HOW ironic that so many of the people who were most against Brexit, who pose as open-minded internationalists, are in fact remarkably blinkered and unable to see beyond our own shores.
Health Secratry Wes Streeting tells us he is feeling liberated.
Keir Starmer insisted that senior Labour party figures keep quiet about Brexit[/caption]
Rachel Reeves is reported to be ready to turn on Reform’s Nigel Farage in her Budget speech and blame him for her tax rises[/caption]
Suddenly, unencumbered by Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s insistence that senior Labour party figures keep quiet about Brexit, he says that finally we can all admit that Brexit is the problem behind Britain’s lacklustre economic performance.
It seems that he may not be acting alone.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves is reported to be ready to turn on Reform’s Nigel Farage in her Budget speech and blame him for her tax rises.
Never mind that she waved through fat pay rises for public sector workers within days of taking office, without any conditions that they improve productivity.
Never mind that her decision to hike employers’ National Insurance contributions in last year’s Budget, which has helped reduce payrolled employment by 115,000 over the past year.
No, they say the reason that the public sector deficit is burgeoning and we are having to suffer even more tax rises is down to Nige and his successful campaign to leave the EU.
It appears that she will back her claim with yet another fantasy piece of economic modelling, which shows that the economy would have been £120billion larger by 2035 if we had stayed in the EU.
But we have already seen how good these economic models are.
In May 2016, a month before the Brexit vote, then Chancellor George Osborne and his Treasury crystal-ball gazers tried to frighten us with a forecast that if we voted for Brexit the economy would shrink by up to six per cent within two years — ie by mid-2018 — and unemployment would rise by up to 800,000.
The British public wisely worked out that this was probably a load of cobblers and voted Brexit anyway.
They were right. In the two years following the Brexit vote the economy carried on growing and unemployment carried on falling.
To believe that Brexit has really harmed the UK economy you have to be ignorant of what is happening across the Channel.
Has the EU soared ahead without us? Hardly.
Since Brexit, the UK’s economy has grown at about the same rate as France and quite a bit stronger than Germany.
France is in the midst of fiscal crisis like Britain. In fact, it is in a far worse state, without a functioning government and with bond investors rapidly losing patience.
Germany, meanwhile, is suffering significant industrial decline.
That said, it is true that the UK economy is in the doldrums.
There are plenty of reasons for that: The highest energy prices in the world, thanks to our Net Zero commitments, for one thing, plus an unproductive public sector.
Has Brexit harmed some businesses through greater friction in trade with the EU? For sure.
But it has also meant we have been able to do trade deals with India and Australia, which we couldn’t have done under the EU. And we have been able to avoid the worst of US President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
Bizarrely, Starmer trumpeted all these as a Labour achievements in his conference speech, without mentioning that it was only Brexit which had made them possible.
Brexit was only ever going to be a blank canvas. Of itself it promised neither economic success or failure.
Health Secratry Wes Streeting tells us he is feeling liberated[/caption]
It simply provided Britain with the opportunity to make its own economic policies and negotiate its own trade deals.
Whether Brexit is a success or not depends on how good those decisions and policies are.
Moreover, the negative effects of Brexit were always going to come upfront, in the early months as importers and exporters found themselves grappling with new rules.
The advantages, on the other hand, were always going to be in the longer term as we had a chance to repeal EU era legislation and formulate a different economy.
So far, the Conservative and Labour governments, which have followed Brexit, have only tickled around at the edges. They have not sought to diverge very far from the EU.
As a result, we have simply become an alternative brand of European social democracy, with low growth to match.
In fact, where we have diverged it has often been in areas to Britain’s disadvantage — we have a more drastic and damaging target for phasing out petrol and diesel cars, for example, by 2030 rather than 2035.
We could, of course, change this by becoming just a little more like the fabled “Singapore on Thames”, deregulating our industry and labour markets to attract overseas investment.
Low growth
But it is not going to happen under the current government.
Starmer is determined to inflict even more burdens on UK industry through his Employment Rights Bill.
He has drawn us back into the EU’s regulatory orbit through his reset deal, which disastrously puts Britain back under the thumb of the European Court of Justice.
Streeting may fantasise that Britain would be sailing off into the sunset were it not held back by the drag anchor of Brexit, but back in the real world the UK economy continues to be damaged by Labour’s economic and fiscal policies.
Life is likely to get even worse for business after November’s Budget.
Brexit is only damaging in the sense it has given government ministers an excuse for their failures, and prevents them seeing why you cannot grow the economy by transferring resources from a productive private sector to an under-productive public one.
That you cannot tax your way to economic growth, and that union-pleasing social policies do serious harm to business.
One day we will have a government that can see all this and is prepared to take full advantage of Brexit in order to escape Europe’s low trajectory of growth.
Sadly, though, as Streeting’s blinkered worldview makes plain, I fear we may have to wait a long time.
