Resolved: The United Kingdom should rejoin the European Union.

Excited to finally debate with you, Savant!

Background

The United Kingdom (UK) became a part of the European Union (EU) in 1973, in part to avoid economic decline. The UK served many important roles for the EU, including providing its member nations more global reach and pushing for free trade. During this time, the UK had specific opt-outs from certain EU requirements, including adoption of the Euro as their currency and maintaining its own border controls.

In 2016, the Brexit referendum vote was held in the UK where a majority (51.9%) of the population opted to leave the EU. The UK fully departed the EU over the course of the next 4 years, negotiating trade deals with the EU post-exit. As a result, the UK became a “third country,” its relationship with the EU now governed by the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA).

Harms

The decision to dissolve this relationship came with a multitude of harms to those in the UK.

The most devastating of these have been economic. Using a combination of micro and macro economic data, a recent study found that leaving the EU cost the UK 6-8% of GDP per capita over the past 5 years. This came in part as a result of a variety of specific impacts, with investments into the UK dropping by 12-18%, employment down 0.5% per year (resulting in a 3-4% reduction in employment growth), and total factor productivity (TFP) growth down by a similar amount. British exports have come down by a fifth, reaching the point that they are behind every single other G7 nation at a fifth of what they were before Brexit. 14% of UK companies gave up selling to the EU due to steep costs and bureaucracy. Customs paperwork alone adds $10 billion dollars a year for exporters costs.

The TCA does not address these harms. Non-tariff measures (NTMs) are huge factors, taking the form of “regulations, standards, technical requirements, licensing requirements, and quotas. They can affect trade in various ways. For example, sanitary and health standards may boost consumer demand, while at the same time increasing the cost of production. This may lead to either an increase or reduction in trade, depending on which effect is stronger.” This has led to huge declines in the variety of products being exported from the UK to the EU, partially explaining the drop-off in exports.

The ground level effects are staggering. A full third of the increased cost of food per household between 2019 and 2023 can be attributed solely to Brexit, adding hundreds of pounds to the cost of groceries for every family. Cost of living for the average household increased by £870 by 2022, and real wages have fallen by an estimated £470. By 2024, the decline in economic growth equated to a cost of £1,000 per household.

Brexit also had a huge impact on migration. Net migration has ballooned in the years after the referendum, but how those numbers break down is where the trouble comes in. Net migration of EU citizens fell in that period, so the vast majority of immigration came from asylum seekers, most of whom entered the country via human traffickers. This is particularly evident in small boat crossings, which increased from 299 to 46,000 between 2018 and 2022.

These impacts are a consequence of Brexit. The UK lost its access to real-time data through EU security databases like SIS II, losing essential capacity for intelligence-led policing and, as a result, making it much more difficult to intercept traffickers at UK borders. Their efforts to shut down legal routes to entry make the illegal backdoor tactics used by traffickers essential for anyone who wants to enter the UK, and the migrants’ reliance on traffickers mean abuses don’t get reported. And since the UK isn’t bound by the EU’s anti-trafficking directive, the UK is effectively creating a pocket of Europe where modern slavery is alive and thriving.

Framework

Any policy direction for the UK should be directed based on what does the greatest good for the most people, with the greatest impacts being those affecting the UK and its citizens directly. As such, my value will be Quality of Life. The emphasis will be on how policy will affect livelihoods within the UK and for those who would become UK citizens.

Model

Simply put, the UK should rejoin the EU. This would not happen overnight, but I’m not going to establish a specific timetable. The two parties would negotiate terms and there would be an agreement for the UK to rejoin under Article 49 of the Treaty of the European Union. While this would mostly just mean a return to form, e.g. meeting the Copenhagen criteria of political stability, economic viability and legal alignment, I acknowledge that doing so would come with concessions from England since they no longer command the veto power they had. Those concessions would be as follows:

1. Joining the Schengen area and, thus, allowing passport-free movement from other EU countries to the UK.
2. Committing to joining the rest of the eurozone in adopting the euro as their primary currency, which would require phasing out the Pound Sterling as their currency.

