Britain after Brexit
Twelve areas. Both columns filled. No total, because no exchange rate exists between sovereignty and GDP.
How this table is built
Every row has a gain column and a cost column. Both are filled, both are the same width, and neither gets more visual weight. A layout that gives one side more space has taken a position before you have read a word — and on this subject readers arrive already suspecting the page of having taken one.
Rows marked Counterfactualdepend on a comparison with a Britain that stayed in the EU. That Britain was never observed. The marker is there because the difference between “lower than it would have been” and “lower than it was” carries most of the confusion in this whole argument.
The scoreboard
Area
Gain
Cost
Sovereignty
Gain
Greater formal UK policy autonomy. Immigration, trade, agriculture, fisheries, subsidy control and the domestic rulebook are decided in the UK.
Cost
No vote over EU rules that still bind UK exporters. Sovereignty over a rulebook you follow anyway is a narrower gain than sovereignty in the abstract.
Trade policy
Gain
An independent trade policy, exercised: new agreements with Australia and New Zealand, and accession to CPTPP.
Cost
Lost automatic participation in EU agreements with around 70 countries, most rolled over rather than improved. New barriers on the UK’s largest trading partner.
Goods trade
CounterfactualGain
Zero tariffs and zero quotas on qualifying goods under the TCA. Freedom to set tariffs on the rest of the world.
Cost
Goods exports to the EU 14% below 2019 in real terms. Customs declarations, rules of origin and SPS checks apply where none did.
Services trade
Gain
Regulatory freedom over the UK’s largest and strongest export sector.
Cost
No automatic single market access and no mutual recognition of qualifications — the thinnest part of the deal covers the strongest part of the economy.
Immigration
Gain
Free movement ended. The UK sets every immigration rule and can change any of them unilaterally.
Cost
Labour shortages in social care, agriculture, hospitality and haulage. Migration changed composition rather than simply falling — and rose sharply before falling back.
EU budget
Gain
No further annual member-state contributions.
Cost
Much smaller than the gross figure implied, because the rebate and returned spending were never sent or came back. Replacement programmes and Horizon participation are funded domestically or by negotiated payment.
Regulation
Gain
Complete legal freedom to diverge from retained EU law, and the machinery to do it.
Cost
Divergence raises costs for firms selling into both markets, so actual divergence has been modest. The freedom is real; the use of it is limited by economics.
Agriculture
Gain
A domestic support system paying for environmental outcomes rather than land area — a policy unavailable inside the CAP.
Cost
Transition disruption and pressure on farm incomes during the switch. Four divergent regimes now operate inside one internal market.
Fisheries
Gain
Independent coastal state status, own management plans, and phased quota increases.
Cost
Quota gains far below what was campaigned for; the EU remains the dominant export market and new export costs fall on perishable goods.
Northern Ireland
Gain
Dual access to both the UK internal market and the EU single market for goods — a position held by no other UK region and no EU region.
Cost
A trade border within the UK, EU goods rules applied without a vote, and two years without a functioning Executive.
Democracy
Gain
More decisions formally returned to Westminster and the devolved administrations, and a referendum result implemented.
Cost
Three years of parliamentary deadlock, and a settlement in Northern Ireland that applies external rules through a consent mechanism rather than a vote.
Economic output
CounterfactualGain
New trade relationships and policy freedoms, with projected effects around 0.1% of GDP each over 15 years.
Cost
The OBR assumes long-run productivity around 4% lower and trade intensity around 15% lower than if the UK had remained — a counterfactual, reviewed twice and unchanged.
Each row links to the page carrying its evidence. Sources for every figure are listed at the foot of those pages and summarised below.
Where each row’s evidence lives
The key distinction
Brexit produced real political and constitutional gains in autonomy. The strongest official economic evidence simultaneously indicates a significant aggregate economic cost relative to remaining in the EU. Both can be true, and the argument that has consumed British politics for a decade largely consists of each side insisting the other’s half is imaginary.
Two things follow, and they cut in opposite directions. The OBR’s 4% productivity estimate is not proof that every individual, sector or region is worse off — it is an aggregate against an unobserved counterfactual, and plenty of people and firms are doing better than they were. Equally, individual Brexit successes do not overturn the aggregate economic evidence: pointing at a signed trade agreement does not answer a productivity estimate two orders of magnitude larger.
Why the columns are not added up. This page does not add the columns up. Converting "decisions are now made in Westminster" into pounds so it can be netted against a productivity estimate would require an exchange rate between sovereignty and GDP that nobody has, and inventing one would be the least honest thing on the page.
The question worth asking instead
The useful question is not "was Brexit good or bad" — that compresses a dozen separate outcomes into one word. It is "which of these rows do you weigh most heavily, and why". Two people can read this table, agree on every fact in it, and reach opposite conclusions. That is what a genuine political disagreement looks like, as distinct from a factual one.
Start at the beginning: how Brexit happened, or read what both campaigns promised.