Five years after Brexit – Britain’s exit from the EU – a majority of British voters are dissatisfied with the choice of road, opinion polls show.
However, for Swedish exporters, doped by a weakened crown, Brexit looks like a prize draw.
The United Kingdom is five years after Brexit Sweden’s fourth largest trading partner, both in terms of goods and services, according to a recent report from the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce.
This is despite a massive increase in bureaucracy as Britain is no longer part of the customs union and the EU’s internal market.
Weak crown lifts the trade
Growth in trade between Sweden and the UK has raised an average of just over 13 percent after Brexit, which can be compared with an average of 5 percent before the British EU exit, according to the Chamber of Commerce’s analysis.
The barriers to trade brought by Brexit have probably hampered the trade, according to Carl Bergkvist, chief economist at the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce. But the weak development for the krona – which has lost about 10 percent against the pound over the five years – has made it cheaper for British companies to buy goods and services from Sweden.
From a British perspective, trade with the outside world is not the same success story – on the contrary. The value of British exports has since Brexit increased by 0.3 percent per year, which can be compared with the OECD average of plus 4.2 percent during the same period, reports the Financial Times magazine with reference to the think tank “UK in a change Europe”.
The British Opinon has also swung. Measurements from the National Center for Social Research show that 58 percent of British voters today regard Brexit as a mistake.
According to British political scientists, this is related to the fact that younger voters – who were not allowed to vote when the Brexit issue was decided – have a much more positive view of the EU than older voters.
Small businesses losers
British small businesses are identified as a loser on Brexit by the Financial Times. In a review of the Brexiteffeks, they also point to major changes in staffing in British healthcare and which foreign students are plugging in British universities.
The number of students from EU countries plugging in the UK has collapsed by 50 percent after Brexit. EU students have been replaced by students from Asia and Africa.
The same trend – perhaps even clearer – can be seen in public British healthcare. The number of doctors born in countries such as India, Pakistan, Egypt, Nigeria and the Philippines had in 2023 eightfold compared to 2016, according to the British regulatory authority General Medical Council (GMC).