Advantage 1: Economic Boons

The UK regains full access to the EU market of 27 countries. No more trade barriers, no extra costs, no paperwork. That accounts for 41% of UK exports and 51% of imports. That combined with restoring its foreign investments will yield substantial economic growth for the UK. It would also get access to a number of global trade agreements through the EU.

1. Eliminating NTMs imposed by the TCA, which would correct an estimated loss of 20-42% of export product variety, chiefly affecting small, less diversified firms that can no longer trade with the EU.
2. Barriers to investment will also disappear, restoring access to the estimated 12-18% of total investments not garnered as a result of Brexit.
3. Car companies could bounce back. The TCA eliminated most tariffs, but stipulations on the “rules of origin,” which require a vehicle’s parts to largely originate in the UK or EU in order to qualify for trade without tariffs, are difficult to uphold, particularly with electric cars where batteries often come from China. And that threshold is rising, forcing carmakers to consolidate, reducing production and increasing costs for consumers. Only by rejoining the EU is this alleviated.
4. UK businesses would have seamless access to EU supply chains. Higher costs, widespread among businesses as a result of higher supply chain costs, would quickly be addressed.

Advantage 2: Influence and Security

The UK has lost substantial global and regional influence that it stands to regain through EU membership. This means helping steer EU policy on trade, digital regulation, and climate change. They’re often affected by EU product standards anyway, particularly by General Product Safety Regulations, the CE Mark (health, safety and environmental protection standard) and its disjoints with the UKCA Mark, all resulting in greater costs for UK businesses in terms of time, money and expertise that many small companies do not have. Rejoining the EU would lead to an alignment of these standards and how they’re applied, removing the need for these expensive add-ons. This would also give the UK more heft globally, wielding the weight of the entire EU in trade negotiations so that they don’t have to sacrifice the wellbeing of their farmers and businesses to get trade deals. Just looking at how Brexit has affected the deals the UK has already made with CPTPP, Australia and New Zealand, the UK could recoup as much as £100 billion per year and 4% of their GDP. 

The EU facilitates extensive data-sharing and cooperation among European police and judicial authorities (through Europol and the European Arrest Warrant in particular). The UK’s efforts to regain access to much of their data has been denied and, as long as they aren’t in the EU, access they gain is tenuous, data protection rules are in dispute and real-time access to essential data from the SIS II system is impossible. The TCA also led to instability and reductions in EU-UK criminal justice cooperation. Regaining access means more effective cross-border crime fighting and a greater capacity for intelligence-led policing, including access to wide-ranging data on criminal suspects and fast-tracked extradition. Defense funds would also become more available, as the UK would no longer have to engage in failed negotiations to gain access to hundreds of billions of pounds in funding.

Advantage 3: Travel and Labor Rights

Travel to and from the UK gets a lot easier when it can be done passport free. Among other benefits, it precludes the need to deal with other entry systems that both restrict travel and impose delays. Even new systems that don’t require manually stamping passports require that UK citizens pay to get clearance to travel, and travel into the UK is similarly costly. Considering these effects diminished labor demand within the UK by an average of 15.7%, there is a gap in the labor market that is waiting to be filled. Freeing up travel will increase EU net migration to the UK and make it easier to travel into EU member nations given the mutual right to work, allowing free flow of labor in and out of the country that results in vast talent pools, increasing demand for foreign goods, smoother business operations. This also allows many to commute regularly for work and study, the latter particularly through cooperations like Erasmus. This would also free up tourism from the EU, which will in turn result in more money spent within the country.

The benefits also extend to consumers, who will be able to rely on EU protections. In particular, they will have the ability to seek redress from cross-border transactions through the Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) platform and have the protections of the Consumer Protection Cooperation Regulation to ensure authorities abroad work with local authorities. This will stimulate more trade between the UK and other EU nations.

I look forward to Con's case!

Impressive work from Con!

