Billionaire businessman Guy Hands has called Brexit a complete disaster and a bunch of lies that have harmed large parts of the economy.
On the third anniversary of the UK leaving the EU, Hands, founder, chair and chief investment officer at private equity firm Terra Firma, said it was a complete disaster. It has been a lose-lose situation for us and Europe. Europe has lost more in financial services, but we lost as well. The reality of the EU was that it was just a bunch of lies.
The only way that Boris Johnson is going to work was if there was a complete deregulation of the UK and we moved to a sort of Liz Truss utopia of a Singapore state and that was just never going to happen, Hands, a former donor to the Conservative Party, told BBC Radio 4 s Today programme.
The British population was never going to accept a state in which the NHS would be demolished, where free education would be severely limited and where employment regulation would be thrown apart. It was just a total lie. He said that the biggest issue about it, and you can take the Brexit bus as a good example, is the lies that Boris Johnson and the Conservative party told about the NHS. The country and the NHS were thrown under the bus when they did it. On average polls, 57% of people in the UK would vote to join the EU, according to John Curtice.
Eddie Truell, a City veteran and strong Brexit supporter who founded Duke Street Capital, and is co-founder of the Pension Insurance Corporation, expressed disappointment at the speed of deregulation in the UK's financial services sector.
He said that he hoped for faster deregulation than was the case, and also spoke on Today. After the big bang in the 1980s, we saw an enormous positive explosion in the city. I was hoping that we would see the same. He said that Britain had the largest trade surplus in financial services in the world, of $87 bn, up 10% from 2020. The trade surplus in financial services in the UK is important for the UK. He said that all the rest of the economy benefits from financial services.
Financial services found it easier to trade with other countries outside of the EU because of leaving the EU. Truell said it was a lose-lose. The EU probably lost more from failing to reach proper agreements on financial services, but the UK didn't really benefit either. The City exported its products and services to other parts of the world, including the US, Singapore, Switzerland, etc.