A decade after Britain voted to leave the EU, the economic cost is crystallising in the story of a single Bristol start-up. Eskimo, launched to sell high-fashion electric radiators across Europe, saw its exports to the European Union collapse from 40% of total sales in 2020 to just 5% by 2025. Its boss, Phil Ward, calls it “the Long Brexit effect”.
The post-Brexit trade deal brokered by Boris Johnson in December 2020 guaranteed zero tariffs, but Ward says red tape and paperwork unrelated to tariffs created delays, costs and, crucially, the expectation of hassle among prospective customers. Eskimo stopped selling directly to European consumers entirely; a planned expansion to Germany floundered. When the company tried to export towel rails to Australia and New Zealand, it discovered that both countries follow international safety standards heavily influenced by the EU’s CE mark – a stark illustration of how one theoretical Brexit benefit – the freedom to diverge from EU rules – has, in practice, created new barriers.
“Ten years on, a Bristol start-up's EU exports collapsed from 40% to 5% as red tape stifled trade.”
The pattern is broader than one firm. The UK Trade Policy Observatory at Sussex University calculated a 26% reduction in the different types of UK exports by 2023. A new study from Aston University Business School, using five years of detailed trade data, concludes a 53.8% loss in the variety of exports to the EU and 31.5% for imports.
Ten years ago today, Britons voted on a simple question – in or out – but that vote has “complicated politics ever since”, writes Kiran Moodley for Channel 4 News, with Keir Starmer “perhaps the latest casualty”. The Vote Leave promises have been weighed against the reality of diminished trade and political upheaval – a reckoning that, for firms like Eskimo, is measured not in slogans but in lost orders.