Eh, you're overthinking the vaccine story. It's unsurprising that the UK had better access to vaccines: the UK is one of the world's biggest medical industry centers.
The point about inflation and recession is not that it isn't happening elsewhere: it's just that it's worse in the UK. It's also kind of obvious that putting a tariff on all your exports (leaving the common market) is bad for the economy.
I suspect brexit is more a symptom than a cause. The UK has had horrible economic growth for over a decade now, largely driven by a political system that concentrates power in the hands of not particularly competent people.
I've seen some wild claims circulating that, for example, 80% of the UK's inflation is caused by Brexit but those don't seem at all plausible. No EU member has inflation that low, France's is about the lowest at 6.2% and that's with some fairly substantial and expensive energy price subsidies keeping it down. In fact I don't think there's any country in the developed world with inflation as low as that would imply the UK's should be if not for Brexit.
It's a bit of a misleading stat - the EU's avg. inflation is brought up by the poorer countries. If you compare the UK to France, Germany, Italy (the normal points of comparison, in other words), it's obviously doing fairly badly[0].
It's also not the only stat that looks bad. Foreign direct investment, for instance, fell off a cliff. Exports have basically plateaued, probably because it's actually really difficult to get things in and out of the EU now.
On a more fundamental level, leaving the single market is essentially declaring a trade war on your own economy. It's never going to be a good economic proposition, and the hard brexit we've ended up makes it pretty onerous to do anything over EU/UK borders.
No, it really is only France and a couple of smaller countries which have that comparatively low inflation - Germany was 10.9%, Italy 9.4%. That headline average inflation figure is pretty representative. (Also, it looks like one of the countries bringing up the average was the Netherlands which is definitely not considered one of the poorer countries.)
What people do often point to is the interest rates Germany's government pays to borrow money, which are rather lower than the UK (and lower than the rest of the Eurozone). Basically, the only comparisons that get made are the ones that make the UK look worse.
Inflation is only part of the problem. The economy is not in a great shape overall. And the forecasts are terrible. If you read a bit more on what the BoE says, you’ll see there is more to it than the sound bites you get from politicians. Also, Labour is lucky not to be in power right now, but they will still have to do the thankless, dirty work when they get their majority. Expect some vocal disappointment in the near future.
For context, whilst the BoE forecasts the longest recession ever in the UK, the ECB adjusted its forecasts for 2022 to 4% and 2023 to 2.7%. The British economy really is not behaving like the EU’s.
Of course the forecasts are terrible, they're terrible everywhere. The attempts to fight COVID and especially lockdowns were a disaster. Things were pretty normal up until they started. This has nothing to do with Brexit.
Brexit happened in January 2020. As the first lockdown started, the news were that trade was falling from a cliff, which was part of the impetus to deny anything bad was happening, to avoid shutting down the country at an already difficult time.
Things had started to change beforehand as various actors tried to adapt before the shit hit the fan, but yeah, the effects were not being felt that much, on account of the thing not having actually started yet.
"It's unsurprising that the UK had better access to vaccines:"
Other countries in Europe have pharma industries, most obviously France. And the mRNA vaccines were partly developed by a German company (BioNTech) so, this doesn't work. It was a surprise and the reason the UK got better access much faster because the EU insisted on doing everything as a single bloc, in a heavily centralized way, and the EU institutions are slow.
"The point about inflation and recession is not that it isn't happening elsewhere: it's just that it's worse in the UK."
As pointed out by makomk, this isn't true.
"The UK has had horrible economic growth for over a decade now, largely driven by a political system that concentrates power in the hands of not particularly competent people"
This talking point is also made up. UK growth has been similar to the EU for the last decade - sometimes a bit higher, sometimes a bit lower. See for yourself:
If the UK has had "horrible" growth due to "incompetent people" then the same is true of the European Union as a whole.
There's a real problem with pro-EU misinformation here. Both your talking points about economics are completely false. It's not even like Europe is the only place with inflation, the whole world has it right now thanks to the massive money printing that went into lockdowns and other attempts to mitigate COVID. I thought everyone knew that.
Are we looking at the same graph? Aside from 2012-14, it consistently shows the UK trailing the pack in terms of growth, often by multiple percentage points. Bear in mind, even a single percentage point is quite a big deal: the chinese economy was 'roaring' at an average of 4% growth per year.
I loaded up the csv in visidata, and the graph you sent me shows the UK trails the EU growth average by half a percentage point since 2008. Against a relatively well-performing economy like germany, it trails by 0.94% over the same period.
I do take your general point that the stats do not make such a dramatic picture as one would expect given the recent coverage. The general picture, though, is of a country generally underperforming, even when compared against an underperforming region. This is, in my eyes, totally in keeping with what you would expect from the haphazard policy-flailing that has characterized the UK government in recent years.
