Regular readers of SfE will know that although I’m no economist, I try to push back against the small but vociferous mob of Brexit-supporting economists who try to ‘prove’ that either Brexit is already a success, or more usually nowadays, that it isn’t quite as bad as people said it was going to be. Julian Jessop is one such and he’s been at it again in the pages of The Telegraph where he normally lurks: Remainer lies are crumbling as the German economy slumps.
The article is subtitled: While European economies deteriorate, doomsayers are finding increasingly desperate ways to convince themselves that Brexit has failed.
To be fair to Mr. Jessop, I expect both the headline and the subheading were dreamt up by sub-editors to get readers. He doesn’t talk about remainer 'lies' but he does refer to remainer doomsayers, by which I assume he would include me - if he had the slightest idea who I am.
However, I am in rather better company than him. Most reputable economists are on my side of the argument and also, I note that a hero of mine, Professor Chris Grey, is also pushing back against Jessop’s spin in a longish Twitter thread:
This article by @julianHjessop is getting a lot of attention as a supposed 'gotcha' of 'remainers', along with many others comparing German & UK economic performance so as to draw conclusions about Brexit: https://t.co/9P489Szasl 1/10
— Chris Grey 🇺🇦 (@chrisgreybrexit) May 28, 2023
Jessop notes that Germany is in recession, having suffered a second quarter of negative growth and this is his reasoning for writing:
“If you want to pick the “sick man of Europe”, try Germany. The latest data show that the EU’s largest economy shrank in each of the past two quarters, as consumer spending crumbled under the weight of high inflation and a slump in real wages.”
He accuses remainers of cherry-picking dates and time-frames to present a rosy picture of the EU or its member states, which is precisely what he is doing in his article since he acknowledges that France and Italy have been doing rather well.
He sets his sights firmly on the IMF and the OECD. Now, these bodies have a long history of being negative about Brexit, and their forecasts (and those of the OBR, IFS, Treasury, and others) are almost universally attacked by Brexiteers for being wrong.
Not for the first time, he writes: “The second trick is to rely on forecasts from bodies such as the IMF and OECD. There are many problems here. One is that these like-minded organisations have a negative view of Brexit, so this is bound to be reflected in their projections.”
Fair enough, if these organisations are institutionally biased or inept, as he seems to think, you would think he might ignore their projections but no, he follows up with this:
“It is also telling that the IMF has already had to revise up its 2023 growth forecasts for the UK by a full percentage point – and is now predicting that the UK economy will grow faster over the next five years than those of Germany, France or Italy.”
As Grey points out it does seem a trifle hypocritical to disparage the IMF/OECD when they disagree with you, but hail them for their accuracy when they occasionally deliver a bit of positive news. But this is what they all do. And the basic assumption of Brexiteers like Jessop isn’t just that their forecasts are wrong, but always wrong in a way that shows Brexit in a bad light. Nobody ever underestimates the damage, apparently.
Jessop reserves a special attack on the so-called doppelgänger models, the ones that try to create a theoretical economy using a combination of others that were most similar to the UK before Brexit. He admits they need to be “taken seriously” but refuses to accept the one run by John Springford at the Centre for European Reform (CER) which shows the British economy is currently 5.5% smaller (about £140bn) than it otherwise would have been had we remained in the EU.
He says the “results also typically fail a basic “smell test”: the CER model suggests that the UK economy would have grown nearly twice as quickly since 2016 if we had voted to Remain.” He says we actually grew 5.9% but Springford’s model suggests it could have been 11.4%.
The CER may be wrong of course. However, as Grey also points out, what is not at issue is that Brexit has had a seriously negative impact, we are only arguing about the extent of it.
I assume he or other Brexit-supporting economists could easily produce their own doppelgänger model if they chose to do so, but noticeably they don’t. I wonder why?
In any event, as someone cleverer than me has pointed out, Germany is a manufacturing and exporting colossus that has had to replace 52% of its energy supplies and seen major disruption to two of its largest export markets (the UK and Russia). That it is only doing marginally worse that Britain is not something to boast about.
The growing problem for Jessop and all Brexiteers whether they are knowledgeable about economics or not, is that they are having to fall back on ever more outlandish excuses, the latest of course being the Blob! This perhaps tells us more than anything that they have no rational explanation for Brexit’s failure and when this is all you have, you must know the argument is lost.
Finally, Lord Hannan has blocked me on Twitter, something I find quite extraordinary since I have no idea why. To my knowledge, I have never replied to any of his tweets and I can only assume he took umbrage at something I posted elsewhere or retweeted or liked:
I don’t think I’m unique in being blocked by him. It would be fascinating to see how many accounts are in his blocked list, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn it’s in the thousands. He does get an awful lot of trolling, deservedly so in many cases, although it doesn't seem to dent his ego.
Imagine being spectacularly wrong about almost everything from Brexit to Covid, yet still retaining perfect self-belief. How does he do it?
Elsewhere, The Daily Mail has a perfectly accurate headline: Lib Dem Council close to collapse with a record debt of £2.4 billion.
Shocking, eh? How could a local council run up such debts? And what kind of idiot spendthrifts in the Liberal Democrats were responsible?
If you live in or near Woking and have been a regular reader of the Mail, the headline should prompt you to cancel your order because it is thoroughly misleading. Woking had been Conservative run for 14 years up until May 2022 when the Lib Dems took charge, but only after the annual budget had been set and voted through.
The poor old Lib Dems have only held the purse strings for a few weeks, and I assume all the locals know the truth. The article does mention the council had been controlled by a minority Tory administration which started investing in commercial property (the start of the problems) in 2016. However, a lot of people will have only read the headline which can only have been calculated to mislead.
This is straight out of the Goebbels propaganda playbook and the reason why Wikipedia once declared The Daily Mail to be a "generally unreliable" source.
