The Brexit benefits you haven’t heard of Something to celebrate for cephalopods and puffins June 18th 2026 Doomerism dominates Britain’s Brexit discourse. But Britain is reaping many an unsung benefit. Imagine you run a Kentish vineyard. Before Brexit, EU rules stopped you using a Bocksbeutel—a pot-bellied bottle reserved for certain German, Greek, Italian and Portuguese wines. Today you are free to sell your wine in whatever shape of bottle you like. And consumers have the option to buy champagne (even better, English sparkling wine) by the pint, Winston Churchill’s preferred portion size, rather than the 700ml mandated by Brussels.
Those who love sweets can also count Brexit as a win. Since 2022 European icing and marshmallows have become noticeably less white. Brussels banned the use of titanium dioxide (a whitening agent) as a food additive for fear it might damage consumers’ DNA. Britain’s regulators were unconvinced by the danger. So British confections remain as white as a Dover cliff. Other winners include cephalopods. EU law recognises the sentience only of vertebrates. Britain’s independent animal-welfare rules extend this to several invertebrates, among them octopuses and lobsters. Then there are puffins. Danish fishermen’s pursuit of sand eels, the seabirds’ favourite food, has been blamed for dwindling puffin numbers. The EU prevents member states from imposing unilateral fishing bans. Free from such strictures, Britain has sided with the puffins over the Danes—outlawing the harvesting of sand eels in British waters. Record numbers of puffins have been reported on Skomer island off the Welsh coast this year. On land, liberalised rules on gene-edited crops (heavily regulated by Brussels) allow farmers to benefit from seeds engineered to withstand Britain’s changing weather. Outside the EU’s common agricultural policy, thanks to tweaked incentives, hedgerows (and the wildlife they support) are flourishing: 1,800km of them have been planted since 2023. When he was Tory minister for “Brexit opportunities” Jacob Rees-Mogg spoke of freeing Britain from EU laws “regulating the power of vacuum cleaners”. In 2017 the EU banned the sale of those with a wattage greater than 900W. One minister told the House of Lords that their return could rid the chamber of mice gorging on uncleaned crumbs. Yet the cap remains in place. Herculean Hoovers are among the many Brexit benefits that are no doubt still to come. ■ For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in Britain, sign up to Blighty, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//britain/2026/06/18/the-brexit-benefits-you-havent-heard- of
Britain is slipping down the defence league table The government cannot avoid hard choices for ever June 18th 2026 British officials, eager to rebuild bridges with Europe, see defence as a ticket to a closer relationship with the bloc in other spheres. After the resignation last week of John Healey, a widely respected defence secretary, over the failure of the government to come up with the money for the armed forces to match its rhetoric, that assumption is fraying. Mr Healey had been locked in a battle with the Treasury over a spending plan to fund the government’s strategic defence review (SDR). In his brutal resignation letter to Sir Keir Starmer he told the prime minister: “You have been unable, and the Treasury has been unwilling, to commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country at this time of rising threats.” The SDR, published a year ago, called for moving at speed to be ready for war.
In February Sir Keir told the Munich Security Conference: “We must build our hard power, because that is the currency of the age…As Europe, we must stand on our own two feet. And that means being bold.” But British boldness has been conspicuously lacking. Wrangling over how much money the armed forces would get saw the defence investment plan (DIP) delayed time and again. Service chiefs warned of a £28bn ($38bn) shortfall in the equipment budget over the next four years. The need to get the DIP out before the NATO summit in Ankara on July 7th brought matters to a head. Mr Healey, by his own account, was presented with an allocation that fell “well short” of what was required. The headline figure of £13.5bn was actually nearer £10bn once some Treasury sleight of hand is taken into account. At a time when many countries in Europe, including Germany and Poland, are rapidly raising their defence budgets, Britain will be spending only 2.68% of GDP on defence by 2030, an increase of just 0.08 percentage points over next year’s figure (see chart). The government’s pledge to get to 3% in the next parliament (provided “economic and fiscal conditions allow”) and to meet the NATO target of 3.5% by 2035 scarcely looks credible. General Sir Nick Carter, a former chief of the defence staff, says: “Even as
