"The British GDP has been reduced by 6–8%, business investment has been reduced by 12%, and trade volume has been reduced by 15%, compared to what it could have been if the U.K. had remained in the EU."
https://now.tufts.edu/2026/06/08/10-years-after-brexit-vote-...
The UK is not the empire it was once, they need ties with mainland Europe, their closest trading partners, to be economically viable. So this doesn't entirely come as a surprise to me.
Of course this was painted as "project fear", and Michael Gove famously said that people had had enough of experts.
They used lies. Literal fabrications out of whole cloth.
They said that the UK was spending hundreds of millions of pounds on the EU, and if they pulled out they could use that money on like the NHS or something.
Lies.
The average person doesn't care about any of that.
If ~99% of those gains go to ~0.1% of people, the average person does not care.
What they do care about is, did MY expenses go up higher than MY wages. Did MY opportunities get better or worse...
In the UK example, the result is potentially even worse - but I would guess the response to COVID & global wars are likely to have a bigger impact on that than Brexit.
Of course, any economic gains weren't guaranteed and were predicated on competent national government and we saw what happened there.
However, net-net, I'd rather have one shite layer of government, rather than two.
To make a parallel that might work for California or NY. In Europe however there is no single country that is so much better than the others at making money, in the same way as those two. Even countries that didn't enter the EU (Switzerland, Norway) accepted most of the EU regulations because they need some of them.
The UK in that respect already had the sweetest deal of all EU members; and, unlike Switzerland or Norway, actually had a say on the regulations that it had to follow. Plus, they had and have a messy situation due to (non-EU-related and therefore unaffected by Brexit) agreements that the border with Ireland cannot be a customs union, so the only thing a competent national government could do was to tell people they had been duped and promised something impossible. The result would have been a Switzerland- or Norway-like non-membership, with small benefits and less power in the EU.