So disastrous that he can’t bring himself to admit his part in what has been the biggest foreign policy failure since Suez in 1956. And financially, Brexit has been far more costly. Its malign impact continues to be a drag on the economy and will be with us for decades. The final bill will be absolutely colossal.
Unable to face up to what damage he’s inflicted on us, he is now blaming me and you for the predicament we find ourselves in. His latest piece is this: We only have ourselves to blame for our once-great nation’s sorry slide into poverty - Britain doesn’t just have a politician problem; it has an electorate problem.
We? Exactly who is he talking about?
He’s right that we have an electorate problem, but wrong about which section of the electorate is to blame. He believes there are not enough extreme right-wing voters, the ones who would like to have seen a no-deal Brexit, a slashing of environmental, safety and employment regulations, a privatised NHS, and Royal Navy gunboats cruising the English Channel.
The truth is that we don't have an electorate anywhere near as well-informed as they should be. That’s why charlatans like Hannan get away with peddling a lot of misinformation.
As an example, among many other delusions, Hannan forecast in June 2016 two days before the referendum that if we voted to leave the EU, by 2025 Britain's “Financial services [would be] booming – not only in London, but in Birmingham, Leeds and Edinburgh too.”
Are they 'booming'? Err...no.
According to Rob Rooney, formerly Morgan Stanley’s top man in London, the impact of Brexit on the City has been disastrous: “ Frankfurt, Madrid, Milan and Paris are all doing better than they were. It has been at London’s expense. There is no question about that.”
This is in an article in The Guardian with the depressing title: ‘The money machine is misfiring’: City blames Brexit for UK’s £20bn productivity headache
The report makes clear that the UK has been losing market share since 2016 to the Netherlands, Ireland, Spain and Italy, with the government's analysis showing Britain’s share of the global pie has slumped to 15%, down from 21% in 2010.
John Springford of The Centre for European Reform, is quoted:
“You would have expected the UK – given the size of its finance sector – to have done at least as well, if not better, than other countries. But financial services output has been pretty weak since 2016. And there hasn’t been a great deal of investment in the sector either.”
Under Blair and Brown, it was banks in The City which contributed disproportionately to the UK's productivity, with Britain recording the second-highest rate of growth in the G7 pre-2008. The industry is still well above average, but the rate has collapsed into reverse – as one of the biggest sectors dragging down the UK’s overall performance.
In his latest Telegraph article, Hannan says: "...if you have regulations that inhibit risk-taking, privilege some sectors over others, or prevent companies from acting in the most efficient way, those firms become less productive."
Yes, and if you erect trade barriers between your exporters and their closest, largest and richest overseas market and then deliberately misalign your production standards for purely ideological reasons, those firms will also become less productive. At least if we follow European regulations as a member of the EU's single market, we are on a level playing field, rather than one permanently tilted against us.
But this point is not mentioned.
The comments below his piece are instructive. They are almost universally in support of Hannan's general thrust (a man who has been wrong on every major issue, “nobody is going to die of covid”) and there is not a single mention of Brexit - which as I remember it, was supposed to solve all of our problems. In Hannan's 2016 piece, there were no caveats, no cautionary notes, no talk of any downsides or trade-offs at all. Just vote to leave, and your troubles will be over.
We have been going downhill ever since.
Many of his Telegraph readers point out that his party's record over 14 of the past 15 years is responsible. They had the chance to cut regulations and taxes, but didn't. From this, the respondents don't take the obvious answer that it is incredibly difficult, and that many of the solutions Hannan suggests are just not politically feasible or popular. No, they assume the government wasn't trying hard enough!!
Their answer is .....yes, you've guessed it, Nigel Farage and Reform UK Ltd. Some seem to think that Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak were all socialists!
I shudder to think what the future holds, I really do.