our NATO allies make hard choices, we slip ever further down the NATO league table—a table we once led.” Part of the problem is that the one programme regarded as untouchable, known as the defence nuclear enterprise (DNE), is expected to absorb about half of the equipment budget over the next decade. As well as the requirement for four “Dreadnought” ballistic-missile submarines and a new nuclear warhead, the DNE now encompasses the AUKUS pact with America and Australia through which Britain will acquire 12 nuclear attack submarines. Unless the new defence secretary, Dan Jarvis, a former paratrooper, can squeeze more money from the Treasury, programmes to re-equip the army with state-of-the-art armoured vehicles and to replace the navy’s ageing surface fleet with new destroyers and frigates in the 2030s will face cuts and delays. The RAF may have to give up on getting 12 nuclear-capable F-35A fighter jets. Even the high-profile Global Combat Air Programme partnership with Japan and Italy to build a sixth-generation fighter may be (in the jargon) “pushed to the right”. Sir Lawrence Freedman, a leading British strategist, believes a fundamental rethink is needed. This should consider what capabilities are urgently required and what Britain is in a unique position to provide for the defence of Europe. He argues that the immediate priorities should be getting stocks of munitions up to levels able to sustain high-intensity warfare, and investing in drone-making capacity and technology. Working with Ukrainian firms could deliver precision deep-strike weapons quickly and at low cost. Speeding up maintenance and refits is also urgent. Scandalously, about half the navy’s major surface ships and the entire attack-submarine fleet are docked for repairs and upgrades. As for contributions to NATO, Sir Lawrence stresses Britain’s nuclear deterrent and protecting North Atlantic sea lanes and undersea infrastructure, such as cables and pipelines, from Russian subs and sabotage. “The army”, he says, “has a role to play but is unlikely to be leading mechanised breakthroughs in a European war.”
Britain is still keen to show it has lost none of its military derring-do. This week Royal Marines fast-roped from helicopters to seize a Russian “shadow fleet” tanker in the Channel, while Sir Keir promised that Britain will “play our full part” in opening up the Strait of Hormuz. But the DIP, when it finally lands, will do little to convince Britain’s European allies that it will make the hard choices needed to live up to its aspirations as a security partner. ■ For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in Britain, sign up to Blighty, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//britain/2026/06/18/britain-is-slipping-down-the-defence- league-table
What Britain needs to do to grasp its big opportunities in AI For a start, the government needs to think bigger June 18th 2026 BRITAIN’S ECONOMY is far weaker for being outside the EU. Its booming AI sector may be a notable exception. So far this year British technology startups have raised over $14.5bn in venture capital, more than all other major European markets combined. Britain has 33 AI unicorns (startups valued at $1bn-plus), more than France, Germany and the Netherlands put together (though France has the biggest in Mistral, which makes continental Europe’s most advanced AI models). They include Wayve, whose driverless cars will soon be coming to London’s streets through Uber, a ride-hailing app. “It’s definitely a Brexit dividend,” says Keegan McBride of the Tony Blair Institute, a think-tank.
One benefit is that Britain is not beholden to the EU’s stringent AI Act, which critics say holds firms and their customers to burdensome standards. The British government has favoured innovation over regulation. Yet while Britain feels freer, in reality any ambitious AI firm will want to sell to the bloc, so must comply with the act anyway, says Alexandru Voica of Synthesia, one of Britain’s biggest generative-AI firms. In some cases, Brexit has made things “harder not easier”. Mr Voica points to steep visa fees and not being able to hire people fast enough as one reason the firm is now opening offices in mainland Europe. On June 9th the British government launched a global-talent scheme to help reduce such frictions. Great ideas, even when stripped of Brussels’s red tape, still do not always turn into action. “AI growth zones”, designated areas where the government aims to build data centres more rapidly by fast-tracking planning approvals and prioritising grid connections, remain little more than labels. “The UK has a huge strategic advantage [over the EU],” says Pascal Levensohn, a venture capitalist helping to set up an innovation hub in Cambridge. “It hasn’t taken advantage of it.” If the European comparison flatters Britain, then the American one humbles it. This month the British government celebrated £6bn ($8.1bn) pledged for investment in AI infrastructure. That is pocket change compared with the $700bn the four big American hyperscalers will probably spend on capital investment in 2026 alone. In April OpenAI, the American firm behind ChatGPT, announced that it would be pausing Stargate UK, an infrastructure project, in part because industrial energy costs are four times higher than in Texas. The recent order by the Trump administration to prevent any non-American from accessing Anthropic’s latest models (notably Claude Fable 5) shows how access to frontier AI is at the pleasure of the American government. “Europe 2031”, an essay by a group of AI experts imagining how the continent will fare if it doesn’t take the technology more seriously, argues that Brexit’s biggest advantage may be that the British can “broker bilateral AI deals with Washington more easily”. Britain still has immense opportunities in AI. A lot of the fundamental science behind today’s models was done by British boffins (one, Geoffrey