Brexit isn’t to blame for our current problems; it is still an opportunity
By Larry Elliott:
The UK economy is clearly struggling. Growth has stalled, interest rates are going up and the Treasury is softening up the public for a new dose of austerity measures.
For some, the explanation for these horrors is simple: Britain is paying the price for its decision to leave the European Union. Forget the impact of the most severe pandemic in a century. Forget what Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has done to energy prices. Brexit is the “gorilla in the room”.
Really? Or is this a classic case of confirmation bias, where someone starts with a preconceived view and then finds evidence to back up their argument? As in: I always said Brexit would be a disaster; the economy is in a bad way; Brexit is to blame and here’s the proof.
...All sorts of dire predictions were made for the UK economy at the time of the Brexit vote: house prices would tumble, unemployment would rise by 500,000 and the economy would sink into an immediate recession. None of it happened. The economy has trundled on.
Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, takes a
. He has argued that Britain’s economy was 90% the size of Germany’s before Brexit but only 70% the size of it today.
Prof Jonathan Portes
[someone Chop has quoted favourably from in the past], an economist at King’s College London who is no fan of Brexit, has described this comparison as
because it involves measuring the value of economies at prevailing exchange rates. This is not the normal method economists use to assess the relative performance of countries, because comparisons are heavily influenced by movements in currencies.
The Briefings for Brexit paper (a comprehensive piece of work, worth reading whichever side of the argument you are on) says these counterfactual analyses are flawed. It concludes: “A careful reading of the evidence shows that while there is little evidence yet that Brexit is doing much to help the UK economy, neither is there evidence of much harm.”
That rings true. There has been no Armageddon. The economy is adapting, even if that process has been made more difficult by the pandemic, the war, and Liz Truss’ brief period as prime minister.
If the effects of Brexit have tended to be exaggerated, then the impact of the pandemic and the lockdowns that accompanied it have tended to be downplayed, perhaps because the most fervent anti-Brexiters also wanted longer and more stringent lockdowns.
After six years, the argument for Brexit remains what it always was: an opportunity to look at an under-performing economy in a new light and to do things differently. Whether that opportunity will be seized or squandered remains to be seen, but there is no gorilla in the room, just a mouse with a loud squeak.
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That's up to a politician who has the courage to tell the truth to the people of the UK that Brexit is breaking us economically and it needs to be revisited. (And as dunover notes, it may literally break the UK apart at this rate too.) I'm becoming increasingly unimpressed with Starmer on many issues and I can't even remotely see him having the balls required on Brexit, so it looks like our only hope here is Sunak, but his hands are tied by the loony right fringe of his party who will bring him down at the first hint of a 'BREXIT BETRAYAL'.
