Friday, January 31, 2025
Lies, incompetence and deceit
Back in 2016, as the Brexit referendum campaign got underway, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove published a joimt article in the Sun in which promised that after Brexit 'The NHS will be stronger, class sizes will be smaller, taxes lower ... wages will be higher, fuel bills will be lower.'
In separate article in the Telegraph on 26 June 2016, Boris Johnson claimed: 'British people will still be able to go and work in the EU, to live, to travel, to study, to buy homes and settle down. There will continue to be free trade and access to the EU single market.'
Today is the fifth anninversary of us leaving the EU and judging it on what was promised by the main protaganists above it has been a totla and utter failure. The Independent takes a more measured view, though their conclusion is not much different from mine.
The paper says that Brexiteers promised a new age of British sovereignty, a crackdown on migration and the much-derided “£350m a week” that could be diverted from the EU back into the NHS, but half a decade on, and by many metrics, Brexit appears to have missed the mark:
Since Britain left the EU, migration has been at the highest levels since records began; while key sectors face staffing shortages.
And almost six in 10 Britons (59 per cent) think that Brexit has gone fairly or very badly, with just 12 per cent believing it has gone well, according to a YouGov poll in October.
UK trade expert David Henig told The Independent: ”The UK now has significant trade barriers to its neighbours. It’s something we will have to live with. We will not be allowed to forget it; there will always be issues.”
Brexit-optimist economist Julian Jessop, a fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs, admitted that Brexit has made it harder or “impossible” for small businesses to adjust.
“The UK’s departure from the EU has undoubtedly had some negative effects on the economy, notably through reductions in trade, shortfalls in business investment, and disruption to labour markets,” he told The Independent.
However, he added that the “overall drag on exports and imports has been much smaller than feared”.
Former deputy prime minister Lord Heseltine said that nearly five years on, Brexit “has been a historic disaster”.
“It has destroyed Britain’s leadership in Europe just at a time when there was a critical need (for it), it has closed off opportunities for the younger generation to share in the benefits of Europe and it has denied Britain’s industrial base access to the research and policies of Europe. Our economy is much worse because of it and there is no reputable authority that denies this.
“I think the British people know that they were deceived and the deceit is measured in reduced living standards,” he added.
The numbers speak for themselves:
The latest Treasury estimates show that the cost of Britain’s settlement with the EU stands at approximately £30.2bn in total. This is separate from any estimates of lost money from separating from the EU.
As of the start of 2024, the bulk of this settlement (£23.8bn) had already been paid. Approximately £6.4bn still remained to be paid out to the EU in 2024 and onwards.
The government has not yet published the figure to the end of 2024.
However, this cost is hardly comparable to the forecasted losses from exiting the EU in terms of GDP and trade.
For those who quote the pandemic and the energy crisis as the source of our economic woes it is worth noting that the UK’s GDP took the worst hit compared to all other G7 nations at the time; a 10.3 per cent drop in 2020:
In 2023, Bloomberg Economics estimated that the UK is suffering £100bn a year in lost output from leaving the EU.
The economists Ana Andrade and Dan Hanson wrote that the UK committed “an act of economic self-harm when it voted to leave the EU”, with GDP four per cent smaller than it would have been without Brexit.
In its latest forecasts alongside the new 2024 Budget, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) estimated that UK trade will take a 15 per cent hit in the long term as a result of Brexit.
The independent financial watchdog pointed to “weak growth in imports and exports over the medium term [which] partly reflects the continuing impact of Brexit”.
Sir Nick Harvey, the CEO of pro-EU think tank European Movement UK, is calling for a closer partnership with Europe to repair some of the economic damage from Brexit.
“Being out of the European single market has now dented the British economy by more than 5 per cent, causing an annual shortfall in Treasury finances of almost £45bn. That equates to around a third of the basic rate income tax yield,” he told The Independent.
“Our future prosperity and security demand a much closer partnership with Europe. The government’s ‘reset’ points in the right direction, but they need to go much further and much faster if we are to build a brighter future.”
A recent study from the Centre for Economic Performance at LSE found that goods exports from the UK dropped by £27bn in 2022 alone as a result of Brexit.
Specifically, the study concludes that the UK’s trade cooperation agreement (TCA), implemented in January 2021, reduced UK goods exports (excluding services) worldwide by 6.4 per cent due to a 13.2 per cent fall in EU exports.
The paper’s authors said that the drop in EU trade post-Brexit was due to the “introduction of new trade barriers under the TCA, rather than the uncertainty of the withdrawal process”.
The study suggests that 16,400 businesses – some 14 per cent of UK exporters – stopped exporting to the EU due to Brexit trade rules.
Though Thomas Sampson, co-author and LSE economics professor, says that the hit to trade was “less than expected”, he also called the TCA a “disaster for small exporters”.
On health, excluding emergency funding due to Covid, the planned NHS budget scarcely increased in 2020/21 and 2021/22, from fiscal year 2022/23, the core NHS budget jumped from £162.3bn to £185.4bn. Although Michael Gove claimed that Brexit had “delivered” on its £350m NHS pledge, no evidence was provided and the budget was still lower than the previous year when including additional Covid spending.
While, leaving the EU did not have the intended effect on net migration. The paper says that free movement was in place until January 2021, but since then, net migration and immigration have soared. At least 3.6 million immigrants have entered the UK since Brexit (between June 2021 and June 2024, the latest available data); with net migration at 2.3 million over that period.
