This week, the Daily Express finally admitted what a dreadful failure Brexit really is and just how damaging it is becoming. Their lead article is damning at best and truly depressing for the future prospects of the United Kingdom.
Entitled – “Brexiteers give Boris 2,000 ideas to obliterate EU rules – and here are their suggestions” – the upbeat article says that – “Brexit Opportunities Minister Jacob Rees-Mogg made a direct appeal to Express readers and people around the country for ideas about how the UK can benefit from Brexit. Since his appointment in February, the British public has responded “with enthusiasm” and hundreds of ideas have poured into Mr Rees-Mogg’s office.
The hope was that, free of the EU and interference by the European Commission, the UK could rip up vast quantities of unnecessary red tape and allow the economy to power forward.
Boris Johnson won the December 2019 election on a pledge of “getting Brexit done”, but Mr Rees-Mogg has always insisted that this included making Britain better as a result of Brexit and ensuring the Government “gets out of the way of ordinary people’s lives”.
It was hoped that, by delivering on Brexit, Johnson would be able to revive his flagging Government but scandalous events have ended up taking all the oxygen and effort of Downing Street in its bid simply to survive.
In the meantime, Brexit opportunities have been so hard to find, that its biggest cheerleader, in the form of Ress-Mogg has resorted to asking for some suggestions from his fanbase.
And so what have those suggestions been, given that the Daily Express is one of the biggest mouthpieces of Brexit.
Mr Rees-Mogg’s officials have confirmed more than 2,000 ideas were received. The top nine proposals have now been published. They were even described as the ‘most interesting’ of ideas – and here they are:
1. Encourage fracking, shortcut rules on planning consultation via emergency act.
2. Abolish the EU regulations that restrict vacuum cleaner power to 1400 watts.
3. Remove precautionary principle restrictions (for instance) on early use of experimental treatments for seriously ill patients and GM crops.
4. Abolish rules around the size of vans that need an operator’s licence.
5. Abolish EU limits on electrical power levels of electrically assisted pedal cycles.
6. Allow certain medical professionals, such as pharmacists and paramedics, to qualify in three years.
7. Remove requirements for agency workers to have all the attributes of a permanent employee.
8. Simplify the calculation of holiday pay (eg 12.07 per cent of pay) to make it easier for businesses to operate.
9. Reduce requirements for businesses to conduct fixed wire testing and portable application testing.
Quite why this was not rounded up to the top 10 is a mystery.
Its No 1 suggestion – to restart fracking is opposed by 81 per cent of the British public. Its second recommendation to revive Britain’s flagging economy, by increasing vacuum cleaner power, is pitiful to read. It reads like a parody piece. From there it only gets worse.
So let’s have a look at the evidence that analyses the actual outcome of Brexit.
The introduction of new post-Brexit trading rules last year caused a “major shock” to UK-EU trade, says the LSE Centre for Economic Performance. It found UK imports from the EU fell by 25% relative to those from elsewhere in 2021.
In February, the British Chambers of Commerce found that half of exporters and manufacturers were facing difficulties with the new goods trading regime. The BCC summed up the problems as: “costs, delays, and confusion.”
The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) stated this year that as evidence began flowing in, they reported that it was “still consistent with our initial [2016] assumption” of a 15 per cent eventual reduction in total trade, compared to what it would have been if we had stayed in the EU.” The OBR went further in a separate report to say that – “as European trade dives, new trade deals with other parts of the world will not have a material impact.”
A new study from the think tank UK in a Changing Europe finds that total service exports to Europe have dropped by 14 percentage points more than those to the rest of the world. There are bigger hits to two especially important categories: professional services (with an excess hit to EU sales of 52 percentage points) and financial services (where the same gap is 38 points).
The IMF forecasts UK growth for 2023 to be half the advanced economy average. Yes, you read that right – half.
Then there is other data. For instance – Amsterdam immediately overtook London as the prime site for share trading in Europe, a development directly linked to a bar on EU investors doing Euro-denominated equity trades outside the single market.
Prospect Magazine reports that – “Zoom out from trade and look at total business investment across the entire UK economy, and two things jump out: first, it suddenly stopped going up after the 2016 referendum; second, we have failed to see a vigorous bounce back from Covid. Post-lockdown and post-hard Brexit, business investment is 10 per cent down on 2019, and vastly down on where it would have been if pre-2016 expansion had continued.”
I could go on. Research has now pinned 6 per cent of food inflation on the problems that Brexit is causing. The Economics Observatory reports that – “Since the Brexit vote in 2016, the exchange rate of the pound against other leading currencies has fallen significantly.” A flagging currency means you are importing inflation. So many skilled workers from the EU left the UK that a record amount of visas were issued in 2021 – and in the last twelve months – because we are no longer EU members (we cannot refugees to the country they last came from) – the UK has admitted the highest number of refugees in 32 years.
In brief, Brexit has brought us the opportunity to frack open countryside that no one wants and to push up the power of a vacuum cleaner. But it has; reduced trade and therefore GDP, which makes every average household poorer as living standards fall. It has created inflation through higher costs on top of a weaker currency. It has forced investors to take their money elsewhere and reduced Britain’s power and influence whilst creating less opportunities for the young. In addition, red tape and bureaucracy has rocketed that has created huge queues at ports and, of course, notnleast the Union of the United Kingdom is threatened like never before.
If anyone believes that Brexit has any real positive impacts on the country as a whole, it would be nice to hear about them. Jacob Rees-Mogg has heard them – the top 9 – and none of them has any significant positive influence on the economy – unlike the other way around.
It is estimated that the entire losses of the Covid pandemic in Britain will be completely overshadowed and in the long run, will effectively put the economy into recession mode for at least a decade. In 2016, the government itself predicted Brexit would cause a recession, they just didn’t state how big. In 2018, the government forecasted the economic cost to the country would be 3.9 per cent of GDP – they just didn’t state how long it would last. In 2022, the government’s own experts have confirmed the economy will be worse off by 4 per cent of GDP. Worse still – it now forecasts that new trade deals with non-EU countries will not have a material impact (just 0.1 per cent), and any effect will be gradual i.e. over 15 years.
Tens of billions of desperately needed taxpayers’ money has been spent attempting to manage the difficulties of Brexit. Hundreds of billions have been lost in trade – and hundreds more will be lost each and every year because of it. What opportunities there might have been, have been squandered because the people in power had no plan and no real idea what to do – hence the chaos. To be true, if they can’t even manage their own office properly, what chance did they ever have to run a country, let alone something as difficult as an exit from the worlds biggest trading bloc.