We can certainly agree that the UK has underperformed relative to, say, America. I don't think Chinese GDP stats have ever been accurate and developing countries often have high growth anyway, so am not so interested in comparisons to that. But certainly it can be compared to the US and there we see poor relative performance, and indeed the same is true of Europe in general.
Comparing UK growth to the EU average isn't so useful because the EU contains a lot of countries still catching up from decades of Soviet rule. Poland posts 6% GDP growth but that doesn't mean it's a richer country than the USA, obviously. That sort of thing skews the average upwards. That's why I plotted the EU line but also more comparable non-ex-Soviet countries. German GDP was historically boosted by their fixation with subsidizing the rest of the EU with cheap exports, leading to their massive Target2 imbalances. That is nearly a sort of broken windows fallacy style of growth so those figures also have to be taken in context.
But these things aren't anything to do with Brexit, and the UK isn't really so different to comparable western European countries. Their growth is all within narrow bands on that graph, especially from 2017. Indeed the poor growth rates inside the EU were one of the arguments made for why leaving is a good idea! EU policy leads to poor growth, so went the argument and therefore by leaving, the UK can change policies to go faster and catch up with the USA. Of course the mere act of leaving doesn't make that automatic - it's necessary but not sufficient, and it's unclear if the other conditions will ever be satisfied (primarily social attitudes towards capitalism are the problem, imo). Brexit actually taking effect happened simultaneous with the appearance of COVID and then the government was dominated by that, so very little of what's theoretically possible has been done, and now of course the economy is trashed due to lockdowns so who knows when or if the a more US style approach can ever be implemented. But it is at least now theoretically possible.
I have the opposite opinion. I think the UK has been historically hamstrung by its desire to ape the US. The US is a continent-spanning superpower, the dollar is the world's reserve currency, and the US economy is the largest in the world. That means that a lot of the things the US can do, vis-a-vis policy, the UK cannot. Copying a nation that is on basically in a class of its own in every particular is a quixotic project that will never work.
With the EU, the UK had at least one US-level advantage: the unfettered access to a gigantic market. Now, there's regulatory doubling, at the very least, if you want to sell or buy things in that market. I think you'd need some spectacular advantages to outbalance that, going forward - and I have no idea where they are supposed to be coming from. From a business perspective, the most perfect regulatory framework is inferior to a bad regulatory framework that allows you access to a much bigger market.
Access to the EU market was never really a big advantage for the UK because the EU's internal market never did much beyond physical goods, but the UK was/is strongest in services. Unifying trade in services never became a priority for the French/German controlled EU institutions, and was sometimes outright opposed by them, meaning the UK benefited far less than is commonly argued it was more like other countries having great access to the UK market but not vice-versa.
Moreover the EU had and still has a completely imperial attitude towards the UK, as they perceived leaving as impossible so figured they could do whatever they wanted to Britain. See how they were constantly attempting to screw with or outright steal the City financial industry, like by trying to forcibly relocate it to other areas of Europe. That sort of thing was also happening before the referendum even got started. Most people in the UK don't have a good view towards the EU for this sort of reason. Remain had to rely heavily on fear-based arguments in order to shore up the 'natural' level of positive EU support which would otherwise have been far too low (~a third, iirc).
"From a business perspective, the most perfect regulatory framework is inferior to a bad regulatory framework that allows you access to a much bigger market"
Yeah? Tell that to all the people and companies fleeing China after years of arguing that there were no limits to what made sense to do, to get access to the world's largest single market.
I don't think it's very hard for the UK to follow in America's footsteps. Most of the big economic differences are a combination of legal and cultural, not anything fundamental. US culture is to some extent a derivative of British culture after all!
If you can't see fundamental economic differences between the UK and US, I would caution you that, while it may not be visible from your vantage point in Andromeda, Jupiter is indeed larger than a duck, even if they seem more or less much-of-a-muchness when one has proper perspective.
When roughly 50% of the imports and exports of such a piddling island, services included, are directed towards the EU - obviously, from a very great distance, it makes no difference at all if those goods are subject to tariffs, and if the industries producing them get no input into the regulations they will have to adhere to.
If you were observing, say, from Pluto, you would probably note that the little smudge of the EU is a mite bigger than the little smudge of the UK, and 50% of the UK's import/export economy, while no big deal on the cosmic scale, probably matters a bit to the people who live there.
The point about inflation and recession is not that it isn't happening elsewhere: it's just that it's worse in the UK. It's also kind of obvious that putting a tariff on all your exports (leaving the common market) is bad for the economy.
I suspect brexit is more a symptom than a cause. The UK has had horrible economic growth for over a decade now, largely driven by a political system that concentrates power in the hands of not particularly competent people.