Boe Chief: Brexit Impact on UK Economy Negative for Foreseeable Future

1. Negative impact for foreseeable future.

2. That he has always been carefully neutral, and is suddenly being forced to give his opinion.

If you look at the actual data, which everyone should, it doesn't support claims like these and never has. There is no visible impact of Brexit on the economic figures. UK GDP growth hasn't departed from the other big countries in western Europe, the lines move in sync as they always did:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-worldbank-constant-us...

You can see COVID, and the 2008 crash, but you can't see Brexit. The same happens if you look more directly at the trade figures, which does show a negative impact for about a month or two just after the new trading rules were implemented, but then immediately goes back to where it was after people figured out the new system. In most graphs you can't even see this transition period unless you zoom in, that's how short it was, and so there's just no impact on economic growth. So it turns out that single market membership had no benefit to the British economy, which is mostly services based and the single market only really tries to standardize trade in goods.

This was not predicted by anyone in the media/economics profession. Academics, British government, central bankers, journalists, IMF, EU ... all of them got this dead wrong. None of them have any credibility left on the matter, yet they never show contrition. Only a handful of Brexit campaigners did correctly predict it and they get given no credit. Paul Krugman made all the usual wrong predictions before the vote, but to his minor credit did admit immediately afterwards that economists were engaged in "motivated reasoning" (i.e. lying).

This is a specific example of a more general problem with the British establishment: they are willing to abuse legacy respect for institutions in order to advance their personal agendas, especially on Europe. Bailey really loves this line about how he has never taken a position. He uses it all the time. That's a good example of the kind of lying civil servants have often engaged in, this pretending to be neutral whilst actually being very biased. In reality he has criticized Brexit in the past, always with the same line about how he never takes a stance whilst simultaneously doing so.

Here he is doing it in May:

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/speech/2025/may/andrew-baile...

And in November 2024, where he "takes no position" but simultaneously "urges ministers to rebuild relations with the EU".

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/nov/14/bank-of-eng...

He wants to be seen as neutral whilst making claims about economics that he must know aren't true. But he's a BoE lifer and like many civil servants struggles to handle cases when reality departs from academic modeling predictions. Model says leaving EU should have a negative economic impact, no such impact is visible, model must therefore be correct. Nobody should listen to him.