Framework

Utilitarianism makes sense. Three problems with focusing on the long run aspect:

1. It’s impractical. Any number of policies and external pressures may be applied to the UK over the years, shifting the scale we’re using to weigh harms and benefits, hence why long term economic predictions are represented by probability distributions of outcomes.
2. I reject the idea that present and near-term impacts should be sacrificed for expected future gain. If people are hurting now, that's reason to act.
3. Three, the two are not mutually exclusive. Impacts with both short and long term consequences should have the greatest weight.

I’ll reorganize the debate.

Contention 1: Economics

Trade

The EU was still by far the UK’s largest trading partner and, due to proximity and shared markets, will remain so. Con argues that the UK should pursue other markets. Three problems.

1. The UK is still dependent on the EU, especially for: supply chains, which remain unstable post-Brexit, increasing costs for 70% of UK firms, and as their chief market for trade services.
2. The UK has agreements with CPTPP, Australia, New Zealand, the US and India, all of which are massively outweighed by Brexit and benefit foreign producers at the expense of UK farmers and businesses. The EU accounts for 41% of UK exports and 51% of UK imports now, both of which stand to grow if the UK rejoins. This will remove tariff and NTM barriers, as well as the many bureaucratic costs that prevent 14% of UK companies from trading with the EU, as well as restore customer confidence in cross-border transactions, increasing trade by making disputes with EU-based traders less costly and complex. 
3. The UK can wield far greater leverage in trade talks from inside the EU than from without due to the addition of a much bigger and more diverse economic bloc. They will also regain a lot of leverage within the EU, both as one of their biggest trading partners and via their defense and security initiatives, which are essential to the EU since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Investments

Foreign investments in the UK are down 12-18% post-Brexit. Even big wins in private investment have not significantly reversed this. The UK’s numbers on direct investment are even worse than the EU’s: foreign direct investment (FDI) fell from £22.9 billion to £1.3 billion in the UK between 2022 and 2023.

The UK’s measures introduce more risk and costs. The Matching Adjustment requires insurers to join the system, despite the additional tests required and many preferring fixed cash flows. Both the new compliance burdens and high risk cash flows act as deterrents to investment. Similarly, sub-investment grade assets carry hefty risks, including lower liquidity, concentration, reinvestment and credit risks, and rebalancing constraints, increasing risk of default. That risk has already increased interest costs for real estate investment companies. Both policies differ substantially from both Australia’s and Israel’s, and those countries' successes don’t evince similar outcomes for the UK.

The programs Con cites aren’t big windfalls, either. The Precision Breeding Act for Plants is hampered by a risk averse EU market that treats PBOs the same as GMOs. A similar system to Combined Review is in the works in the EU as well, one with effective controls for the risk of this AI application.

Wage Growth/Inflation

UK wage growth is leveling off and its benefits are mixed at best due to reduced purchasing power and tax adjustments reducing their take-home pay.

Addressing inflation isn’t enough. Prices are stubbornly high already, economic growth remains low, and weak productivity restricts the UK’s capacity to grow, leaving the country vulnerable to future crises.

Influence/Market Access

Acquiring everything the UK needs from outside of the EU would be expensive and slow. Just covering shortfalls in the lettuce market via a deal with the US more than doubled the price. Con’s strategy requires a much bigger set of deals with more diverse food varieties covering more persistent needs from multiple countries. Sourcing food, tariff-free, from within the EU kept prices down.

Con points to the TCA’s review mechanism as a panacea. However, the TCA can only sand down trade frictions. The car market demonstrates the myriad ways the EU suppresses the UK’s market via “rules of origin”-based tariffs and NTM barriers like compliance costs involving complex documentation and standards testing, each of which have to be negotiated down with deals that may never materialize and could be reversed.

Focusing on the UK’s leverage, Con’s link shows that trade in services favors the EU. These services are the backbone of UK exports, yet the UK hasn’t been able to sell them further abroad. The EU currently wields more power in negotiations with the UK because of the imbalance in their relative needs, with the UK amounting to 10.1% of the EU’s imports while 51% of the UK’s imports come from the EU.

Subsidies

Con’s talks up the benefits of subsidies in the UK. Three responses.

