In a calm, measured voice, the narrator of the Leave campaign's promotional video before the 2016 Brexit referendum made a series of simple, powerful promises. The only problem is, we now know they were just empty words.
Six-and-a-half years after the UK narrowly voted to leave the EU on June 23, 2016, and three years after the country finally left the union of the other 27 European states on January 30, 2020, we've looked back at the promises that were made during the campaign.
With polls showing that the number of people who regret the decision to leave the EU now significantly outnumbers supporters in all 40 Welsh constituencies, we have taken a video posted by campaign group Leave.EU and checked the claims they have made to see if they actually came to pass (spoilers - they didn't).
Many might argue about why these promises didn't prove well founded - pointing to the extraordinary things that have happened since the vote, not least the coronavirus pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis we're living through largely as a result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. But what is indisputable is that the central idea of the Brexit campaign, that leaving the EU would have a decisively positive impact on the UK's finances and public services has proved wrong. It's effect has at best been minimal, and more likely damaging.
Claim 1: "You will benefit from better care provided by the NHS thanks to the reallocation of funds from the EU budget"
Variations of this claim are some of the most notorious made by the Leave side with the “we send the EU £350 million a week – let’s fund our NHS instead” on the side of the bus one of the best known.
Let's look at this "reallocation of funds" . The headline £350m figure was always inflated because what the UK sent to the EU was actually much less than this anyway. The UK Statistics Authority called it a "clear misused of official statistics" as it didn't include the UK's rebate, which brought the figure down to around £250m. Nor did it include the money we got back from the EU through its spending programmes like structural funds. And Full Fact argued that "in any case the impact on the economy from changes to trade after leaving the EU is likely to be far bigger than savings from the UK’s membership fee".
Now, this doesn't mean that health budgets in the UK haven't increased, they have. However, when inflation is in double figures, the population is aging and medical treatment is getting more expensive to deliver, small increases in health spending doesn't mean improvement, it means you are actually going backwards in standards.
The Office for Budget Responsibility believes that leaving the EU will result in 4% lower economic growth than would otherwise have been the case, with consequently lower tax receipts and the Nuffield Trust claims that this has translated proportionately onto the NHS budget meaning we have spent less on the NHS that we could have done if we hadn't left the EU.
Ultimately however, NHS spending is a political choice, if the UK Government wants to spend more on health it can. It either needs to move money from other pots, raise more cash in tax or borrow more. Any financial impact of leaving the EU is a drop in the ocean compared to the overall £200bn or so annual health spending in the UK and the decisions that really affect that number are political ones.
The idea that following Brexit we will have better care has also proven totally untrue, as we will see in the next point...
Claim 2: "Controlled immigration will lead to reduced waiting times for you and your loved ones"
People about what has caused waiting times to rise, and rise massively, but you can't argue that the promise Brexit would cause waiting times to fall has proved massively wide of the mark.
Anyone who is currently waiting for a procedure on the health service anywhere in the UK knows that the waits are astounding. A recent WalesOnline special investigation showed the true scale of the NHS backlog in Wales with thousands of people dying while awaiting a procedure. Many are choosing to travel aboard to access cheap private treatment.
Now of course Covid has played a role in this as the pandemic increased waiting lists. But these lists were already at an all time high before the pandemic and now that we have fully opened up they are remaining stubbornly unmoveable (and is some areas are still increasing). This totally discredits the idea that waiting times would go down because of Brexit.
The "controlled immigration" that will lead to this waiting time reduction has also been wildly off the mark. UK net migration hit 504,000 in the year to June last year which was the highest figure ever recorded, The graph below shows how net migration has increased in the UK driven by non-EU migrants.
But Brexit hasn't just failed to stop high immigration, it has also limited the ability to get in desperately needed doctors and nurses from the EU, The main crisis facing the NHS is a staffing one, and Brexit has made it much harder to recruit skilled healthcare workers that in tern makes it hard to reduce waiting lists - the opposite of the Leave sides promise.
It is even harder to recruit overseas staff because the real terms fall in NHS pay over the last decade. As you can see from the estimates in the graph below, rather than allow us to put more cash into health spending, post Brexit things are going to get worse.
Claim 3: "Excess funding that otherwise sent to Brussels could also be be directed to education meaning better prospects for your children."
Are you starting to see a trend here? Let's put aside the fact that we have already established that the "excess funding" was not only less than touted but also any saving was eradicated by the economic hit that came from leaving the EU.
Taking higher education first, Brexit has decimated both access to funding, staff and student for UK universities. Even the most prestigious institutions are being hit with Cambridge University, which used to receive €483m (£433m) over the seven years of the last European research funding programme, Horizon 2020, has received nothing in the latest round. Oxford Uni, that used to get of half a billion Euros has not received just received just €2m
Students in the UK can no also no longer take part in the Erasmus program which was particularly effective at getting poorer students to study for a year abroad.
But what about compulsory education? Well according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, school spending per pupil in England (of which Wales gets a consequential) fell by 9% in real terms between 2009–10 and 2019–20, the largest cut in over 40 years. There has been an increase in the last three year (which started before we left the EU) that will increase spending per pupil by over 8%, school spending per pupil in 2022–23 will still be 1–2% lower in real terms than in 2009–10.
