UK significantly worse off under all Brexit scenarios - official forecast

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

The UK would be significantly worse off under all possible Brexit scenarios in 15 years’ time, according to a benchmark economic analysis produced by a range of government departments including the Treasury.

The keenly anticipated document concludes that GDP would be 0.6% lower under the Chequers plan in 2035-36 – although that has been ditched after a revolt from the Conservative right – and 7.7% lower in the event of the UK crashing out with no deal, when compared with the UK remaining in the European Union.

Officials modelled every scenario across a range, comparing them in nominal terms. Under the worst-case, no-deal scenario, GDP would be 10.7% lower than if the UK had stayed in the EU in 15 years’ time, assuming there is no longer any net migration into the UK from the EU and European Economic Area (EEA) after Brexit.

Before publication of the analysis, Philip Hammond, the chancellor, said the UK would be worse off in the future after Brexit, saying: “If you look at this purely from an economic point of view, yes there will be a cost to leaving the European Union because there will be impediments to our trade.”

-snip-

Dan Sabbagh
Wed 28 Nov 2018 12.36 GMT


Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/nov/28/uk-significantly-worse-off-under-all-brexit-scenarios-official-forecast-gdp

[Raster]

1. Great Britain, you have been sold a nationalist Brexit pile of shit...

...most of you really do not want to leave the European Union. And let's cut to the chase, there is NEVER going to be a beneficial scenario for the UK and Europe by breaking up. This is EXACTLY what the nationalists and fascists (Putin*) want to happen.

TURN. BACK. BEFORE. IT. IS. TOO. LATE.

Time to *metaphorically* hang, draw and quarter Nigel "fucking" Farage* and Boris "bullshit" Johnson* in Hyde Park.

[Pope George Ringo II]

2. Voting for economic sanctions against ourselves was never going to work out.

I'm actually happy Trump crapped on the deal because I don't want May's deal to pass. Either it gets us one step closer to a second referendum, or it makes for an awful Brexit. The worse Brexit is, the faster we can apply for re-admission to the EU. Of course, we'll never see the rebate again, the pound is done, and we'll probably be forced into Schengen, but that's not entirely terrible.

Still, sometimes it helps to see numbers attached to help quantify a disaster.

[LiberalFighter]

3. To me it just didn't make sense for Britain to exit as it was apparent

there were going to be economic disadvantages to.

[yardwork]

4. Too bad these analyses weren't discussed before the BREXIT vote in 2016.

[GulfCoast66]

5. You forgot this

It was discussed nonstop.

[Denzil_DC]

6. well, you sort of have a valid point, but not quite.

Prime Minister at the time David "I'm outta here" Cameron forbade any civil servant from doing any forward planning for the possibility of a pro-Brexit vote. They could think about it, but they weren't allowed to write anything down.

But the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, George Osborne, did make some dire predictions about the possible aftermath. Many other experts and specialist bodies also carried out analyses (including the Scottish Government, which has been ahead of the game on Brexit all along, and still is), and many voices in the Remain camp saw what would result quite clearly (including not a few UK DUers).

During the campaign, they were dismissed as "Project Fear", the term "fake news" not having gained currency yet. Others in the hard-line Brexit camp felt that any economic downsides were irrelevant because what mattered was "taking our country back". Some went so far as to argue that the UK had gotten "too soft", and a period of economic pain and struggle would be good for the national soul.

Even after the vote, Theresa May's government failed to carry out any detailed analyses. Brexit secretary David Davis repeatedly claimed they had drawn up impact papers, but when parliament finally demanded to see them, it turned out they didn't exist:

David Davis told a committee of MPs on Wednesday that the UK government had produced no economic forecasts on the likely impact of Brexit on various sectors of the economy.

It seemed to stand in marked contrast to many of the things he had said before about analysis being carried out by his Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU).

See if you can identify where and when Davis has previously talked about the impact studies and analysis being carried out on a sectoral basis.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/dec/07/what-brexit-impact-papers-quiz-on-what-david-davis-said-when

I've no idea what Davis did during his time in office, but he seems to have been positively Trumpian in his work ethic.

