Nearly a decade after Britain voted to leave the European Union, the Brexit argument still has a remarkable ability to reduce a complicated question to two slogans. For some, any closer alignment with Brussels represents a retreat from sovereignty. For others, Britain should simply reverse the decision and rejoin the EU as though the intervening years had never happened. Neither position tells us very much about the problem Britain actually has in front of it.
The more useful question is considerably less dramatic: how can Britain reduce the economic and administrative friction created by its departure while retaining the political choices that Brexit was intended to deliver?
That is where the debate ought to be heading.
The price of friction
Britain did not leave Europe and suddenly find itself facing tariffs on most goods. The UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement provides tariff-free trade in goods where its rules are met.
But tariff-free does not mean friction-free.
Britain left the Single Market and Customs Union. Businesses trading goods with the EU therefore face customs procedures, rules of origin and other regulatory requirements that did not exist when the UK was part of the EU's internal market. The House of Commons Library notes that barriers to trade are now higher, while also warning that Covid, the war in Ukraine and global supply-chain disruption make it difficult to attribute every change in trade performance to Brexit alone. The numbers nonetheless tell an important story.
In 2025, UK goods exports to the EU were 14% below their 2019 level in real terms. Services performed very differently: exports of UK services to the EU were 28% above their 2019 level in real terms.
That divergence is revealing. A British software company, consultancy or financial-services firm does not necessarily encounter the same physical border as a manufacturer moving components across the Channel. A lorry carrying food, machinery or manufactured goods certainly does.
Britain's post-Brexit trade problem is therefore not uniform. It falls particularly heavily on activities in which paperwork, certification, inspections and rules of origin become part of the cost of doing business.
And the EU remains difficult to replace simply because of geography.
In 2025, the EU accounted for 41% of UK exports of goods and services and around half of UK imports. That is not a relationship Britain can sensibly treat as just another foreign market.
The productivity question
The Office for Budget Responsibility offers perhaps the most important number in this debate.
Its current forecast continues to assume that the post-Brexit UK-EU trading relationship will reduce Britain's long-run productivity by around 4% compared with remaining in the EU. The mechanism is principally the increase in non-tariff barriers and the resulting reduction in trade intensity.
That number needs to be handled carefully.
It is an economic forecast assumption, not a laboratory measurement showing that Brexit has already removed precisely 4% of British productivity. The OBR explicitly acknowledges considerable uncertainty and the difficulty of separating the effects of Brexit from Covid, the war in Ukraine, weak investment and other economic shocks.
But dismissing the estimate would be equally careless.
The economic logic is straightforward. Trade is not merely about selling more goods. It exposes firms to competition, expands markets, encourages specialisation and can increase the diffusion of knowledge and technology. If trading becomes persistently more cumbersome, some of those benefits become harder to capture.
That is the economic case for reducing unnecessary friction. It is not an argument for pretending that Britain can simply return to 2019.
The bureaucracy has a price
There is another figure that needs updating. The often-repeated £7.5 billion annual customs cost comes from an earlier HMRC estimate. It should not be presented as today's measured bill. HMRC subsequently produced a new estimate based on actual 2022 customs declarations and put the administrative burden at approximately £1.8 billion. The National Audit Office notes both the newer estimate and the continued relevance of the older £7.5 billion figure as an earlier assessment.
The distinction matters because good economic journalism should not use the largest available number simply because it makes the argument more dramatic. The underlying point survives: customs procedures impose administrative costs that did not exist in the same form when Britain was inside the Customs Union.
The same is true of border infrastructure. The National Audit Office estimates that government has spent at least £4.7 billion implementing new arrangements and improving management of the post-EU border.
That is not necessarily an argument that the expenditure was unjustified. A sovereign state needs a functioning border. But it does demonstrate that Brexit changed the physical and administrative machinery through which British trade operates.
What about the small business argument?
Here the original version of this column was too confident.
There is evidence that Brexit has made exporting to the EU more difficult for some businesses. The Government's own 2025 Trade Strategy cited an estimate of approximately 16,400 businesses that had stopped exporting to the EU since Brexit.
That is significant. But it is not the same as saying that 40,000 small businesses stopped trading with Europe. I would not publish the larger figure without a source that clearly supports it. There is also an important methodological warning. HMRC advises against directly comparing some pre-2021 and post-2021 customs-business statistics because the underlying data sources changed. Again, the lesson is simple: Brexit has created additional trade frictions, but the statistics should not be turned into political ammunition beyond what they can actually demonstrate.
