Brexit has been a great success. Don’t let Labour kill it

Remain supporters told us our trade would fall if we dared to leave the EU. Now they decline to study the figures. Labour tell us removing frictions with the single market would boost growth. But there is little to win there given we already have a complex free trade deal.

The official government figures show a large increase in our service exports in particular and continued expansion of trade worldwide. The UK has shot up to being the second largest global exporter of services after the US following Brexit. We do not hear many cheers for that good news from people who are sure we must have lost export orders.

British exports have leapt by 50% between 2016 and 2023 according to the government statistics. Like most countries our sales abroad took a dip over Covid lockdown but have otherwise done well, outpacing inflation. Services have been especially strong and they continue to be more than half the total.

Whilst we were in the EU our trade with the rest of the world expanded faster than trade with the EU. This has continued after Brexit, with non EU now accounting for 59% of our exports. We are now signing trade deals with non EU countries that include chapters on freer trade in services which were often missing from EU trade deals.

We have persevered with voluminous imports from the EU with little restriction. It means we still have a large trade deficit with the EU as before, where the EU accounts for 52% of our imports. Much of the reason is the UK net zero policies pricing us out of fossil fuel using industry, making us more import dependent on EU energy and EU industrial and petrochemical products. We are running down our oil and gas production in favour of more imported and more CO2 intensive LNG.

At the same time, the UK has risen up the league table of countries attracting foreign investment in new activities and greenfield sites. In 2021 and 2022 the UK was the second most successful place for foreign direct investment after the US, pushing China down to third. The UK has been attracting three times as much as Germany and more than four times as much as France.

Far from Brexit undermining our place in the world, the latest Brand Finance Soft Power survey puts the UK up into second place after the US, ahead of China, Japan, Germany and France. Since Brexit the UK has reclaimed its own seat and vote on the World Trade Organisation and has cut tariffs. It has formed AUKUS with the US and Australia and been a leader in NATO after the US.

It is high time so many commentators and lobby groups dropped the doom about our trade. They rely on out of date forecasts of what might happen to our trade made before the event. They often used a model of trade which assumed more with nearby neighbours and great difficulty in trading long distance. Those always looked wrong as they could not account for the strength of China’s trade with Europe and America.

The UK joining the Trans Pacific Partnership was an important recognition that we trade more outside Europe than within. It links us a bit closer to a faster growing important part of the world. UK services are welcomed worldwide and help us develop deeper links and contacts with those who like our skills. Post-Brexit Britain is higher in world esteem, more influential and trading more than when we were an EU member. We are also saving ourselves a share of the huge debts the EU is building up, and saving a large annual charge when our budgets are stretched with domestic demands.

Getting Brexit done, even imperfectly, worked well.