Debunking Benefit 3: The Multiverse Where Britain Randomly Volunteers to Underwrite the EU
A benefit built entirely out of counterfactual smoke, time slippage and the UK mysteriously becoming fiscally adventurous for the first time in history.
I have always had a deep love of time travel. One of the very first books I ever read when I was a mere cubling was Lightning by Dean Koontz. It’s a time-caper filled to the brim with Nazis, car chases, multiple potential timelines and a “what if” ending that I absolutely did not understand at the time, but which, nonetheless sparked what has become a life-long fascination with alternate realities and “sliding door” moments.
Keeping this concept in the front of our minds, something I did not expect, was that I would one day be writing a critique of a political policy because a benefit was justified by what can only be called unlicensed temporal manipulation to make something seem more real than it is.
Yet here I am, elbow deep in Chapter Three of 75 Brexit Benefits, being asked to believe that our nation’s greatest act of self-harm in the modern era, spared our country from financial responsibilities that we were never liable for, in a universe we never lived in as part of a treaty we weren’t part of.
The claim as quoted from 75 Brexit Benefits reads that:
“By leaving the EU, the UK has avoided being used as a guarantor for ever-growing EU debts for Covid regeneration loans and the purchasing of defence equipment, and having the EU cap on member budget contributions increase by two-thirds up to a maximum of 2% of annual Gross National Income (GNI)1”
Indeed.
The argument that’s been built by Foyle around the above statement is that had we as the UK not shot ourselves in the foot repeatedly Brexited, we would have been stuck paying crippling sums towards the EU’s pandemic recovery fund known as the NextGenerationEU2 (NGEU - and mentioned briefly in Debunk 2).
The “benefit” and chapter surrounding it are both presented almost as though the United Kingdom deftly dodged a meteor that streaked past our kitchen window while we were making toast - the problem being that this meteor-related peril does not exist in our timeline. It was never heading for us. The toast, as it were, was never in danger.
To try and make sense of this, a good place to start will be a fixed point in our timeline - specifically, 31 January 2020, the day we exited the European Union3 in a veritable guff of bluster and charted our way into the wider world shouting “RULE BRITANNIA” at the top of our lungs and mistaking this as being, finally, sovereign.
With this point in time as our starting point, we start creating some issues for Mr Foyle’s “benefits”, the biggest problem of which being that the NGEU that our win hinges on was announced… checks calendar… in May of 2020, a good five months after our triumphant egress from the EU building and at that point we were already standing outside on the pavement clutching our laminated visitors badge.
The NGEU did not affect us because… well, it couldn’t. We were not included in the design nor were we asked to contribute, because, as a rule a treaty designed for EU members is only applicable to EU member states.
Beyond the fact that this hypothetical doesn’t work due to… well, the laws of physics, really, Mr Foyle also doesn’t seem to in any way acknowledge the United Kingdom’s illustrious track record of constantly sidestepping anything that even remotely resembles mutual fiscal responsibility.
When the eurozone was in crisis following the little snafu of banks throwing themselves bodily on fainting sofas and dragging the world’s economy into the gutter, we negotiated opt-outs from bailout mechanisms a few years later4. When the fiscal compact was put in place5 in 2021, we, along with the Czechs, opted out as well6.
Our entire relationship with the European Union’s financial and monetary infrastructure has, as a rule been a case of the EU developing mechanisms for regulation, funding and safety and the UK looking at it with a side-eye and muttering “no, go away, fuck off” under its breath until it was left alone. The idea that, had the UK stayed in the EU, we would have suddenly developed an uncontrollable passion for guaranteeing hundreds of billions of Euros in joint EU debt isn’t just historically unsupported, it borders on somewhere between unlikely and fully hallucinatory.
Yet, somehow, chapter three of Mr Foyle’s book places us in an alternate timeline in which the UK willingly signs up for NGEU, volunteers to underwrite a share of its borrowing and then, to make matters even more dramatic, is saddled with repayments for decades on end.
To get this fantasy to work, Foyle would have to bend time in two directions at the same time - first he would have to pretend that we did not, in fact, exit the EU in 2020. Secondly he would then have to pretend that our country which fought tooth and nail against even being approached by the Eurozone, would suddenly agree to a level of fiscal integration that we have always avoided like the plague.
A small note on the use of counterfactuals: I am not opposed to them and will be using them significantly in the course of this work, but - for a counterfactual to be analytically useful, they need to take into account multiple factors, in this case the institutional constraints, legal reality and historical behaviour of the UK - this one does none of those.
It creates the effect in which the whole chapters argument becomes less a serious economic position, and more a case of some who watched Avengers: Endgame and took the completely wrong policy lessons from it.
The trick that Mr Foyle has deployed here - and yes, it is a trick - is the inflation and hyperbolisation of a counterfactual. He has basically created a whole alternative universe in which the UK behaves in a way which the UK has never behaved, assign a few enormous hypothetical liabilities and then dramatically leaps back into the present day shouting “just see how terribly lucky we are!”
It’s the equivalent of me telling my husband after I forced him out for a stupid-mental-health walk that “aren’t we so lucky that we didn’t stay in on the sofa today, because if we had, a sinkhole might have opened up in the floor and swallowed us whole.” It makes for very interesting imagery, but doesn’t create particularly compelling evidence.
And yes, for anyone asking, I did see the very impressive looking sums that were dished up in this chapter made up of long-division that’s so neat that it’s practically gagging for a gold star, but honestly, there’s no real point in engaging with mathematics from an alternate universe.
Chapter three in 75 Brexit Benefits isn’t really about debt - it’s about trying to create a scary alternate reality to make the present one feel safer in comparison. It’s time travel in the service of misdirection - a flash of multiversal wizardry to distract us from the real world costs of Brexit (billions upon billions) that dwarf the imaginary losses we are told we have narrowly avoided.
If you’ve enjoyed this brief detour through the Brexit Cinematic Universe, please feel free to support the work that keeps me hopping between timelines with only mild confusion and occasional swearing. A paid subscription helps enormously (and is never expected).
And if that doesn’t work, a one-off coffee keeps my flux capacitor running.
If none of that’s doable right now, a share is just as powerful - and considerably less likely to distort the space-time continuum.
Foyle, Gully. 75 Brexit Benefits: Tangible Benefits from the UK Having Left the European Union (pp. 36-38). (Function). Kindle Edition.
NextGenerationEU. (2025). NextGenerationEU: for a stronger, more resilient Europe. [online] Available at: https://next-generation-eu.europa.eu/index_en [Accessed 11 Dec. 2025].
News, B. (2020). Brexit: UK leaves the European Union. [online] BBC News. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-51333314 [Accessed 11 Dec. 2025].
News, B. (2012). Queen’s Speech: Plans to withdraw UK from EU bailouts. [online] BBC News. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-18002961 [Accessed 11 Dec. 2025].
European Central Bank (2015). ECONOMIC AND MONETARY DEVELOPMENTS MAIN ELEMENTS OF THE FISCAL COMPACT. [online] Available at: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/mb201203_focus12.en.pdf.
News, B. (2012). EU summit: UK and Czechs refuse to join fiscal compact. [online] BBC News. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16803157 [Accessed 11 Dec. 2025].
(When) Do you sleep, Bear?
Poor wee Gully. No wonder he uses a nom de plume. Not even truthful about his sales figures.