Those enthusiastic Brexiteers who campaigned for and cheered the leave vote in 2016 and who painted a sparkling picture of a bright post Brexit future are now on the defensive as we enter the fifth year of negotiations. Briefings for Britain (formerly Briefings for Brexit) are now publishing pieces attacking just about every serious economic forecaster you can think of. Recently they published a post by professor Graham Gudgin, Honorary Research Associate at the Centre for Business Research (CBR) in the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge.
He is of the Patrick Minford school of economics, meaning he is one of a vanishingly small number of economists who think Brexit is a good thing. The post is a joint one with Harry Western, a pseudonym for an unnamed senior economist.
They in turn rubbish studies by The Treasury (embarrassing predictions), the OECD, Economists for Remain, the Centre for European Reform (CER), the National Institute for Economic and Social Research (NIESR), a paper by Born et al now published in the Economic Journal and two economists working at Warwick University. At no point do they consider that they themselves might be wrong.
They even link to somewhere that has "debunked" Treasury figures but clicking on the link takes you to another piece on Policy Exchange (where Gudgin is chief economic advisor) where Gudgin himself simply asserts The Treasury are wrong! You couldn't make it up.
The studies all come independently to conclusions that include uncertainty causing a loss of GDP of around 2-3% of GDP so far and a fall in business investment of around 15%. Gudgin and Western don't pretend that the researchers were all wrong but that the effect of the vote has either been exaggerated or is due to factors apart from Brexit. In other words Brexit is bad - just not quite as bad as these people are suggesting - or wrongly accused.
How do they explain all the evidence? Like this:
"It is difficult to believe that the exaggeration of the impact of Brexit in all of these studies is accidental. We might reasonably assume that the researchers did not set out with the overt intention of exaggeration. More likely is that, being surrounded by like-minded academics, they ‘knew’ at some level that Brexit must be economically damaging and when they saw a downturn in the relative performance of the UK economy after mid-2016, it must have seemed obvious to them that this was a consequence of the referendum result"
It was "group think" or herd mentality apparently.
They seem to applaud the fact that "Chancellors in the current government are preventing Treasury economists from undertaking further reports on Brexit" - which in itself is an amazing thing for researchers to say,
Polling
The Times had a report yesterday that the cabinet office is on course to spend close to £2 million on polling this year - three times what was spent last year. This is a stunning amount of money but I think it points to the way Cummings is governing us. It is not leadership but followership.
Apparently a visitor to Downing Street who attended meetings along with Johnson and Cummings hast told the FT that they were unsure who was running the government. I think we know who it is don't we? We can see this in the numerous policy announcements and subsequent reversals. You cannot base policies on polling. Asking people in the street who generally haven't got a clue is no way to govern.
EU Negotiations
A bit of gossip leaked out of Brussels yesterday and was reported by Reuters that in a closed door meeting with national envoys Barnier told them he was confident of reaching an agreement with Britain. I take this to mean we are showing a bit more flexibility on the level playing field stuff and fishing. This follows indications that we have accepted an over arching agreement in place of the multitude of separate stand-alone deals we were hoping for.
I am certain also that the UK will have to ask for an extension because we are nowhere near ready for the NI protocol to be implemented. The government has not yet revealed how this whole entirely novel border is to be operated in detail - with just five months to go.
It is quite impossible to get the new IT systems, infrastructure and all the staff ready by December 31.
