Anne-Marie Trevelyan

Burnham Says Brexit Failed. Britain’s Trade Figures Tell a Very Different Story Remember the warnings that Brexit would cut Britain off from its largest market? Five years after Britain left the Single Market, we have enough evidence to ask what actually happened. The figures tell a rather different story from the one Brexit's critics would have us believe. The EU remains our largest trading partner. British firms still sell hundreds of billions of pounds of goods and services there each year, and services sales have grown strongly. In 2019, Britain sold £294 billion of goods and services to the EU. In 2025, it sold £384 billion. The EU took 43 per cent of our exports before Brexit. It took 41 per cent in 2025, and its share has stayed between 41 and 44 per cent for a decade. The picture is not all flattering, and it should be described honestly. Adjusted for inflation, goods exports to the EU are 14 per cent below their 2019 level. Brexit added real friction to goods trade, and that shows in the gap between the EU figure and the 8 per cent fall in goods exports to the rest of the world. But part of the weakness reflects the changing shape of Britain itself. Manufacturing has fallen from 17 per cent of economic output in 1990 to about 9 per cent today, roughly half its former share of the economy, while services have grown from 70 per cent to 80 per cent. Britain has spent decades becoming less dependent on manufacturing and more dependent on services. Since 2019 the pandemic, the energy shock and weak global demand for goods have pulled in the same direction. Brexit cannot be the whole explanation. Services tell a very different story. In real terms, British services exports to the EU are 28 per cent higher than in 2019. To the rest of the world, they are up 26 per cent. That matters because services make up roughly four-fifths of our economic output. Britain now exports more services than goods, and the surplus on services, about £54 billion in the last quarter of 2025, almost exactly offsets the £58 billion deficit on goods. Law, finance, accountancy, engineering, advertising and technology are what modern Britain sells best. Yet listen to the Brexit debate and you could be forgiven for thinking the whole economy consists of lorries queuing at Dover. Andy Burnham now wants to reopen that debate. If his answer to Britain's economic problems is much closer alignment with the EU, he must say what he would align, and what Britain would receive in return. Which barriers would fall? Which sectors would gain? Which powers would be constrained? And how would his settlement serve the services economy, where Britain holds a formidable international advantage? None of this proves a Brexit trade boom, and there was none. What the figures do demolish is the caricature that leaving the EU severed Britain from Europe. We left its political institutions. We did not tow the country into the mid-Atlantic. The weakness in goods exports is real and deserves serious policy, but it afflicts trade outside the EU as well as within it, while services have performed spectacularly. So before Burnham trades regulatory freedom for closer alignment, he owes the country the economic case rather than a bare pronouncement that Brexit failed. Show us the deal. Why should a country whose export strength increasingly lies in services bind itself to a regulatory system because goods trade has disappointed? The serious argument about Brexit concerns the extra friction in goods trade, the value of regulatory autonomy, and whether governments have properly used the freedoms we regained. Have that argument. But drop the fiction that Britain stopped trading successfully with Europe. The numbers do not support it. "Before Burnham trades regulatory freedom for closer alignment, he owes the country the economic case rather than a bare pronouncement that Brexit failed."