Monday 24 July 2023

Hannan: Confessions of a conman

The article by Daniel (Lord) Hannan published by The Daily Telegraph on Saturday: Britain is now a poor nation. This is the number one issue we face – yet our leaders ignore it, was in stark contrast to his rosy pre-referendum vision of life after Brexit in Britain in 2025. It is an admission, although he would probably argue differently, that he has been peddling a total fantasy. This isn't a surprise, is it?  Brexit was always going to make us poorer, as the vast majority of respected economists have been saying for eight long years.

For those who haven’t seen the video, broadcast on BBC Newsnight in May 2016, you can see it HERE.  

Hannan followed it up with a piece in similar style for Reaction, Iain Martin's website, which appeared on 21 June, just two days before voters went to the poll.

In the video, he purported to be looking back from the year 2025 and painted a glowing picture where “our economy, our democracy, and our liberty” had been reinvigorated and free from the sclerotic EU, every sector from fishing to financial services was 'booming' in Hannan's fantasy world. This is now just two years away with all the economic indicators turning downwards. He proclaimed:

"The United Kingdom is now the region’s foremost knowledge-based economy. We lead the world in biotech, law, education, the audio-visual sector, financial services, and software. New industries, from 3D printing to driverless cars, have sprung up around the country. Older industries, too, have revived as energy prices have fallen back to global levels: steel, cement, paper, plastics, and ceramics producers have become competitive again.”

Recognise Britain in there?  No, neither do I. Neither does Hannan obviously since he now says:

"Britain has some of the lowest productivity in the developed world, meaning that we generate less stuff per hour. Slovenes are overtaking us now, and Poles are on course to do so in the mid-2030s. South Koreans, who had a third of our income per head as recently as 1985, have already surpassed us. Yet we refuse to acknowledge, let alone address, the causes of our decline."

Brexit naturally isn't mentioned as a cause. The only mention of the word is in this passage:

"We argue about Brexit, wokery and Just Stop Oil as a kind of displacement activity. We would rather not recognise, let alone remedy, our longer-term problems. The only serious attempt to prioritise growth came from Liz Truss, and prompted outrage from civil servants, commentators, and MPs, including many Tories." 

Hannan isn't nearly as clever as he thinks he is. He inadvertently answers his own argument by failing even to hint that Brexit is to blame, even though two of the countries he cites as being about to overtake us in the prosperity stakes are in the trade bloc that he has spent his adult life trying to get us out of, and succeeding finally in 2016.

Brexit IS the cause of our decline and the only reason it can't be 'recognised, acknowledged, or addressed' is that it is the governing party's flagship policy and driving ideology and one he has spent 30 years campaigning for.

Lord Frost, our former chief Brexit negotiator, tweeted Hannan's article approvingly in another demonstration of why Brexit can't be implicated in Britain's 'decline' as Hannan calls it.  This was picked up by Mujtaba Rahman, a former treasury official who retweeted it with incredulity:

My only quibble with Rahman is with the word "partly."

This then triggered a little exchange with the wildly pro-Brexit trade adviser Shanker ‘Snake oil’ Singham:  


These leading lights of Brexit are the ones who pretended to have all the answers in 2016 (Frost was a bit later admittedly) but now are left wringing their hands and asking why nobody is using these mysterious and elusive "opportunities" that Brexit was said to offer.

By "mitigate through border management" Singham is, I assume, referring to trying to maintain frictionless trade with the EU as if we are still a member.  It's having one's cake and eating it again.  

The government isn’t using the 'opportunities' because they can’t without inflicting more and more damage on our own wealth generators. We are hearing from virtually every sector of British industry (personally I can’t think of one which isn’t saying this), from fishing and farming to cars and chemicals, that they do NOT want to diverge from the rules and regulations that govern what was, is and always will be our largest overseas market for both imports and exports.  For heaven's sake it was once our own HOME market!

This is what each new incumbent in No 10 finds as soon as they’ve got their feet under the desk. Johnson, Truss and now Sunak have in turn discovered the practical impact of Brexit is almost all on the downside.

Gove, Badenoch, and other ministers have had to backtrack, water down or delay implementing both the original Withdrawal Agreement and the TCA when faced with potentially seeing businesses crippled with extra costs and made less and less productive.

Confronted with this reality ministers always back down but have to resort to dissembling to explain their decisions because they can’t be honest without calling Brexit, which they still have to appear to support, into question.

Only the other day did we learn that acceding to the CPTPP will "not lead to substantial economic gains for the UK", according to trade academics at the highly respected UK Trade Policy Observatory at Sussex University.

Polls

Andrew Neil, the closet Brexiteer, tweeted about the latest YouGov poll.

Note Neil reports that 57% of respondents now think Brexit was a mistake, but this is with don’t knows included. Removing them gives a record 64% to 36% thinking it was wrong to leave the EU. YouGov has only seen that figure once before in May this year.

He then compounds this by suggesting only a ‘narrow majority’ or 51% would vote to rejoin. But what he fails to point out is that just 32% would vote to leave, meaning some 17% of the electorate either would not vote or don’t know. Removing them gives 61% to 39% wanting to rejoin.

This compares to 52% who wanted to leave in 2016. It has been a massive rejection of Brexit and it can only increase.

When your opponents need to resort to distorting simple arithmetic facts you know you’re winning the argument. 

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