I can turn my cold, or hot, tap on 50% and everything is fine. Turn the other one on 50% as well, and the sink overflows and there's a right mess.

I don't particularly have an opinion here either way, but it seems obvious to me that e.g. it's harder to rejig an economy that's currently subject to stress from other factors.

Saying "brexit might have worked it it wasn't for the rest of reality" just seems like a long way around of saying "brexit didn't and never would have worked" no?

Sorry if I am missing some deeper meaning here?

Imagine that you take up a gym routine. Ordinarily it would go well. You then break your leg.

If you keep doing squats then you're going to end up in a pretty bad place. You may need to change course.

I'm not saying that I think Brexit was a good or bad idea. I just don't see how it's not intuitively obvious that economic changes aren't just additive. It's a complex system with lots of nonlinearity, mixing, etc.

But when would you like this holiday from global events while rejigging and would it be English breakfast or earl grey with the breakfast?

The reason people don't try to separate out the factors like that is because if you do, the results are that Brexit had no measurable negative impact. It only actually took place for real in Feb 2020 and then there was a transition period for about a year, so the impact was drowned by lockdowns. See for yourself:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...

If you looked at those growth numbers having never heard of Brexit you'd have no clue anything UK specific had happened (virtually indistinguishable from e.g. Spain).

Even if we restrict to only exports, the huge dip occurs at the exact same time it does for every other country in Europe (lockdowns). By the middle of 2022 exports have caught back up to where they'd have been without COVID (extrapolated). There's been a dip again since then, but that's clearly driven by the economy and inflation/energy prices given the timing.

The GFC and lockdowns were major impacts. Leaving the EU doesn't even seem to show up in comparison.

It's worth asking why the economic predictions were so far off here. In hindsight it shouldn't be surprising because EU membership was never that significant to the British economy, despite what was routinely claimed during the campaigns. The UK is a much more heavily services oriented economy than the EU "core" countries, and the EU never really got anywhere with its attempts at a single services market (arguably deliberately). The single market made it easy for Germany/France to sell into the UK, but didn't make it easier for the UK to sell into France/Germany. And of course trade is still happening at significant levels, it's not like leaving the EU meant cross-border trade dropped to zero, it just added some paperwork.

There's also the unfortunate fact that economists were exaggerating deliberately, especially when they claimed that merely voting to leave would have instant and massive negative effects. As Paul Krugman put it:

https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/0...

What we’re hearing overwhelmingly from economists is the claim that it will also have severe short-run adverse impacts. And that claim seems dubious.

Or maybe more to the point, it’s a claim that doesn’t follow in any clear way from standard macroeconomics — but it’s being presented as if it does. And I worry that what we’re seeing is a case of motivated reasoning, which could end up damaging economists’ credibility.

The vote was in 2016. Looking for 2015 to now, it clearly shows the UK having achieved 0% growth (in GDP per capita) once 2015. Literally all the other countries and the EU as a whole out performed us.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...

I think the ability to look at data like this and come to completely different conclusions perfectly sums up the divide between brexiteer (I assume you are, I hope that is ok?) And remoaners like me.

The reason growth is zero in your graph since 2015 is because lockdowns and other pandemic mitigations (+knockon inflation) were so destructive. It went from +4% from a 2015 baseline to -6%, and the "rebound" only recovered half of what had been lost. This is up to 2021, see below.

Growth before and after the Brexit vote was entirely unaffected by it, so it's impossible to claim that the vote itself led to any economic impact. N.B. the Treasury forecast a recession that'd destroy 500,000-800,000 jobs before any legal changes had been made at all, just from the uncertainty created by the vote. Clearly very wrong, therefore they don't really have the ability to do this type of economic forecasting and nor were they aware of this fact. So all claims about Brexit economic impact have to be taken with an enormous pinch of salt because economics, as a profession, doesn't have the claimed level of understanding. Alternatively, as the publicly voiced doubt by Kruger indicates, they know they can't make such predictions but are engaging in "motivated reasoning".

Anyway, that lack of any impact from the vote is why you'd have to look for impact in 2020/2021. But how can anyone separate out the different variables there? You'd have needed the economic situation to be perfectly normal in all other European countries, with Brexit the only thing that changed, to create a comparable situation.

> Literally all the other countries and the EU as a whole out performed us.

That data ends in 2021, when the UK was still very much killing itself with COVID mitigations. A more up to date graph tells a different story:

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/gdp...

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/DEU/united-kingdom/gdp...

In 2022 UK growth rate was 4.1% - higher than the pre-Brexit baseline and much higher than Germany which returned to normal growth rates. So by playing this game I could argue that Brexit has clearly unleashed the Great British Economy. But I wouldn't do that because, again, Brexit is small potatoes next to the chaos unleashed by the public health community. Also at the level of these tiny differences GDP gets affected by things like bank holidays for the King's Coronation and other trivia.

Fundamentally, there's very little difference between the different European economies at this point. They are all vastly outclassed by what's happening in the USA. Arguing over Brexit is a pointless distraction given it apparently has such a tiny impact that it can't even be separated from other factors, and even if you assume otherwise, avoiding it could only have kept the UK in line with other Euro-area economies. But the UK needs to be matching the USA, not France or Germany.