A few extracts from Brown's report:
"The Cabinet Minister has signed massive trade deals with Australia, New Zealand, and Florida in the past 12 months with negotiations with many more countries underway.
"A gargantuan tie-up with Pacific nations in the CPTPP trading bloc is also close to being rubber-stamped.
“Since Brexit, we’ve negotiated more free trade agreements than any other independent country in the world,” she says.
“These deals have slashed the costs of our imports and our exports while opening up foreign markets worth hundreds of billions of pounds for British businesses like Unilever, BP, and Barclays Bank.”
The trade deals with Australia, New Zealand, and Florida are not 'massive' but actually tiny, barely worth anything at all, and are virtually a rounding error compared to the trade deal we had with 27 nations across Europe.
The 'Gargantuan' tie-up with the CPTPP is only set to increase GDP by 0.08% over the next 15 years. This is about one-fiftieth of what we are losing in GDP by quitting the EU, as the OBR confirmed again this week.
And we had to negotiate 'more free trade agreements' with other independent countries because we lost access to all the ones we had when we Brexited. The vast majority were rolled-over copies of the ones negotiated by Brussels. The trade talks aimed at extending some temporary arrangements with Canada have been stalled by Badenoch over cheese and beef and the UK car industry is becoming very concerned that 10% tariffs are going to be imposed on our exports to Canada at the end of the month!!
The really big ones with the USA and India have yet to materialise and almost certainly won't add very much to GDP in any event.
Of course, politicians of all colours tell fibs and have done so for decades if not centuries. What is different about today's political landscape is the extent and the scale of the lies and how easily they are disproven.
The OBR are quite clear that Brexit is reducing trade and they expect both imports and exports to fall by 15% by 2030 and this will reduce GDP by 4%. There are plenty of studies and statistics to show the impact could be even worse.
The FT recently analysed the UK's trade stats and showed how at the end of last year Britain's trade figures had suffered the largest 5-year drop in goods trade by volume since records began in 1997.
Badenoch is not stupid. She has a Master's degree in computer engineering and worked as a systems analyst at the Royal Bank of Scotland Group. She also worked as an associate director at Coutts Bank for seven years between 2006 to 2013.
She is now the Business and Trade Secretary. It's inconceivable that Ms. Badenoch doesn't know what she is saying is wrong, and an egregious lie. It is gaslighting on an Olympic scale, of the kind that government ministers in the past would never dream of doing. The question is why does she (and others) do it?
I think the sheer magnitude of the mistake that Brexit is proving to be is overwhelming its advocates.
It's easy to admit to a small error, "Oh I'm so sorry I forgot to put sugar in your coffee." That sort of thing costs nothing and is immediately forgotten.
Slightly bigger ones may take a bit more doing. As the mistakes get even bigger, the admissions sometimes have to be coaxed out. If the consequences are really serious, even criminal, they have to be forced out at great cost with incontrovertible evidence.
But eventually, the lies become so huge, so significant and unbearable that they can never be admitted to. For example, Blair is never going to admit the Iraq war was a strategic mistake and neither is George Bush.
So it will be with Brexit. Farage, Cummings, Johnson, Frost, and all the guilty men are never going to concede Brexit was a catastrophic and historic mistake. Like Badenoch, they will go to their grave insisting Brexit was the right decision. In the meantime, the gaslighting will go on.
