As I posted on Saturday, David Davis told the Institute for Government in September last year that our negotiators were “really crap” and admits Brexit hasn’t "delivered." He's not alone. There is an excellent article in The Guardian about the economy sinking and support for Brexit falling.
Lord Edmiston, a Tory donor who gave £1 million to the Brexit campaign said it was never likely to be smooth in the short term and that hiccups were to be expected and we should judge it after a decade. I didn't spot that in the small print of the Brexit red bus.
Yet, in the Daily Mail, the historian Robert Tombs, a mad keen Brexiteer has an article that seems to be arguing that it’s all going swimmingly. Tombs, says we remoaners have “quietly morphed into something even more insidious: ‘Rejoiners.’”
He claims that suggestions that Brexit has failed is “defying the facts.” Tombs apparently doesn’t think like Davis that our negotiators were really crap. No, they apparently did a fantastic job, or they did if you believe the ‘facts’ as he sets them out.
Among his 'facts' is a claim in connection with the TCA that, "despite unscrupulous scare stories. Official statistics show that our exports to the EU have not been damaged by leaving. They even broke all records in July 2022."
He is in a minority of one with that so-called fact. EU exports have grown in money value because of inflation since 2019 but volumes are well down as many exporters know. And according to HMRC figures, the number of UK businesses exporting to the EU fell by a third, to 18,357 in 2021 – the first year after the Brexit transition period ended – from 27,321 in 2020. This is a fact.
If what he was claiming was true, it would be plastered across every right-wing Brexit-supporting newspaper, but it isn't.
Tombs only hints that things are perhaps not all rosy. “Three years after we left, it’s fair to say that successive Conservative administrations have failed to capitalise on our Brexit freedoms,” is as far as he goes.
Suffice it to say his ‘facts’ are either wrong or simply assertions about the future. For example, Tombs claims signing an agreement with the CPTPP will create a huge free-trade area with over 500 million people which, with the UK, would be economically more significant than the entire EU. Really? Hardly a fact.
Lord Moylan, is also quoted in The Guardian. Moylan, a Tory peer and former adviser to Boris Johnson, says "an economic hit should come as no surprise." He says the negotiations were "appallingly handled, but as far as Great Britain is concerned, Brexit is now complete."
Davis on the other hand says Brexit hasn't delivered.
Not only did leavers not know what they were voting for, but now that they've got it, they can't agree on what it is.
All these wealthy men may be happy to wait ten or twenty years. Edmiston says to 'judge' it after a decade. What if it's judged to have been an unmitigated disaster? They will hardly feel any pain and may well have gone to live in France by then. It was and is a mad gamble with the odds stacked heavily against the UK and the poorest as usual will pay the highest price.
In The Telegraph, disgraced former PM Liz Truss has discovered a new enemy within. She says it was the “left-wing economic establishment” that brought her down. As someone pointed out on Twitter if she truly believes that about the international financial markets, she is further to the right than Attila the Hun. I suppose, from where she is anyone with moderate Centre right opinions looks like a Corbynista or a member of Militant Tendency.
Separately, at a press conference announcing yet another interest rate increase, the deputy governor for monetary policy at the Bank of England, Ben Broadbent says the impact of Brexit on the economy was coming through faster than first expected. He told reporters that “Brexit… has been something that has pulled on our potential output in our country and that’s been our assessment for many years. We’ve not changed our estimate of the long-running effects, but we’ve brought some of them forward and we think they’re probably coming in faster than we first expected.”
And a Scottish fishermen's leader who has spoken before about the 'opportunities of Brexit' and I assume voted to leave, seems to have had a change of heart.
Mike Park, the chief executive of the Fraserburgh-based Scottish White Fish Producers’ Association, says: “It is costing more and taking longer to get fish into the continent and there are a lot of paper trails required and red tape.” He is quoted saying, “We were the poster boys, we wanted out. But a lot have now reassessed their enthusiasm for Brexit because it has delivered nothing.”
This is what Tombs, Moylan, and Edmiston are up against. Brexit hasn't delivered anything and never will. Time is running out. They certainly haven't got ten years.
