Hacker News Reader

Comment by segasaturn | Hacker News Reader

GDP is a terrible indicator of a country's real wealth. Of course Britain's economic output fell after Brexit - it's trading less with the EU! That doesn't mean the UK is poorer or has "cost" them anything. Sadiq Khan is constantly making bold, unsubstantial statements like this - definitely a politician for the Twitter era.

View on HN

All anecdotal measures of household wealth I can see are down. Public services are crumbling (some literally): roads, hospitals, schools, NHS is in tatters on all possible metrics, and with people departing in droves. Everyone I speak to has had their personal household budget squeezed hard.

Or course it's just anecdata and also at this level you can't disentangle the effect of COVID and global inflation from Brexit, but it's not a pretty picture for UK prosperity right now.

It's not trading less with the EU. This is a myth. Trade ratios between EU and RoW haven't shifted after Brexit.

British GDP is lower now because of lockdowns. Brexit itself appears to have made no difference. The governments own trade statistics show this clearly.

You’re completely incorrect. Trade by volume is massively down between the UK/EU. Trade by value is similar because of the effects of inflation. Once you adjust for that, you see a huge drop.

Yes, but not proportionally so. Trade is down because of the damage of lockdowns. If it were due to Brexit you'd see trade with the EU fall more than trade with the rest of the world. We don't see that. The ratio of trade with EU vs everywhere else hasn't moved.

> Yes, but not proportionally so.

Also completely incorrect. See the British Chambers of Commerce from April 2023: https://www.britishchambers.org.uk/news/2023/06/uptick-in-ex...

You have to check industrial and agricultural production to check the "real wealth" of a country

Which is down

Reply on news.ycombinator.com