There's quite a bit of slippy argumentation in this article.<p>The anecdote about the filming of Barbie is misleading. The UK has been strongly competing with Hollywood for filming for years, as it's one of the few places in the world that has the local high-end moviemaking infrastructure to compete with Hollywood, but without the militant unions. This isn't a new phenomenon and the unions factor is mentioned near the end of the article, even though movies are presented as a new trend at the start.<p>Then the article goes off on a big Brexit-related hit job. They say <i>"Sterling has lost 15% of its value against the dollar since the 2016 Brexit referendum"</i>, <i>"For the stagnating post-Brexit UK economy..."</i> and <i>"The pound’s sharp drop in value"</i>. For the real currency story see my other comment but briefly the currency had been in decline since 2014, but reached its pre-referendum value about 18 months after the vote when it became clear the promised 800,000 job losses and "emergency taxes" weren't going to happen. The actual leaving of the EU had little apparent effect either, with GBP/USD being the same now as in 2020.<p>That makes sense because the UK economy is services-heavy and the EU single market only did anything for goods trading, not services. That's why the UK has always exported more services to the USA than the EU and why leaving didn't actually impact UK/EU trade despite what the article claims. There's a Parliamentary report that shows a graph of long term UK/EU trade (in slow decline due to the falling size of the EU relative to rest of the world) and you can't actually see Brexit on it at all, because the effect was too temporary to show up.<p>The WSJ also tries to blame inflation on Brexit but again, a quick check of the real charts shows that this isn't the case:<p><a href="https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/inflation-cpi" rel="nofollow">https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/inflation-cpi</a><p>Inflation wandered around between the 0%-2% band that the central bank was targeting up until the economically disastrous lockdowns and associated money printing to pay for things like furlough and eat-out-to-help-out (which the US wisely did not copy). The GFC had a much bigger impact on inflation than Brexit.