Brexit Has Made the UK More European, Says Goldman Sachs

Brexit has made the United Kingdom "more European," Goldman Sachs argues in research reported by the Financial Times on June 26 — a resemblance measured, per the FT's framing, in lacklustre GDP growth and weak inward investment rather than cafe culture or egalitarian social values.

The Goldman note's argument, as reported by the FT, is one of convergence: since leaving the European Union, the UK's economic performance has come to resemble that of the continental economies it departed — sluggish output growth and a diminished pull on foreign investment.

The characterisation is Goldman's analysis as reported by the FT, not an official statistic. The feed carried no specific growth or investment figures from the note, so the magnitude of the shortfalls Goldman describes, the comparison periods used and the note's methodology remain unverified here.

Background

The UK voted to leave the EU in June 2016 and formally departed on January 31, 2020, with the Trade and Cooperation Agreement governing relations from the start of 2021. The economic consequences have been contested ever since: sterling fell sharply after the referendum, and economists have tracked effects on trade intensity, business investment and labour supply. The Office for Budget Responsibility has long assumed a roughly 4 per cent long-run reduction in UK productivity relative to remaining in the bloc — an estimate disputed by Brexit's supporters.

The framing carries a barb. For decades, a strand of British economic self-image cast the UK as a flexible, lightly regulated outlier set against a slower-growing continent; an argument that Brexit delivered convergence with European growth rates inverts that story. Goldman Sachs's European economics research is widely read in markets, though bank research reflects the house's analytical view rather than any official finding.

What comes next

The test of the argument lies in the note's own numbers — comparison windows, investment measures and counterfactuals — none of which were carried in the feed. Watch for the full note's circulation and for responses from other forecasters; whether the analysis feeds into the wider policy debate on UK-EU relations would depend on take-up that cannot be assumed from a single report.