UK healthy life expectancy falls by two years in past decade

I don’t think Brexit was the only reason for the cost of living crisis, but it is quite hard to ignore as one of the contributing factors. Correlation does not imply causation, of course, and other major things happened around the same period. The pandemic disrupted supply chains, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine drove up energy, fuel, fertiliser and food costs, and inflation rose across much of Europe. But the point still stands that Brexit did *definitively* make the UK more vulnerable to those pressures. UK inflation peaked at 11.1% in October 2022, and food and non alcoholic drink inflation reached 19.1% in March 2023, its fastest rate for over 40 years. Some of that was global. But it’s also difficult to separate this from the fact that we had just left the EU’s single market and customs union, making food imports more expensive and more complicated. LSE research estimated that post Brexit trade barriers added around £250 to household food bills, or nearly £7bn nationally, by March 2023. Then the war in Ukraine happened, and this affected energy prices, fuel prices and food production across Europe. But the UK was dealing with those shocks from a weakened position. We had added trade friction with our nearest and largest trading partner, less access to EU labour, more bureaucracy around imports and exports, and less of the economic protection that comes from frictionless trade. The OBR still assumes that Brexit will reduce UK imports and exports by around 15% in the long run, with a roughly 4% reduction in potential productivity. So yes, other things happened to raise the cost of living across Europe. But the point remains that Britain felt those pressures while also dealing with the self inflicted costs of leaving the EU’s trade framework. Brexit did not single handedly cause the cost of living crisis, but it made food more expensive, added friction to trade, weakened long term growth, and reduced economic resilience. The EU had issues obviously but financially the UK was demonstrably better placed inside it than outside it, and that absolutely had an impact on how hard the cost of living crisis was felt here.