1. Subsidies aren’t an absolute good. Markets can and do suffer from their imposition. The UK is borrowing far more than it can afford to advantage certain businesses, skewing markets in favor of certain enterprises. This has already yielded numerous legal challenges. Since they can be handed out and clawed back by governments, they can also yield major consequences as countries shift policy and turn to austerity.
2. While the Jaguar Gigafactory could address the “rules of origin” issue for one company, it doesn’t address the compliance costs at all. Even this £500m subsidy only mitigates a problem that rejoining the EU would solve.
3. Third, the comparisons to South Korea and Taiwan amount to assertions of UK success: they have invested in different industries in different markets. The UK isn’t following their roadmap.

Tax burden

Con talks about VAT. VAT stands for Value Added Tax. It sets the threshold taxable turnover at which businesses owe a consumption tax. This threshold is lower in the EU, and they restrict the number of product categories that can be “zero-rated,” i.e. the company can reclaim the VAT it pays, keeping prices down.

But the EU is restrictive for a reason: more variation in VAT between nations leads to significant tax advantages and consumption shifting. The EU takes measures to address disparities with non-EU nations. Any company in the UK selling to the EU has to contend with that country’s VAT threshold. This is particularly devastating for ecommerce sellers (26,000 UK-based ecommerce sellers, around 10% of the UK sector), who are subjected to the one-stop-shop (OSS) system, requiring them to register for each country’s VAT at substantial cost and pay selling platforms to handle paying other countries’ VAT.

“All of these VAT changes, on top of customs, excise, and other Brexit-related changes, undoubtedly will make EU–UK trade in goods and services, and in particular business-to-consumers trade, more expensive, more complicated, and less attractive for both businesses and consumers.”

And it’s played out negatively for the UK, whose GDP has continued to underperform post-Brexit. Singapore, by contrast, doesn’t have similar pressures.

Contention 2: Travel and Labor

Labor demand/wages

Con drops that labor demand declined by 15.7% because of Brexit. This amounts to 460,000 people by 2024, with the biggest effects in agriculture, hospitality and construction, establishing a gap in the labor market that has resulted in weaker economic growth with 38% of UK businesses not growing and 12% of them shrinking. Food security and food safety are at great risk, with labor shortages leading to increasing fraud and adulteration concerns.

Con drops that entry into the EU would increase talent pools, demand for UK goods, and stream-line business operations. Instead, he doubles down against foreign labor. Raising the Skilled Worker Salary Threshold has worsened labor shortages, with massive shortfalls in skilled labor: 150,000 from the National Health Services (NHS) workforce, 132,000 from hospitality, 61,000 in manufacturing, and 59,000 engineers. Small businesses cannot afford to recruit from abroad, as they incur both the higher wage costs and increased fees. Worse yet, unemployment has continued to rise as the labor market unravels despite these efforts. Young workers have paid the biggest price despite rising wages with more downsizing and reduced hours.

Con’s examples work against him. Switzerland encourages hiring EU migrants, placing its restrictions on non-EU migrants, bringing in over a hundred thousand of new migrants from the EU in 2024 alone. The UK’s migration policies function as a blanket suppressor of labor migration, with a net negative number of EU migrants. Singapore’s levies encourage skilled immigration, as they are reliant on foreign manpower.

Security/Human trafficking

Con argues that human trafficking is non-unique to the EU. Three problems.

1. Con drops the mechanisms the UK and EU use to address human trafficking and criminal activity in collaboration that the TCA has uniquely destabilized, including Europol, the European Arrest Warrant, the SIS II system, and hundreds of billions of pounds in defense funds, all of which have an established track record of boosting UK cross-border crime fighting and intelligence-led policing by providing necessary data on criminal suspects and stream-lining extradition.
2. The magnitudes are starkly different. In the span of 4 years, small boat crossings to the UK increased from 299 per year to 46,000. The number of registered victims of human trafficking is also higher than the entire EU (19,125 vs. 10,793), and the EU has since instituted a crackdown on human trafficking.
3. Signing deals with individual countries like Vietnam (not one of the top 5 nationalities arriving at UK shores) is a band-aid solution to the UK enforcement problem.

