ManyVoices

Just before Britain’s fateful referendum on its membership to the European Union 10 years ago, the government of the day gave a stark warning. A vote to leave the bloc would lead to “an immediate and profound shock” to the economy. By a slim margin, the public voted to leave anyway.

The economic warnings were wrong, but only in their timing.

Brexit has damaged the British economy and the costs have steadily accumulated over the past decade, greatly outweighing any benefits, economists say. More visibly, Brexit has unleashed a torrent of political instability: The country will soon get its seventh prime minister since the June 23, 2016 vote, after Keir Starmer announced his resignation on Monday.

The turmoil has led to a sense of regret: In a recent poll, nearly half of Britons said that Brexit was going worse than expected, up sharply from five years ago. Another survey found that just over half would support rejoining the European Union.

It is hard to be precise about the cost of Brexit, given the other hits to the British economy since the referendum, including the Covid-19 pandemic, President Trump’s tariffs and the wars in Ukraine and Iran. Here’s what to know about the economic impact so far, according to several recent reports.

The economy is smaller than it would have been.

In 2016, Britain’s government assumed that a vote to leave would mean an immediate rupture of the country’s trade ties with the 27 other members of the European Union. Instead, there were years of negotiations. Britain didn’t officially leave the bloc until the end of January 2020, and even then there was an 11-month transition period. That obscured the economic effects because trading rules didn’t fundamentally change until 2021, four and a half years after the vote.