Adrian S
4.7K posts
@Adrian_Simpson
Kayaks, nature, weather. Occasionally politics. Focus on the argument, not the person.
@b_judah Erm, because you're a liar? Either you haven't read the OBR analysis to know that what you said is completely wrong, or you have read the analysis and you are knowingly lying about what it says. Your choice. Are you speaking out of ignorance or deceit?
▶️ You will see Brexiteers cling to the argument that because the 🇬🇧 grew recently at a similar rate to 🇫🇷 and 🇩🇪 there is no Brexit damage. ▶️ But economists at @GoldmanSachs, @nberpubs and others are not measuring the outcome but rather modelling what 🇬🇧 itself would have achieved had it not done Brexit: i.e. no new trade barriers and no new red tape with our larges market. ▶️ Every serious organisation that has modelled this has found a significant and growing Brexit drag on where the 🇬🇧 economy like have been otherwise. ▶️ What they are saying is we’ve weakened the 🇬🇧 economy to be like 🇫🇷 and 🇩🇪 when we should be growing much faster. ▶️ This is what @nberpubs found in its 2025 paper — “The Economic Impact of Brexit” by Bloom, Bunn, Mizen, Smietanka & Thwaites: 1️⃣ “By 2025, Brexit had reduced 🇬🇧 GDP by 6% to 8%, with the impact accumulating gradually over time” 2️⃣ “Investment was reduced by between 12% and 18%” 3️⃣ “Employment by 3% to 4% and productivity by 3% to 4%” 4️⃣ “These forecasts were accurate over a 5-year horizon, but they underestimated the impact over a decade” “These large negative impacts reflect a combination of elevated uncertainty, reduced demand, diverted management time, and increased misallocation of resources from a protracted Brexit process.” ▶️ How much has this cost us by these calculations? Some £180–240 billion.
The Netherlands actually a great example of why Brexit was a mistake and UK growth would have been much higher had me remained. Let me happily explain. The Netherlands has an economy much more like Britain than France of Germany with a strong orientation to services, finance and science rather than manufacturing. It's an incredible economy we should be emulating in fact: with an astonishing trade to GDP ratio of 170%. It's managed to achieve of this inside the EU. Now had we remained in the EU, I am confident, as the research from OBR, NBER and other suggests our growth rate would have tracked more closely to the Netherlands than France or Germany. Both of which have specific problems neither the UK nor the Netherlands share to do with either in France with their labour markets and company formation, or in Germany with overexposure to the China and Russia shock due to a larger manufacturing sector.
To summarise my point: Brexit has led to lower growth and higher inflation, thus a worse fiscal position, necessitating higher interest rates and creating more expensive gilts than we otherwise would have had worsening our gap compared to France since 2020. To summarise @afneil point: the worsening gap with France is purely Truss and Reeves and unlinked to Brexit. Make your own mind up!
But this is what Starmer wants us to get closer to.
As one of the chroniclers of Brexit, I am truly inspired by the lengths Nick Clegg, Ben Judah and others are going to in order to get me to write a fifth book. They can't actually believe they would win a Rejoin referendum, can they?
