Patrice Gouty still remembers it as if it were yesterday. In the early hours of June 24, 2016, when the results came in and he learned that Britons had voted to leave the European Union (EU), he was in Dubai, where he was living at the time. “I cried about it. » The Frenchman loved London, where he had arrived in 1983, on an adventure, before spending decades there climbing all the levels of the hotel and restaurant industry.
Exactly seven years later, back in the British capital, he still storms against the politicians who pushed for Brexit. “They have all deserted, from this jester of the Prime Minister with his red bus [Boris Johnson] to Nigel Farage [qui dirigeait, à l’époque, le parti United Kingdom Independence Party]. »
Charming, raw formwork, with the abrupt and direct manners of a restaurant boss, Mr. Gouty does not have the luxury of deserting, having to constantly face the very many consequences of Brexit. He runs the sixteen Joël Robuchon establishments open around the world, the group created by the French chef who died in 2018. In London, this includes an establishment Le Comptoir Robuchon, a restaurant in the upmarket neighborhoods near Mayfair, where the gastronomic menu with matching wines costs 300 euros per person, and a deli, a sort of bakery-coffee-delicatessen.
Diving into your daily life is a shortcut to the economic reality of Brexit, allowing you to take stock of its thousand and one tangible difficulties. Not that it’s the only worry. As elsewhere in the world, it is facing the shock of energy prices, the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic and food inflation. But Brexit adds an additional layer of complexity: hiring problems, visa headaches, concerns about the supply of fresh produce… With concrete consequences: today, while the deli remains very profitable, Le Comptoir does not more profits.
His experience is reflected at the macroeconomic level. If the experts are divided on the extent of the shock caused by Brexit, difficult to dissociate from the health crisis and the war in Ukraine, they are unanimous: it is negative. In the first quarter of 2023, the British economy remained 0.5% below its pre-pandemic level, which is worse than Germany (-0.1%), France (+ 1.3%), l Italy (+ 2.4%) or the United States (+ 5.3%). For the past year, the gross domestic product per capita in the United Kingdom has not progressed.
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