It's not somewhat of a stretch, it's a deliberate lie. We get stories like this one every few months here on HN. It's always this kind of thing. They make up an unsupportable counterfactual and then claim a reduction relative to their fantasy world. People point it out and get downvoted by the I'm-an-EU-citizen types who can't accept that there was no impact on the UK from leaving. No negative impact on GDP, no negative impact on trade with the EU, no change to academic funding (UK is back in the Horizon programme, for better or worse, which was supposedly impossible cherry picking).
You can see all such claims are lies by just looking at the relevant graphs and comparing like with like. UK GDP has continued to track that of France. These are neighbors with similar economies, one in the EU and one out.
You could also compare to prior trajectory or look at trade impact.
This study doesn't do any of those things. It makes up a convoluted economic simulation and compares against that, with "uncertainty" being a major component. It's the same technique used to predict a recession immediately following the 2016 vote that would cause 800,000 job losses. No recession happened and employment numbers hit record highs. The prior failure of economic forecasting doesn't stop them from doing it again, with full confidence.
The establishment tell these lies about Brexit for the same reason they doctor video footage of Trump. They staked their credibility on these things being a disaster, and when the sky didn't fall it shook their worldview. Letting go of their prior beliefs is hard because the updates required would affect everything, so some of them decided that maybe if they lie hard and often enough they can live in the fantasy forever.
> there was no impact on the UK from leaving. No negative impact on GDP, no negative impact on trade with the EU, no change to academic funding
I think that is a bit disingenuous
- Good exports are down significantly and exponentially while services exported are up significantly [1]. This has a massive impact on agriculture, fishing as well but it is its own can of worms historically.
- Migration between EU continues to drop and the promise that free movement would continue is not true [2]. There is a stagnation and decline in speciality medical jobs in the UK post Brexit [4] and a significant decrease in investment forecast and outrun [5]. These both have led to less than projected increases UK job numbers.
- The UK is now paying the EU £6.4bn a year for no benefit [3]
It's not disingenuous, the problem is you're not doing the comparisons correctly. Goods exports are down to both EU and non-EU countries. Look at the graph on page 10:
There is no divergence between goods exports between EU and non-EU after the end of the transition period. They continue to move in sync and certainly haven't "fallen exponentially". Therefore, this slight fall isn't due to Brexit. If you look at the graphs in (1) you can see that the big falls are things like textiles, footwear/headgear and "raw animal hides", which haven't been big exports from the UK for over a century!
Imports did diverge immediately after leaving, but got back in sync in around Jan 2023, so any effect was temporary (p11).
Services exports were totally unaffected by leaving. They continued to grow strongly on their prior trends after the hit caused by lockdowns (p13).
So the commentary in (1) is thus very misleading, but it's an academic paper so what do you expect. You can't rely on commentary from academics to understand this issue, they are driven by ideological agendas.
> the promise that free movement would continue is not true
Who do you think promised free movement would continue? Ending it was one of the goals of leaving.
> There is a stagnation and decline in speciality medical jobs in the UK post Brexit
The UK has been giving out visas to medical staff nearly for free for decades, there are tons of non-EU medical workers in the UK. What does this have to do with Brexit?
> The UK is now paying the EU £6.4bn a year for no benefit
I think that's not per year, it's an estimated total remaining intended to cover things like pension payments, and once paid (over a period of many years) it will stop being required. This number is much lower than what the UK paid as a member!
seems to be somewhat of a stretch