The Remain campaign in 2016 was derisively called “project fear” by Brexiters. A decade on, the evidence shows that the warnings were actually misplaced – the damage is even worse than previously feared.
Research commissioned by City Hall found that London’s economy was £30bn smaller than it would have been without Brexit and that Londoners are on average nearly £3,400 worse off as a result. If current trends continue, the UK economy could be £250bn smaller by 2030 than similar EU countries.
Other policies that are damaging to hte economy – NI rises, higher min wage, excessive taxation of the richer, say – are not judged by whether they make the country poorer or not but by whether they’re correct policies or not.
Fun, innit? That here, with Brexit, the claim “economic damage” is supposed to convince all, immediately. No further discussion is necessary.
” Would have been”? An economic forecast based on one thing being changed and everything else staying the same and then conveniently supporting the position the forecasters already held. Well that’s convincing.
What happened to the World War Three that was part of projecct fear Oh…
And thirdly, if I’d known it would fuck London up I might have voted twice.
Net Zero must be one of the most damaging policies that we have. Being out of the EU meant that we could have ditched it completely but we didn’t. The politicians have done everything possible not to take advantage of our independence.
As for project fear, a more honest approach would be to make a list of all the things that were stated would happen back during the campaign and then see how many have come to pass.
Brexit
Covid + Lockdowns
The Ukraine War
Net Zero
To ignore the latter three and blame all the issues with the economy on just Brexit is disingenuous to put it mildly.
Funny how the magic of EU membership didn’t prevent Germany, Italy and France from economically underperforming Britain since 2016.
All these “would have been” reports are abject bollocks. One of them was mapping post Brexit vote UK growth against the US, Ireland and Estonian, for example. Fuck right off twats.
So the same analysis can be used to conclude that GER, ITA and FRA are all worse off because of something something not happening in 2016. File under Andrex.
Third-world immigration is massively damaging to both our economy and our quality of life. Maybe we should reverse that before trying to rejoin the EU?
Being able to take back control of our borders was one of the reasons for leaving. Successive governments have done the opposite.
“It seems to me that this failure of the economists to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences – an attempt which in our field may lead to outright error. It is an approach which has come to be described as the “scientistic” attitude – an attitude which, as I defined it some thirty years ago, “is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed.”
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1974/hayek/lecture/
Ok, he beat me to it. But I’ve been saying the same thing for years on here. Economists are sociologists trying to be real scientists. Making everything look ‘sciency’ with numbers and complicated maths. Whereas the truth is a person can think one thing today and the direct opposite tomorrow, because they’ve had a bad hair day. You can’t model people’s behaviour using numbers, it just doesn’t work. Or it works, until suddenly it doesn’t. Economics is essentially a bunch of very expensively paid people telling us why the past happened the way it did, while having precisely zero ability to predict the future. I mean we might as well ask historians to tell us how to run the country, because by the principles of economics they should be able to predict the future too.
In other words another reason (of 2747) to destroy every single university in the land.
Indeed. Been repeatedly proved. The biggest threat to any economy is posed by economists.
Brexit has cost the UK mere pennies in an economic sense.
What *has* damaged the UK economy immensely is the absolute shower of Clowns that managed it, and proceeded from there.
Both politicians and Career Civil Servants hiding in the Ministries.
And the best/worst part is…. You voted that lot in… collectively… as a Nation… *several times*…
And yes… this includes the Civil Servants and the Quango’s… because they’r only held up by their tame politicians.. who, for some reason unfathomable, get elected again and again..
The EU is simply irresistible to politicians. No voters, no policies to be scrutinised and criticised. Your word is LAW and that’s it chum. See how high Starmer climbed the greasy pole of bureaucracy, despite being an adenoidal android pschopath. That means the politicians can bestow unlimited favours to persuade people to do what they want. See Starmer and Bailey-forget inflation, try and make Rachel look good and the ECB is yours!
Ten year olds chanting, “We told you so!”
We’re still doing better than Ireland was ten years after they left the Union.
Wut? You mean political choices have economic consequences that people may consider ARE WORTH PAYING????
Dear God, see what I’ve just stumbled across.
https://www.euractiv.com/opinion/britain-cant-be-left-to-decide-its-own-future/
Stumble ye not. But rejoice in our native wit and phlegm:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2zJ8vaB5jo
Hilarious loony.
Real Brexit hasn’t been tried yet.
Well hang on. Norniron is still in.
So, either there’s been a constitutional upheaval and the Ulsterites have decided to cut us loose, or real Brexit really has not been tried.
Plus, the Windsor framework, or whatever it’s called, I think, commits us to regulatory harmonisation.
“Research commissioned by City Hall”
That’ll be completely neutral and unbiased, then. As others have pointed out, any effects (whether positive or negative) from Brexit are a mere rounding error on the effects of (our grotesque over-response to) Covid, Ukraine, Nut Zero, and even HS2.
To believe in these ‘estimates’, one must also believe that had we only remained in the EU our economy would have hugely outperformed the rest of the G7, rather than bumping along in the middle. If you think that sounds plausible, I’d like to introduce you to my father, the Nigerian Prince …
just for counterpoint, what’s the cost of net zero?
my untility bills are at least £1 k a year more than they would have been. fag packet says thats £30bn a year right there. add in the heat pump subsidies and so on, gotta be close to £50bn a year before the next thumbscrew.
The proverbial 10-year-old schoolboy could tell you that it has more than doubled the cost of electricity.
British Gas tell me the price per kwh on my bills, electricity is four times the cost of gas, CCGT generators are more than 50% efficient so if all of our electricity was generated by gas- (or coal-)fired generators the price of electricity per kwh would be less than twice that of gas. [NSHEB was set up as a job-creation scheme by Attlee but following the oil price rise after the three-day war its costs have become relatively low, so it isn’t Hydro’s fault].
The green levies and the ridiculous prices paid to unreliable suppliers of wind and solar have more than doubled the price of electricity. What it has done to unemployment is difficult to calculate but we know it is horrendous.
£227bn, according to https://subsidyclock.co.uk/
Although I think the projections are that the costs will double in a few years from now.
Foreigners can do it cheaper, apparently.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-electricity-by-country
project fear said the city would collapse, not grow a bit less well.
among its other doomsday scenarios.
I wonder if there was a global reason happening after Brexit that may have contributed……?