City of London mayor brands Brexit ‘a disaster’
The City of London, the historical financial district within the British capital, has lost around 40,000 jobs since the country left the European Union in 2016, the local mayor has told Reuters. Michael Mainelli described Brexit as a “disaster.”
British voters opted to leave the EU by a narrow margin of 52% to 48% back in 2016, and the divorce was finalized in January 2020.
In February, Bloomberg – citing economists from Goldman Sachs – estimated that the departure had cost the UK about 5% of real GDP compared to its economic peers. According to the article, Brexit’s legacy has been a slow economy and a soaring cost of living, due to reduced trade and the loss of business investment.
In an article on Wednesday, Reuters quoted Mainelli as saying: “We had 525,000 workers in 2016. My estimate is that we lost just short of 40,000.”
The mayor of the City of London – which is a geographically small part of Greater London but a leading global financial hub – added that rivals Dublin, Milan, Paris and Amsterdam have gained the most from the exodus of financial institutions from the UK.
According to Michael Mainelli, “the City voted 70-30 to remain [in the 2016 referendum]. We did not want it.”
The official said he has recently intensified efforts to “engage more” with EU member states, making nine visits to those countries this year alone. Among other things, the City is currently working on a bilateral trade deal with Germany, Mainelli added.
The ceremonial head of the global financial hub noted that the City has increasingly been branching out into such fields as data analysis and insurance, enabling it to make up for jobs lost due to Brexit.
Back in March 2022, the consultancy company EY estimated that more than 7,000 finance jobs had been relocated from the City of London to the EU since 2016.
Britain’s departure from the bloc appears to have adversely affected not only the City, but the country’s economy at large.
In July, the newly appointed Labour chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves, claimed that the UK was in its worst shape economically since the Second World War.
According to a YouGov poll published the following month, as many as 59% of respondents said they would vote for a return to the EU in a hypothetical new referendum.
However, following the Labour Party’s landslide victory in the general election in early July, the new prime minister, Keir Starmer, made it clear that his government had no intention of taking the UK back into the EU, its single market, or the customs union.