Britain has looked beyond Europe — but Europe remains Europe
Brexit was also supposed to create new opportunities around the world. It has done so to some extent. Britain has joined the CPTPP, giving it a formal place in an Indo-Pacific trading bloc, and it has negotiated agreements with countries including Australia and New Zealand. But the scale of the economic effects needs to be kept in perspective. The Government's own impact assessment estimated that the UK-Australia agreement could increase long-run UK GDP by about 0.08%, while the New Zealand agreement was estimated at about 0.03%. The CPTPP accession assessment put the central GDP effect at around 0.06%.
These are not worthless gains. Nor should they be mocked. But they illustrate a basic economic reality: new markets do not automatically substitute for Britain's largest nearby market. And the figures cannot simply be added together to produce a single “Brexit offset” number because the underlying modelling uses different baselines and already incorporates existing trading arrangements. That is a much more useful conclusion than claiming that Brexit trade deals have either “saved” or “failed” Britain.
So why not simply rejoin?
This is where economics collides with politics and law.
A future British government could, in principle, seek EU membership. But that would not be a simple administrative reversal of the 2016 referendum. Britain would have to apply under the EU's accession framework and negotiate the terms of membership. The political circumstances would be completely different from those that existed before Brexit. Questions surrounding budget contributions, institutional representation, the euro, Schengen, free movement and other aspects of membership would have to be addressed in the accession process.
There is no sensible basis for assuming that Britain could simply retrieve every special arrangement it once possessed.
Nor is there any basis for assuming that the EU would automatically reject a future British application. Both propositions go beyond what can presently be established. The important point is that rejoining would be a major political and institutional project, not a reset button. That makes it a poor substitute for dealing with today's practical problems. The middle ground is where the work is. This is where the argument becomes much more interesting. Britain and the EU have already begun moving towards a more practical relationship. The question is how far that process can go. The most obvious area is food and agriculture. The UK and EU are negotiating a new sanitary and phytosanitary — SPS — agreement covering plants, animals, food and related products. The Government currently intends the agreement to take effect around mid-2027, although the final arrangements remain subject to negotiations. For farmers, food producers and exporters, this matters far more than another Westminster argument about whether Brexit was right or wrong. Then there is professional mobility.
Britain's services economy is one of its great strengths, and professional services depend upon people being able to work across borders. Mutual recognition arrangements for qualifications, easier short-term business travel and sector-specific agreements could all reduce friction without recreating the entire Single Market. Youth mobility is another area worth watching. The UK and EU have been negotiating a youth experience scheme, while Britain has already agreed to associate with Erasmus+ from 2027. None of this amounts to restoring unrestricted free movement. Nor does it need to.
Brexit is no longer the question it was in 2016
The British argument about Europe has changed because Britain has changed. The referendum question was ultimately about whether the UK should remain in or leave the European Union. That decision has been implemented. Britain is outside the EU institutions, outside the Single Market and Customs Union, and operating under the TCA. The question for the 2020s is different. What relationship with Europe best serves British economic interests while respecting the constitutional and political settlement that now exists? That is a much harder question than “Brexit: good or bad?” It also happens to be the question that matters. Britain does not need to pretend that leaving the EU produced no costs. Nor does it need to pretend that every economic difficulty in Britain was caused by Brexit. The evidence points to something more mundane and, perhaps, more important: friction has increased in Britain's most important nearby trading relationship, while some parts of the British economy — particularly services — have continued to perform strongly. The sensible response is neither nostalgia nor denial. It is negotiation. Reduce unnecessary customs barriers. Improve veterinary and food-trade arrangements. Make professional mobility easier where there is a clear economic case. Expand educational and youth links. Improve regulatory cooperation where alignment genuinely helps British businesses. And continue pursuing global trade opportunities without imagining that distant markets can perfectly replace Britain's nearest major market.
Britain does not have to choose between sovereignty and cooperation.
Sovereignty is, after all, partly the ability to choose where cooperation is in the national interest.
The Brexit debate has spent nearly a decade asking whether Britain should be inside or outside Europe.
Perhaps it is time to ask the more useful question:
Now that Britain is outside, how do we make the relationship work? That is not a retreat from Brexit. It is simply the beginning of dealing with the world that Brexit created.