All in all, the whole project has been a complete disaster and we are paying the price.
In separate article in the Telegraph on 26 June 2016, Boris Johnson claimed: 'British people will still be able to go and work in the EU, to live, to travel, to study, to buy homes and settle down. There will continue to be free trade and access to the EU single market.'
Today is the fifth anninversary of us leaving the EU and judging it on what was promised by the main protaganists above it has been a totla and utter failure. The Independent takes a more measured view, though their conclusion is not much different from mine.
The paper says that Brexiteers promised a new age of British sovereignty, a crackdown on migration and the much-derided “£350m a week” that could be diverted from the EU back into the NHS, but half a decade on, and by many metrics, Brexit appears to have missed the mark:
Since Britain left the EU, migration has been at the highest levels since records began; while key sectors face staffing shortages.
And almost six in 10 Britons (59 per cent) think that Brexit has gone fairly or very badly, with just 12 per cent believing it has gone well, according to a YouGov poll in October.
UK trade expert David Henig told The Independent: ”The UK now has significant trade barriers to its neighbours. It’s something we will have to live with. We will not be allowed to forget it; there will always be issues.”
Brexit-optimist economist Julian Jessop, a fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs, admitted that Brexit has made it harder or “impossible” for small businesses to adjust.
“The UK’s departure from the EU has undoubtedly had some negative effects on the economy, notably through reductions in trade, shortfalls in business investment, and disruption to labour markets,” he told The Independent.
However, he added that the “overall drag on exports and imports has been much smaller than feared”.
Former deputy prime minister Lord Heseltine said that nearly five years on, Brexit “has been a historic disaster”.
“It has destroyed Britain’s leadership in Europe just at a time when there was a critical need (for it), it has closed off opportunities for the younger generation to share in the benefits of Europe and it has denied Britain’s industrial base access to the research and policies of Europe. Our economy is much worse because of it and there is no reputable authority that denies this.
“I think the British people know that they were deceived and the deceit is measured in reduced living standards,” he added.
The numbers speak for themselves:
The latest Treasury estimates show that the cost of Britain’s settlement with the EU stands at approximately £30.2bn in total. This is separate from any estimates of lost money from separating from the EU.
As of the start of 2024, the bulk of this settlement (£23.8bn) had already been paid. Approximately £6.4bn still remained to be paid out to the EU in 2024 and onwards.
The government has not yet published the figure to the end of 2024.
However, this cost is hardly comparable to the forecasted losses from exiting the EU in terms of GDP and trade.
For those who quote the pandemic and the energy crisis as the source of our economic woes it is worth noting that the UK’s GDP took the worst hit compared to all other G7 nations at the time; a 10.3 per cent drop in 2020:
In 2023, Bloomberg Economics estimated that the UK is suffering £100bn a year in lost output from leaving the EU.
The economists Ana Andrade and Dan Hanson wrote that the UK committed “an act of economic self-harm when it voted to leave the EU”, with GDP four per cent smaller than it would have been without Brexit.
In its latest forecasts alongside the new 2024 Budget, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) estimated that UK trade will take a 15 per cent hit in the long term as a result of Brexit.
The independent financial watchdog pointed to “weak growth in imports and exports over the medium term [which] partly reflects the continuing impact of Brexit”.
Sir Nick Harvey, the CEO of pro-EU think tank European Movement UK, is calling for a closer partnership with Europe to repair some of the economic damage from Brexit.
“Being out of the European single market has now dented the British economy by more than 5 per cent, causing an annual shortfall in Treasury finances of almost £45bn. That equates to around a third of the basic rate income tax yield,” he told The Independent.
“Our future prosperity and security demand a much closer partnership with Europe. The government’s ‘reset’ points in the right direction, but they need to go much further and much faster if we are to build a brighter future.”
A recent study from the Centre for Economic Performance at LSE found that goods exports from the UK dropped by £27bn in 2022 alone as a result of Brexit.
Specifically, the study concludes that the UK’s trade cooperation agreement (TCA), implemented in January 2021, reduced UK goods exports (excluding services) worldwide by 6.4 per cent due to a 13.2 per cent fall in EU exports.
The paper’s authors said that the drop in EU trade post-Brexit was due to the “introduction of new trade barriers under the TCA, rather than the uncertainty of the withdrawal process”.
The study suggests that 16,400 businesses – some 14 per cent of UK exporters – stopped exporting to the EU due to Brexit trade rules.
Though Thomas Sampson, co-author and LSE economics professor, says that the hit to trade was “less than expected”, he also called the TCA a “disaster for small exporters”.
On health, excluding emergency funding due to Covid, the planned NHS budget scarcely increased in 2020/21 and 2021/22, from fiscal year 2022/23, the core NHS budget jumped from £162.3bn to £185.4bn. Although Michael Gove claimed that Brexit had “delivered” on its £350m NHS pledge, no evidence was provided and the budget was still lower than the previous year when including additional Covid spending.
While, leaving the EU did not have the intended effect on net migration. The paper says that free movement was in place until January 2021, but since then, net migration and immigration have soared. At least 3.6 million immigrants have entered the UK since Brexit (between June 2021 and June 2024, the latest available data); with net migration at 2.3 million over that period.
All in all, the whole project has been a complete disaster and we are paying the price.