Back to you, Con.

Great debate, Con!

1. Framework

Con concedes that “new policies may be passed that could change the calculus” of future actions. Con is also sacrificing those in the present - a known set of harms - for a potential benefit to future generations. 

Voters should prefer impacts with known consequences to potential future benefits, recognize that short term harms matter, and that the effects of those harms can and often do have lasting consequences.

2. How has Brexit affected the UK economy?

Con conceded the negative impacts of Brexit. He also conceded that rejoining the EU erases them. That’s the threshold Con has to overcome with his argument.

6-8% of GDP, a cumulative loss of between £180 and £240 billion

The UK has lost £90 billion a year and exports are down £27 billion

These are both short and long term harms that compound over time. They represent net losses, and thus factor in changes resulting from existing policy like the TCA. They’re already yielding long term consequences: with underinvestment of almost £2 trillion in the UK’s infrastructure and a shortfall of capital to scale-up the UK economy and provide critical infrastructure, the UK faces massive increases in project costs and delays, losses it will continue to feel for decades.

3. Where could the UK recoup its economic losses?

1. Countries further abroad

Grant Con the growth projections for the CPTPP and Vietnam.

Con doesn’t have any projections on how much the UK stands to gain from these agreements. His argument is an appeal to possibility: since their economies are growing rapidly, the UK’s economy will also grow rapidly. Con cites Vietnam as an economy that bounced back, but the UK has some big differences, including: a diminishing manufacturing capacity, reliance on a strong and consistent regional supply chain from the EU, and its reliance on trade services it can’t sell abroad. All have remained intractable.

Agreements the UK has gotten with CPTPP, Australia, New Zealand, the US and India are dwarfed by the costs of Brexit and came at the expense of its farmers and businesses. The UK’s economic position in the world is declining, projected to fall from 3.3% to 2.7% of world GDP by 2050, so what incentive do countries with rapidly growing economies like those in CPTPP have to give the UK a more favorable deal? The UK’s leverage will only wane at this rate, resulting in weaker deals.

The UK has its greatest leverage now while it remains the world’s 6th largest economy, but rejoining the EU would add a much larger slice of the world GDP (14.7%). Wielding that as well as a diverse economic bloc representing a broad suite of goods and services grants the UK far more weight in negotiations, and while those deals may come in slower, they will be more substantial and beneficial to the UK than deals it can get now. The UK also has leverage over the EU both economically and in security, which it can wield to improve and streamline EU operations if it rejoins.

1. Investments and subsidies

Even with all of Con’s numbers, it remains unclear what effect all these policy changes will have on the UK’s GDP or how much it would reverse investment losses.

Con’s arguments imply that the UK will back further away from the EU, reducing UK-EU trade. The EU currently accounts for 41% of UK exports and 51% of imports, so Con would compound the losses caused by Brexit with no other market that could or would occupy that essential niche. If the UK remains reliant on the EU as a market, ecommerce sellers will continue to suffer the consequences of the OSS system, car companies will continue to struggle with “rules of origin” laws and NTMs, forcing investment into battery-manufacturing gigafactories with negative results (see: Britishvolt), and EU roadblocks like customs, local VAT and excise taxes will continue to drain them.

Regarding supply chains, Con drops the importance of proximity, which explains the spike in the cost of imports post-Brexit and why 70% of UK firms are still paying more for imports. Buying abroad doesn’t solve the distance and shipping costs. This would be especially devastating for food imports, which could drastically increase in cost without stable deals with the EU.

On investment, Con points to some private investment successes, but that 12-18% loss as a result of Brexit looms larger. Con claims this was “short-term friction” and cites an article claiming the UK will move past this… in 2023. Note that the article I cited came out in 2025 and it’s still a problem. Con keeps beating the drum on high risk investments, dropping my sources that show that these risks yield lower liquidity, reinvestment and credit risks, and increase risk of default. Con misses where my source on real estate investment companies explicitly says that “Almost all [their investments] are currently sub-investment grade” and links it directly to declines in interest rate coverage ratios. So while it might help some markets, it’s hurting others. Regarding Solvency UK, it’s unclear what, if any, elements of the EU’s Solvency II prevent the UK from accessing long-term capital the UK holds (Con’s links do not clarify), but if it is a problem, the UK could still access these funds and invest them before rejoining the EU.

