2 ms·
> The UK is in far worse shape because Brexit has nuked a huge hole in the economy. 4% is about £80bn a year. The EU lost the exact same amount in that exchang
by Proven 4y ago
> The UK is in far worse shape because Brexit has nuked a huge hole in the economy. 4% is about £80bn a year.
The EU lost the exact same amount in that exchange and had to substitute it with inferior or more expensive goods and services from elsewhere.
So no, the UK is not in far worse shape as they can open up to the rest of the world and the EU cannot because it's built around the principles of self-isolation and trade barriers.
Why the UK hasn't done as much after Brexit is a different problem. Sadly, Johnson has turned to be useless, although not nearly as useless as May. I'd like to see a "UK Trump" take over for a while. It's very hard to do worse than the two main parties.
- ben_w 4y ago80 billion is a smaller percentage of the EU’s ~17.9 trillion USD GDP than the UK’s ~3.3 trillion USD GDP. Though as I make that 2.4% of the UK’s GDP (and 0.45% of the EU’s) I’m not sure where the other commenter got the number and percentage from. The EU is likely to find it easier to get useful trade deals as it has more recent experience of writing trade deals, partly because it does that for its members, and partly because the UK government doesn’t trust British people who worked for the EU to get that experience. The UK also has limited room for getting significant alterations to the terms of imports to the UK in any trade deals, because every deal that contradicts EU rules represents another thing that has to be checked for with NI—GB trade. That said, the UK appears to be very good at getting a large quantity of trade deals, by the cunning method of giving the counter-party whatever they ask for at negligible cost, so the British negotiators can get themselves another headline with the words “trade deal” in it.