Ultimately:
- The EU had nothing to do with the long term underfunding of our schools. It is a political decision.
- The wasn't remotely close to enough "excess EU funding" to make up for the cuts to education in the last decade (especially given that money was also apparently going to fix the health service)
- Any financial savings have been offset by the hit to the economy, universities and student programs anyway,
Claim 4: "Your wages will rise thanks to better controlled immigration that will lead to less competition for jobs"
If you really want to debunk this claim you can likely just check you bank balance.
Analysis of official statistics by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) found that real wages (which is your wages compared to the cost of living) fell by an average of £76 a month in 2022 because of mammoth inflation. Key workers in the public sector are now £180 a month worse off in real terms than they were a year ago This is the sharpest fall in real wages since 1977.
Take a look at these ONS charts showing that only in the scientific field have the wages managed to keep pace with inflation (the overall UK chart is the the bottom right):
Now clearly there is a lot at play here and inflation is not simply down to Brexit. However the claim that because immigration will be "better controlled" you there will be higher wages has proven untrue in several way. Firstly, immigration is going up. Secondly, the skills shortage from Brexit has driving inflation that has contributed to wiping out any wage increases people have seen.
Claim 5: "Your weekly food shop will become cheaper. Food prices will no longer be inflated by agricultural polices controlled by the EU"
This one is easy. Leaving the EU has not reduced food prices, it has done the opposite.
Leaving the bloc has added an average of £210 to Britons' food costs over the two years to the end of 2021, according to a study by the LSE's Centre for Economic Performance. This means that Brexit has so far cost UK households more than £5.8bn in higher food bills.
Now it could be argued that everywhere has seen food price increases because of the war in Ukraine. This is true though the LSE data takes account of this when coming to its £210 figure.
However the war in Ukraine and the subsequent increase in food price also shows the weakness that EU agricultural policy was dramatically increasing food prices in the first place. Literally dozens of variables impact food prices, removing EU agricultural policies was never likely to dramatically reduce the price of your supermarket shop.
Claim 6: "You and your family will benefit from a resurgent economy led by new and flourishing small businesses following the removal of burdensome EU regulations and red tape"
This has simply not proven to be the case. Analysis by Bloomberg found that Brexit is costing the UK economy £100 billion a year "with the effects spanning everything from business investment to the ability of companies to hire workers".
Economists Ana Andrade and Dan Hanson say the economy is 4% smaller than it might have been, with business investment lagging significantly and the shortfall in EU workers widening.
“Did the UK commit an act of economic self-harm when it voted to leave the EU in 2016? The evidence so far still suggests it did,” the pair wrote. “The main takeaway is that the rupture from the single market may have impacted the British economy faster than we, or most other forecasters, expected.” Current business investment in the UK is about 9% of GDP which is well below the G7 average of 13%.
The evidence that leaving the EU has actually hurt business and the economy is overwhelming. Research by the Centre for European Reform in December 2022 showed that Britain’s economy was 5.5% smaller than it would have been had it remained inside the European Union.
The final bit of this claim worth looking at is around "flourishing small businesses". The evidence suggests that it is small businesses that have found it hardest to adjust to the increased red tape and complication to trade that leaving the EU has brought. This is because they don't have the resources to open a European branch for instance.
Claim 7: "With less pressure on housing younger generations will also find it easier to get on the housing ladder"
Anyone trying to get their first home knows just how far off the mark this claim was.
According to the ONS, in 2021 (two years after leaving the EU, in Wales full-time employees could typically expect spend around 6.4 times their workplace-based annual earnings on purchasing a home; this is an increase since 2020, when it was 5.8 times.
In England in 2021, they could typically expect to spend around 9.1 times their workplace-based annual earnings on purchasing a home; this is an increase since 2020, when it was 7.9 times their workplace-based annual earnings.
Claim 8: "Politicians, both local and national will become more accountable"
Unless you were convinced of the line between Brexit and political accountability in 2016, it's unlikely your mind will have been changed since. Over the last six-and-a-half years, politicians have voted themselves and the police extraordinary powers to stop strikes, stop protests, and push through legislation without scrutiny. These things aren't all linked to Brexit and it isn't really clear how anyone ever thought it would be.
You might also point to how the UK ranks globally on corruption. Last week the UK slipped down the global Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) to its lowest ever score amid warnings of "slipping standards" that "are being noticed on the world stage".
The UK fell seven places to be ranked 18th in the world after the scandal around PPE procurement and breaches of the ministerial code by Tory cabinet members. Embarrassingly only four other countries saw their year-on-year scores drop by five or more points (Qatar, Myanmar, Azerbaijan and Oman).
The CPI is compiled by Transparency International which uses impartial surveys from experts and business leaders to rank countries by the perceived level of corruption in their public sectors. Chief executive Daniel Bruce said the slump was a "powerful indictment of a recent decline in standards in government" that should "set alarm bells ringing in Downing Street".
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