Policy Exchange, the right-leaning think tank, has published a report with some ideas for addressing our economic problems: Beyond Our Means, a Plan to Tame Public Spending. It may or may not be a useful contribution to the debate, but that doesn’t particularly interest me; the authorship does. The report was written by Roger Bootle, Iain Mansfield, Ben Ramanauskas and Ben Sweetman. The first two were keen Brexiters. In fact, Roger Bootle and Nigel Lawson awarded a 100,000-euro prize in 2014 on behalf of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) to Iain Mansfield for his plan to leave the EU. Two years earlier, Bootle and his team at Capital Economics had won the £250,000 Wolfson prize for setting out how countries could leave the single currency.
I bet neither man thought that eleven years on Britain would have been out of the EU for five years and they would be jointly authoring a report that suggested Britain was living beyond it’s means, with the government being urged by them to take ruthless action which included freezing the state pension, abolishing the triple lock, freezing working age benefits, reducing personal independence payments, charging to visit a GP, reducing the number of university places and cutting overseas aid.
Brexit was supposed to lead to a new age of prosperity, wasn't it? I wonder how many leave voters of pension age would have opted for Brexit if they had known the result would be a freezing of the state pension?
Bootle and Mansfield are just the latest examples of the Brexit prodigals. These are people who campaigned for Brexit but are now making excuses, almost but not quite repenting what they've done to this country. They can’t bring themselves to speak its name at the moment. In Policy Exchange's 132-page report, Brexit is mysteriously missing. Fancy that. For them, Brexit will forever be the great unmentionable.
Bootle, in particular, seems repelled by any idea of nations working together closely to benefit their citizens. I assume if he had lived at the time, he would have vigorously opposed the 1707 Act of Union.
I think we can safely assume that five years after Britain left the 'clutches' of the EU, they all believed a grateful and relieved nation would be lauding them to the rafters, while they penned self-congratulatory articles in The Telegraph bigging up their role in Brexit and taking credit for Britain’s surging growth and newfound prosperity. Taxes would be tumbling and public services would be the envy of Brussels.
Instead, after a decade and a half of public spending cuts, they are now advocating ..... wait for it, more public spending cuts. If the voters of 2016 were told or able to see the outcome of voting to leave, would they have gone along with Farage?
I don’t think so.
The other Brexit prodigals are men like Hannan and Alister Heath in The Telegraph, a once serious newspaper now reduced to giving a platform to people who are eternally wrong. Heath, one of the loudest voices clamouring for Brexit in 2016, wrote an article last year: I have glimpsed the terrifying future of lazy, defenceless, near-bankrupt Britain.
Do they ever look in the mirror?
David Jones, the former Tory MP, once a member of Bill Cash's star chamber and the infamous ERG, is another prodigal. The announcement this week that Britain's EU divorce bill has reached £50 billion was greeted with anger by Jones, who now says:
"I think we were so desperate to get out of the EU that at the time we basically came up with a very bad deal."
This was a different tune to the one he was singing in 2019 when Mrs May was struggling to get a Brexit that everyone could agree on. Jones was in the vanguard of those who were in a hurry to quit the EU and said that the public would feel “cheated" if Brexit was not delivered on time.
And he may think we got a very bad deal under Johnson, but he voted for it and told The Guardian at the time:
“What this [Johnson's deal] does is replace the arrangements under the treaty on [the] European Union, which is what we were in before as a member state, with something that is a straightforward, clear, free trade agreement of a sort that Conservatives are supportive of.”
Foresight is a wonderful thing. If only they had had some in 2016.
Farage
Farage has ditched plans for £90 billion of tax cuts, throwing his entire economic policy off the rails. After criticising both the Tories and Labour for their economic mismanagement, he has effectively admitted he would be doing more or less the same as Rachel Reeves. Reform UK’s policy only works, apparently, if the economy is already growing at the top end of expectations. If things are looking dire, when you actually need something to spark growth in a lacklustre economy, don’t bother asking Farage, he hasn't got a clue.
It was also notable that when other party leaders were expressing sympathy for the victims of the horrific stabbing on the Doncaster to London train, Farage was calling for the identity of the attacker to be released “as soon as possible.” It must have been a terrible disappointment for him to be told the man in custody was a British national, not an illegal immigrant.
This is how GB News reported it:
It says a lot about Farage’s mindset that the first thing that pops into his head is how he can make use of a tragedy to further his racist agenda. To add to his disappointment, it turns out the hero was Samir Zitouni, who had worked on the rail system for LNER for 20 years. He’s said to be "critically unwell" but stable in hospital. Mr Zitouni is said to have saved many lives.
I may be wrong, but I really do hope it turns out that he's an immigrant.
