Brexit is making cost of living crisis worse, new study claims

theguardian.com:

Britain’s cost of living crisis is being made worse by Brexit dragging down the country’s growth potential and costing workers hundreds of pounds a year in lost pay, new research claims.

The Resolution Foundation thinktank and academics from the London School of Economics said the average worker in Britain was now on course to suffer more than £470 in lost pay each year by 2030 after rising living costs are taken into account, compared with a remain vote in 2016.

In a report six years on from the referendum, the researchers said Brexit was damaging the competitiveness of UK exports on the world stage just as companies are forced to deal with the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine pushing inflation to historic levels.

“A less open Great Britain is expected to be poorer and less productive,” it said.

Official figures due on Wednesday are expected to show a fresh rise in the inflation rate from 9% in April to 9.1% last month, as surging petrol prices and the rising cost of a weekly shop ramps up the pressure on struggling families. The Bank of England has warned the inflation rate could reach 11% by October.

As the government attempted to face down rail unions on Tuesday amid the most widespread train strikes since the 1980s, ministers were forced to defend inflation-busting increases planned for the state pension while ordering pay restraint for workers in the public sector.

The former Conservative chancellor Ken Clarke said Britain was in the grip of the worst economic crises since at least 1979, telling the BBC that a recession was almost inevitable. “We are, I think, almost certainly going to go into recession in the next couple of years,” he said. “The Bank of England has had to start tackling