I was reading this article on the BBC this morning, which reminded me in part of a morning I spent number-crunching waaaay back in 2016 to try and work out how much is cost me personally for the UK to be a member of the EU.
Turns out I was pretty close. I had £244/year, while the BBC article has €112.85 (£99.60 on todays exchange rate), which will be based on the 2017 average wage of £550/week (or £28,600/year). That's 0.34% of wages...my numbers came out at about 0.36%, which I'll take as an acceptable error of margin (also, I'm in a higher tax-paying band, so I may even be more accurate on my own personal circumstances).
A more interesting question is "how much has Brexit currently cost me?"...still in it's incomplete nature. There was a bit of research bounced around last month that quoted £66 billion. You have to assume that is spread over 3 years (since this absolute cluster-fuck began), so that's £22billion/year. Approximately 2.5 times more than being a member of the EU costs us...on top of our ongoing membership costs of course.
So, since 2016 I've paid ~£750 to be part of the EU, and ~£1,875 to watch various political parties generally fuck shit up. Literally the only positive I can come up with is that they've prolonged the train-crash so much that I was able to get a new mortgage in place to cover my financial arse for the next 5 years.
Comments
Bloddy hell, Pete. I'd call that a success on your maths and so far an expensive failure on the part of the useless fuckwits in Parliament.
Thank you for the resurrection; it was fun reading your sources and the original post!