So the impact papers had to be hastily cobbled together with all the insight of a team of under-performing high-schoolers:

The threadbare state of government preparations for Brexit was exposed on Thursday as civil service reports once heralded for providing “excruciating detail” on the impact of leaving the EU were criticised for containing little more than padding, repetition and plagiarism.

Months of pressure for disclosure of the economic analysis culminated, several hours before the Christmas parliamentary recess, with the publication of most of the 850 pages recently provided to a Commons select committee by the Brexit secretary, David Davis.

Davis had previously claimed there was extensive Whitehall analysis of “about 50 cross-cutting sectors, [for] what is going to happen to them”. But when a Labour-led vote demanded these forecasts be released to MPs, the Brexit secretary said he had been misunderstood and told the committee no impact assessments existed, only analysis of each sector’s current dependency on the EU.

Nevertheless, the limited nature of the unredacted civil service reports that were finally made public on Thursday left many observers shocked. “There is little overarching analysis by the government, ” said Lord Jay, the former head of the Foreign Office who is now acting chair of the Lords Brexit committee. “No conclusions are drawn with regard to the UK’s future relationship with the EU.”

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/dec/21/civil-service-reports-brexit-criticised-padding-plagiarism

It's only in the last few months, as the deadline pressure has mounted, that the details have seriously been revealed and discussed. And none of it's comforting.

[yardwork]

7. I watched it all unfold here in the U.S. The pro-BREXIT propaganda dominated.

The pro-BREXIT campaign was coordinated, highly funded, based on blatant lies (BREXIT will save so much money! Pay for national health care!) and appealed to nationalism and xenophobia.

The Remain effort was almost invisible.

[Denzil_DC]

8. I actually live in the UK. I'll agree it dominated.

It had dominated for years, even before the idea of a referendum was firmed up. It was largely instigated by Boris Johnson:

Johnson, sacked by The Times in 1988 for fabricating a quote, made his mark in Brussels not through fair and balanced reporting, but through extreme euro-scepticism. He seized every chance to mock or denigrate the EU, filing stories that were undoubtedly colourful but also grotesquely exaggerated or completely untrue.

The Telegraph loved it. So did the Tory Right. Johnson later confessed: 'Everything I wrote from Brussels, I found was sort of chucking these rocks over the garden wall and I listened to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door over in England as everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory party, and it really gave me this I suppose rather weird sense of power.'

Johnson’s reports also had an amazing, explosive effect on the rest of Fleet Street. They were much more fun than the usual dry and rather complex Brussels fare. News editors on other papers, particularly but not exclusively the tabloids, started pressing their own correspondents to match them. By the time I arrived in Brussels editors only wanted stories about faceless Brussels eurocrats imposing absurd rules on Britain, or scheming Europeans ganging up on us, or British prime ministers fighting plucky rearguard actions against a hostile continent.

Much of Fleet Street seemed unable to view the EU through any other prism. It was the only narrative it was interested in. Stories that did not bash Brussels, stories that acknowledged the EU’s many achievements, stories that recognised that Britain had many natural allies in Europe and often won important arguments, almost invariably ended up on the spike.

https://www.indy100.com/article/a-journalist-has-shared-a-story-about-boris-johnson-that-completely-undermines-his-authority-on-the-eu--bkoHJPBuVZ

The BBC didn't help because of its long-term infatuation with Nigel Farage, giving him and UKIP many hours of unwarranted appearances on shows such as the political question-and-answer panel show Question Time at a time when his party had no MPs and few MEPs.

I can't agree that the Remain effort was almost invisible - the debate was long and lively. It was simply overwhelmed, having to beat back against many years of cheap indoctrination on top of the onslaught of simplistic, populist tripe the Leave campaign propagated. It wasn't an atmosphere that encouraged a reasoned, detailed debate on economics or pretty much any other issue.

[yardwork]

9. Putin made skillful use of idiots like Boris and Trump.

As you say, decades of extremist lies and propaganda on both sides of the Atlantic, appealing to people's fears and encouraging them to blame immigrants for problems caused by a globalizing economy - problems exacerbated by the right wing politicians - softened us up. Made BREXIT and Trump possible.