In 2016 David Cameron agreed to hold an EU referendum – largely because his own party was split on Europe. He expected a Remain win that would settle the argument. Instead, Leave won, and he resigned the next day. That isn’t interpretation it's simply the sequence of events. (Hansard 2016; BBC News 2016)
Fast-forward. The UK left the EU single market and customs union on 1 January 2021. Since then the Office for Budget Responsibility – the independent fiscal watchdog that scores UK Budgets has been consistent in its published forecasts: UK trade volumes are lower than they would have been had the UK stayed in the EU, and lower trade feeds through into lower productivity and lower long-run growth. (OBR 2023)
The OBR’s central estimate is that UK trade intensity will end up around fifteen per cent lower in the long run than if the country had remained inside the EU. That is not a campaign group line; it is the official forecaster for the Treasury. (OBR 2023, Box 2.2)
At the same time, the inflation shock of 2021–22 landed hardest on poorer households. Think tanks such as the IFS and Resolution Foundation, and the ONS’s own household cost indices, all show the same thing: lower-income households devote more of their budgets to food and energy, so the same price increase wipes out more of their disposable income. People with savings or assets had a cushion. People without them didn’t. The pain was therefore uneven. (IFS 2022; ONS 2023; Resolution Foundation 2022)
Politically, there is no apology because neither of the two main parties is currently advocating to reverse the decision. They know it’s bleeding us dry. They know the loss of movement is shrinking the world for our kids. It’s not ignorance – it’s indifference. And that’s the betrayal. The government still presents Brexit as something positive. The official opposition has ruled out seeking to re-join. (Conservative Party 2024; Labour Party 2024)
The short conclusion is that UK living standards are under pressure. Brexit is not the only reason – the Covid supply chain disruption and the global energy price spike mattered a great deal, but Brexit is the real driver, and you can see it not in any ideological argument, but in the data published by the institutions, responsible for official forecasts and distributional analysis. (OBR 2023)
