.

If you compare UK goods exports to the EU with sales to the rest of the world, the headline export numbers seem fine. But the other way is to compare UK exports to those of other rich countries. This data tells a much worse story, which suggests that Brexit is damaging UK goods trade both in Europe and elsewhere.

Advanced economies’ goods exports have mostly recovered rapidly from the coronavirus pandemic, and are now above their 2019 level, while UK exports are lower. I’ve estimated how badly Brexit has hit goods exports by comparing Britain to a “doppelgänger UK,” which is made up of a few rich countries that are picked because their economic performance closely matches the UK’s before it left the single market and customs union. The countries are the US, Germany, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. By the end of 2021, the UK’s goods exports were 16 per cent lower than the doppelgänger’s.

British exports to the EU have underperformed, but so have those to the rest of the world. UK exporters serving global markets may be finding it harder to source components from Europe, and global manufacturing companies have moved some plants to the EU from Britain, which would reduce UK exports generally if these companies use plants to serve EU and non-EU markets.

What is clear is that Brexit, far from ushering in “Global Britain,” is making it harder to achieve.

John Springford is deputy director of the Centre for European Reform and runs the regular “Cost of Brexit” report series

Sam Freedman’s conclusion is too neat (“Has Brexit made us a more tolerant nation?”, June). He claims that relatively low opposition to immigration in current polling shows Remainers were wrong to blame the Brexit vote on barely disguised racism. But that was the principal and very successful thrust of the Johnsonled Vote Leave campaign as well as of Farage’s Leave.EU, and in turn dictated the May and Johnson governments’ red line on freedom of movement. With the significant reversal of EU immigration witnessed since, the anti-immigrant right has achieved a major victory, of a kind that eluded Enoch Powell’s overtly racist campaign against black immigration half a century ago.

The public may currently appear less fussed about the number of migrants, but anti-immigration politics has never been mainly about this—as the panic over refugees arriving in dinghies shows. The government’s cruel Rwanda scheme is not the aberration that your author implies, but confirms that it still sees plenty of mileage in stoking the fear of others.

Martin Shaw, author of “Political Racism: Brexit and its Aftermath”