U. K.’ s decision to leave EU is becoming costly
LONDON – Eighteen months after Britons narrowly voted to leave the European Union, Brexit’s negative impact on the United Kingdom is growing.
As the U. K. takes part in a summit in Brussels on Thursday and Friday to assess the progress of its EU divorce talks, the cost of leaving the political bloc continues to climb for Britain.
That is raising questions about whether a divorce is still worth it. A poll published in October by YouGov, an online research firm, showed 47% of Brits thought the country was wrong to vote to leave the EU, compared with 42% who said it was the right thing to do.
The same study found that just 18% want a second vote. Only 14% would opt to abandon Brexit completely while 52% think Brexit should “go ahead.”
Jon Worth, an expert on EU affairs who is staunchly pro- EU, said, “Brexit hasn’t yet entered into everyday peoples’ consciousness.”
Here are the current negative consequences of Brexit on the U. K.:
Huge divorce payment
Britain has agreed to pay the EU $ 54 billion to honor commitments from EU officials’ pensions to investments in European infrastructure.
Weaker economy
A RAND Corp. study this week suggests Britain is likely to be eco- nomically worse off outside of the EU under most scenarios.
RAND’s analysis shows that if Britain leaves the EU without agreeing to a new trade deal with the bloc, its GDP could lose 5%, or $ 140 billion, over 10 years.
Plummeting pound
In the year after the June 2016 vote, the British pound lost 16% of its value against the dollar, Bloomberg data show.
On the bright side, the weaker pound has boosted U. K. exports and made Britain a more appealing tourism destination. Overseas residents made 3.9 million visits to Britain in August, up 5% from a year earlier, according to figures released last month by the Office for National Statistics.
There were 1.9 million visits by U. S. tourists between January and June 2017, up 31% compared with the year earlier, according to VisitBritain, the country’s tourism agency.
Lost jobs
A key attraction for global banks and financial service firms is that Britain offers easy access to markets in 27 other EU countries. But Brexit could cause a loss of as many as 75,000 jobs in banking and insurance, as firms such as Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and UBS Group question whether to shift operations elsewhere in the EU, Sam Woods, Britain’s top banking regulator, told lawmakers last month.