LONDON, February 9. /TASS/. As the 10th anniversary of the UK’s Brexit referendum approaches, the time has come for the country to rebuild ties with the EU, Politico writes.
"The UK needs to have an explicit reckoning with the abysmal failure the Brexit project has been — both for the sake of improving its European policies but, more importantly, for the sake of getting its domestic politics on firm footing," the media outlet points out.
According to Politico, Britain’s departure from the European Union was followed by a dramatic rise in immigration, exceeding 900,000 in 2023. "There’s no indication that extricating the UK from the EU’s regulations has injected the country with any economic dynamism. Since 2020, the British economy has grown more slowly than both the eurozone and the EU as a whole. And with a debt-to-GDP ratio over 100%, its fiscal outlook is just as depressing, if not more so, than its highly indebted European neighbors," the news outlet notes.
"Part of this is because during their time in power after the referendum, the Conservatives wasted precious political bandwidth on tertiary Brexit-related fights," Politico explains, adding that the time "could have been used to undertake deep structural reforms, which would make the UK a more competitive economy."
According to a recent expert report, the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union is costing the country up to 90 bln pounds (over $118 billion) annually in lost tax revenues, while the country’s GDP is between 6% and 8% smaller than it could have been, and the average Briton has seen a hit to GDP per head between ·2,700 and ·3,700 ($3,500-4,800).
Britain held a European Union membership referendum on June 23, 2016, with 51.9% of voters choosing to leave the EU. Following several years of negotiations, the country officially exited the bloc on February 1, 2020.
On January 1, 2021, the UK officially ended its post-Brexit transition period, when European rules continued to apply to the country. In December 2020, the EU and the United Kingdom reached a deal that set the terms for their future cooperation, which particularly included a free trade agreement.