President Trump claims Ukraine ‘started’ the war with Russia
Today, 31 January 2025, is the fifth anniversary of the day the UK formally left the European Union.
And to mark it, we’ve been taking a quick look back at some of the claims we’ve fact checked about Brexit, both in that period and before, since the EU referendum nearly nine years ago.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, for example, we saw government ministers claim the UK’s vaccine rollout was quicker due to Brexit.
That wasn’t correct in terms of regulatory approval at least—under EU law countries are allowed to act independently to approve vaccines in emergency situations. Yet we’ve heard versions of this claim repeated often in the years since.
Indeed, as recently as yesterday, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage MP appeared to say something similar when he told the Daily Express, while speaking about what he thought Brexit has achieved: “We got a vaccine out more quickly than any other country. Some people think that’s great, some don’t, but we were able to do it.”
There’s been confusion over the value of trade deals made since Brexit, as well as which deals were rolled over from our time in the EU (though a word of caution, some of the specifics in those fact checks are now likely to be out of date, particularly as new free trade agreements have since come into force).
A common issue we’ve seen with some of the claims we’ve checked about the impact of Brexit on the UK’s economy is that they are based on counterfactual estimates, without always making that clear.So for example a 2023 claim that tax revenue had fallen by £40 billion a year was based on a comparison between how the UK had performed since the EU referendum and how it might have been expected to perform had the UK not voted to leave the EU—it wasn’t a figure for how the UK’s tax revenue had actually changed since 2016. This important distinction hasn’t always been made clear when the figure has been cited.
We’ve also repeatedly checked claims about the European Court of Human Rights in the years since Brexit. Contrary to some claims we’ve seen, the court is part of the international organisation the Council of Europe, and is not an EU institution. The European Convention on Human Rights, the implementation of which is overseen by the court, protects the human rights of members of the Council of Europe and the UK’s membership of it is not connected to the EU or to Brexit.
You can read more of the fact checks we’ve written about Brexit here.
