Pro-Europe think-tank says Brexit has cost Britain £26 BILLION

A pro-Europe think-tank has said Britain suffered a £26billion blow to the economy annually after the nation voted Brexit. The report by the Centre for European Reform said this was the equivalent to £500million a week - even though the nation is yet to unshackle itself from the bloc.Experts said the UK economy was now 2.5 percent smaller today than if the nation had voted to remain in the bloc.

It read: “But since the start of 2017, Britain’s economy has grown by an average of just 0.3 percent each quarter - despite an acceleration in the pace of global growth. Advanced economies are currently growing twice as fast as the UK (0.6 percent) on average.

“In June 2018, we published our first estimate of the cost of the decision to leave the EU, based upon a modelling exercise, and found that the British economy was 2.1 percent smaller by the end of the first quarter of 2018. According to our revised model, which uses a broader set of data,

“The British economy was 2.5 percent smaller in the second quarter of 2018 than it would have been if the referendum had gone the other way: the cost is growing.

The report said the “the culprit is the vote for Brexit,” adding: “One way to sanity-check our estimate is to compare the UK’s growth to that of other comparable countries since the referendum.

“The UK has grown by 3.1 percent over that period. Compare that to the average of the 22 most advanced economies. 5.2 percent, which amounts to a 2.1 percent gap, not far away from our estimate of the cost of Brexit.”