Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes an economic column for The Telegraph and being a raving Brexiteer, over recent years he has produced a lot of flag waving stuff about how the UK economy will flourish after Brexit. His latest effort is no different. Britain’s economic resurgence has caught the whole world by surprise, says the headline with a sub-heading of "The numbers all point to blistering growth as the hit from Brexit continues to diminish each month." I don't remember him suggesting in 2016 there would be any 'hit' from Brexit at all but anyway, it's now diminishing, so he says.
This is an extract:
"Two cheers for the British Wirtschaftswunder. It may not be an economic miracle, but the accelerating recovery now under way is a breathtaking turn of fortunes for the much denigrated Brexit economy.
"The UK will probably regain pre-Covid levels of output before the eurozone, perhaps by Christmas. By the end of next year it may even have recouped the entire cross-Channel gap in growth since the referendum."
What he is forecasting, and he quotes some impressive statistics from various financial institutions, is a bouncing back from a disastrous fall in output last year and there will no doubt be comparatively high growth of 5-7% this year. We can take this as read. But what we will not see is the regaining of pre-covid levels of output by Christmas or the recouping of the lost growth since June 2016. This is not going to happen and I doubt we will recover faster than the eurozone.
He gives himself a get out clause at the end with this:
"It will take a generation to reach a useful economic verdict on Brexit. What is clear already is that the incessant high-decibel negativism of the London opinion machine has been exposed as ill-informed and hysterical. The British economy is doing just fine."
Who would embark on a 25 year long experiment without 99% certainty of the outcome and with a majority of expert opinion on your side? We set off against expert advice and with nothing more than the faith, hope and slogans of a few nutters. Unless Brexit is a success - and a big one - it will have been a quarter of a century of bickering and division for nothing or to inflict massive and irreparable damage on ourselves.
His record at forecasting is, shall we say, somewhat less than stellar. Back in November 2017 for example, Evans-Pritchard was writing about the Irish border
"Yet Mr Varadkar has made his choice. He has ditched his predecessor’s call for a formula that finesses the border issue with modern technology, demanding that there should be no change whatsoever to the status quo."
"He [Varadkar] insists that the trade frontier should shift to the Irish sea, regardless of the economic facts."
Well, we can see who's economic facts we had regard to when push came to shove. The EU's red line won out on that one didn't it? As for finessing a border with technology, that idea never took off at all. There is now a border in the Irish sea.
In February 2018 he was writing that "If The EU refuses a soft Brexit, so we must invoke the WTO immediately" apparently failing to realise that by 2020 we were not even asking for the soft Brexit that the EU was offering. We demanded a hard Brexit, only marginally above WTO rules, like some sort of crazed flagellant.
On services he said Berlin, Paris, and Brussels were only suggesting a free trade deal for goods and not services which he said would be "prohibitively asymmetric" and would lock in their huge surplus in manufacturing, "while locking out Britain’s surplus in services." This he claimed was cherry picking picking by those who shouted the loudest against it. He said what the EU is offering "is not a deal worth having."
That was of course in the days when The Telegraph, The Sun, Mail and Express all thought they needed us more than we needed them. What false hope that was, eh?
Is there any more reason to think Evans-Pritchard's forecasts are more likely to prove accurate now? No. Where he will probably be right is in saying a deal which excludes service, as the TCA does, is going to be prohibitively asymmetric. Trade figures at the end of the year will be the test but expect the trade gap to widen considerably, heaping pressure on sterling and hence interest rates.
Otherwise, he is Dr Pangloss on the Titanic in the early hours of 15 April 1912.
