![]() ![]() Oxford Street is a major retail centre in the West End of the capital and is Europes busiest shopping street with around half a million daily visitors to its approximately 300 shops, the majority of which are fashion and high street clothing stores. Things have been difficult for small businesses over the past two years and now especially with the ongoing cost of living crisis and the increasing financial pressures on the cost of goods. Shoppers pass a closed down retail shop space on Oxford Street as it is announced that the cost of living is increasing more sharply than wages and while the inflation rate now stands at it's highest for 40 years at over 11% on 15th November 2022 in London, United Kingdom. “We hear stories every single day from small businesses about the nightmare of forms, transportation, couriers, things getting stuck for weeks at a time… the epic length of the problems is just gobsmacking,” said Michelle Ovens, the founder of Small Business Britain, a campaign group. It eliminated tariffs on most goods but introduced a raft of non-tariff barriers, such as border controls, customs checks, import duties and health inspections on plant and animal products.īefore Brexit, a farmer in Kent could ship a truckload of potatoes to Paris just as easily as they might send it to London. The Brexit deal, known as the Trade and Cooperation Agreement, came into effect on January 1, 2021. Maja Smiejkowska/ReutersĪlthough Britain voted to leave the European Union in June 2016, its exit from the single market and customs union was finalized only on December 24, 2020, when the two sides finally agreed a free trade deal. NHS nurses strike over pay outside St Thomas' Hospital in London on December 20, 2022. “Any hope for economic upside from Brexit is pretty much gone.” “The UK chose Brexit in a referendum, but the government then chose a particularly hard form of Brexit, which maximized the economic cost,” said Michael Saunders, a senior adviser at Oxford Economics and former Bank of England official. While Brexit isn’t the cause of Britain’s cost-of-living crisis, it has made the problem more difficult to solve. At the same time, the government is cutting spending and hiking taxes to fill the hole in its budget. The sense of gloom hanging over the UK economy is captured by striking workers, who are walking out in ever larger numbers over pay and conditions as the worst inflation in decades eats into their wages. Alan Winters, co-director of the Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy at the University of Sussex. “The most plausible reason as to why Britain is doing comparatively worse than comparable countries is Brexit,” according to L. All this has exacerbated Britain’s inflation problem, hurting workers and the business community. ![]() ![]() It’s weighing on imports and exports, sapping investment and contributing to labor shortages. Years of uncertainty over the future trading relationship with the European Union, Britain’s largest trading partner, have damaged business investment, which in the third quarter was 8% below pre-pandemic levels despite a UK-EU trade deal being in place for nearly two years.Īnd the pound has taken a beating, making imports more expensive and stoking inflation while failing to boost exports, even as other parts of the world have enjoyed a post-pandemic trade boom.īrexit has erected trade barriers for UK businesses and foreign companies that used Britain as a European base. In reality, Brexit has hobbled the UK economy, which remains the only member of the G7 - the group of advanced economies that also includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States - with an economy smaller than it was before the pandemic. The Brexit deal would enable UK companies to “do even more business” with the European Union, according to Johnson, and would leave Britain free to strike trade deals around the world while continuing to export seamlessly to the EU market of 450 million consumers. It’s been two years since former Prime Minister Boris Johnson signed his Brexit trade deal and triumphantly declared that Britain would be “prosperous, dynamic and contented” after completing its exit from the European Union. ![]()
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