On subsidies, the legal challenges occur because the Subsidy Control Act is not effectively regulating who gets them and the result is distortion via selective advantage in markets - in this case, airlines, property developers and lottery companies. For all Con champions accountability, that accountability comes slow for the few that have sought it. Con drops that markets can be harmed by subsidies, retracting them destroys industries, and the UK’s borrowing to pay them has put the country in debt. De-risking innovation doesn’t address any of this, and I wouldn’t trust the IMF’s views on sustainable investments.

On plant breeding, Con concedes the lack of a market for resulting plants in the EU, asserting that other markets will open up just because the UK’s regulatory framework is changing. Its benefits for UK food security are counteracted by persistent labor shortages.

Wage growth continues to be tempered by reduced purchasing power and tax adjustments while leading to more downsizing and reduced hours for UK workers.

Even if you grant Con some solvency here, recall that many of these investments and subsidies can still occur under the EU system, albeit with more limits.

1. Solvency through similarity

Con’s comparisons to other countries assume contextual differences don’t affect their solvency. To do so, he assumes: similar markets, investment priorities, capital, and economic pressures, despite vast differences in time (years and decades) space (different regions with distinct supply chains). At best, these suggest a shared path to success, albeit one with benefits that we cannot easily quantify for the UK.

None of these countries unilaterally left an economic bloc only to remain tethered to it. That has raised the cost of doing business with their closest economic partners, placing the EU in a position to challenge or counter-balance changes to UK policy. None of them had the alternative of just returning to that bloc and restoring the strength of their markets, either.

4. How has Brexit impacted labor?

Once again, the numbers are stark.

Employment and total factor productivity are down 3-4%

Con claims that Global Talent and HPI visas will solve this, despite both having been in place for years already. Those high wages are reducing the capacity of businesses to hire. Entry and travel costs into the UK are up, so both companies and individuals are paying more. Labor demand has dropped by 15.7%. There are massive worker gaps, hundreds of thousands strong, in the labor market. What are the impacts?

38% of UK businesses are not growing and 12% of them shrinking

Food systems: food insecurity and food safety risks, increasing costs of goods and health care

Nursing: short-staffing in hospitals and care homes leading to panic attacks, exhaustion, and burnout

Manufacturing: production cuts, delivery delays and wasted goods

Engineering: infrastructure days, innovation bottlenecks and increased operational costs

Con points to Switzerland and Singapore’s measures, but doesn’t acknowledge the key ways in which they’re different. In Switzerland, those job registration requirements affect only 6.5% of the workforce and they have continued to reduce most barriers to entry, resulting in over 100,000 new migrant workers from the EU in 2024 compared with the net negative migration to the UK. In Singapore, those levies are far lower for high skilled labor. Con drops their continued need for foreign manpower and given the sustained growth in foreign labor, those work permits aren’t slowing it down.

5. How can the UK address these labor deficits?

Con provides no evidence that existing or planned UK policy is filling these vacancies. Instead, he has doubled down on policies that reduced skilled labor immigration.

The UK’s efforts to tamp down immigration have dramatically increased human trafficking. Con concedes that shutting down legal routes to entry increased demand for traffickers to enter the UK. He drops that the TCA uniquely destabilized the UK’s response by surrendering access to Europol, the EAW, the SIS II system, and massive defense funds. Instead, Con just claims that the EU has failed to detect victims (non-unique: the UK has massively underestimated its numbers), implying that adding tools that have engendered UK successes in intelligence-led policing would either impede or not help the UK address human trafficking. Make that make sense.

Con claims that the UK can just sign more deals to solve for immigration. He’s effectively playing a game of migration whack-a-mole where crises must be resolved by agreements that may never materialize (no deals with any of the top 5 source countries) and will always be playing catch-up.