Report on Effects of "No Deal" Brexit Revealed

[Denzil_DC]

Last edited Thu Oct 19, 2017, 06:44 PM - Edit history (1)

Jolyon Maugham QC may be familiar if you've been following some of the legal proceedings and arguments about Brexit. He's an ardent Remainer. He tweeted the following this evening (you can access the thread by clicking on the tweet below, but I've transcribed and copied the relevant bits):

Link to tweet

Jo Maugham QC? @JolyonMaugham 4 hours ago
So a wee bird has dropped into my inbox what a major newspaper has described as a report from HM Treasury. THREAD


Jo Maugham QC?@JolyonMaugham 4 hours ago
It deals with the consequences of us leaving the EU without a deal - exactly what the "wing-growers" are pushing on us now. /1


Jo Maugham QC? @JolyonMaugham 4 hours ago
"Wing-growers" because their strategy is to leap off a cliff and believe very hard that we will grow wings. Would you like some extracts? /2


Jo Maugham QC? @JolyonMaugham 4 hours ago
Thought so. Coming right up. But first let me tell you that it dates to shortly before the Referendum vote. /3


Jo Maugham QC? @JolyonMaugham 4 hours ago
Ok. Well, the headline is that it won't be as pleasant as @KateHoeyMP and her Hard Right pals told you last night. We won't grow wings. /4



Jo Maugham QC? @JolyonMaugham 4 hours ago
We won't have a very open economy. Which isn't great if the magic plan is to be a great trading nation. /5



Jo Maugham QC? @JolyonMaugham 4 hours ago
Woah! It won't just hurt our access to the EU. It will also hurt our access to over 50 other countries. How many does that leave left? /6



Jo Maugham QC? @JolyonMaugham 4 hours ago
And in relation to the world's biggest market, we'll have worse access than Yemen. Dunno about you, but that doesn't sound good to me. /7



Jo Maugham QC? @JolyonMaugham 4 hours ago
Man! 61% of our agri-food exports will face average tariffs of between 36% and 70%. Still, it'll be good for (inadvertent) set-aside. /8



Jo Maugham QC? @JolyonMaugham 4 hours ago
How much of our economy is made up of services again? I can never remember. Really? That much? Ooh. /9



Jo Maugham QC? @JolyonMaugham 3 hours ago
But, I mean, lots of countries trade on WTO terms just fine. Don't they? Lots of advanced economies? Are you sure? /10



Jo Maugham QC? @JolyonMaugham 3 hours ago
So prices are gonna go up for consumers or our producers are gonna get shafted. But the wings. Think of the wings. /11



Jo Maugham QC? @JolyonMaugham 3 hours ago
Still, at least we won't be a rule-taker. We'll make our own. Take Back Control and all that. Won't we? /12



Jo Maugham QC?? @JolyonMaugham 3 hours ago
Remember what it used to be like? If the big guy knocked over your pint he bought you another, because you had lots of mates. /13



Jo Maugham QC? @JolyonMaugham 3 hours ago
To compete, we'll slash environmental standards and labour protection. "Caution - some might argue that we should emulate" that model. /14



Jo Maugham QC? @JolyonMaugham 3 hours ago
And the great argument for Leaving? That the EU stops us trading with the rest of the world? /15



Jo Maugham QC? @JolyonMaugham 3 hours ago
56% of our trade will be hit if we leave on WTO terms. 44% is quite a lot. 56% is even more. /16



Jo Maugham QC? @JolyonMaugham 3 hours ago
Only 7% of foreign investors view a substantial decline in access to the Single Market positively. 80% would lose a reason to invest. /17



Jo Maugham QC? @JolyonMaugham 3 hours ago
Farming subsidies. Gove can promise you'll keep them. But, you know: it's Michael Gove. /18



Jo Maugham QC?? @JolyonMaugham 3 hours ago
Up to 28.6% of profitable farms will become loss making. But that's fine because, you know, umm... it was on the tip of my tongue. /19



Jo Maugham QC? @JolyonMaugham 3h3 hours ago
Still. Onwards and over. Just wait til you feel those little nubs, pushing through your shoulders, where the wings will grow. /Ends

Maugham has been prodding James Cleverly MP about it on Twitter:

Link to tweet

Jo Maugham QC @JolyonMaugham
Paging @JamesCleverly... James? Are you there, mate?

Jo Maugham QC retweeted,
Jo Maugham QC @JolyonMaugham
So a wee bird has dropped into my inbox what a major newspaper has described as a report from HM Treasury. THREAD
11:56 AM - 19 Oct 2017

Which hasn't gone down well:

Link to tweet

James Cleverly? @JamesCleverly 2h
Replying to @JolyonMaugham

“Mate” if I wanted to read your obsessive outpourings I would follow you. I don’t, so I don’t.

One Leave-supporting journalist was very quick to join what turned into a Twitter pile-on:

Link to tweet

Christopher Snowdon? @cjsnowdon 36m36 minutes ago

Big news, James. The intrepid Mr Maugham has read a report that was published 18 months ago. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/517415/treasury_analysis_economic_impact_of_eu_membership_web.pdf …

Unfortunately for Mr Snowdon, it looks like the report he links to himself, HM Treasury analysis: the long-term economic impact of EU membership and the alternatives, a command paper released in April 2016, doesn't feature any of the phrasing Maugham quotes in the screencaps above, so it's presumably a different one.

I hope Maugham isn't the only one who's received a copy of this report, whatever its provenance, and that some in our media follow it up and make a splash, at the very least.

If Labour was on surer ground over Brexit at the moment, I'd hope it would form the basis for a spectacular Prime Minister's Questions session and some interesting scenes in committee.

Whatever, let's hope it's not the last we hear about it ...


ETA: Somebody has used Thread Reader to produce an "unrolled" version of the above thread, which may be easier to read and link to: https://tttthreads.com/thread/921068161692205057

[LeftishBrit]

1. Glad Maugham is pressing on with this. 'Cleverly' is not well-named!

[Denzil_DC]

2. The instant pushback from Snowdon reads like his cage has been well and truly rattled!

Link to tweet

Christopher Snowdon ✔ @cjsnowdon

Jolyon Maugham is getting 1000s of RTs by pretending the Treasury’s April 2016 Brexit predictions have just been leaked to him. Tragic.

He's still insisting this report is the command paper I mentioned in the OP. The Brexiteer trolls he's attracting are lapping it up. He's supposed to be some sort of journalist. It took me less than five minutes to disprove his claim.

I've searched the PDF for key phrases in Maugham's screencapped quotes, and they don't appear anywhere in the command paper.

Some of the screencaps include superscript note numbers, which I don't think is standard in command papers, and suggests to me that Maugham hasn't paraphrased those quotes, as if he had, why would he include note references?

[Denzil_DC]

3. Maugham has attempted to engage with self-appointed naysayer-in-chief Snowdon.

He points out what I mentioned above - that Snowdon's focusing on the wrong report:

Link to tweet

Jo Maugham QC ✔ @JolyonMaugham
Replying to @cjsnowdon

I'm sure you'll let me know, Chris, when you find the paragraphs I've tweeted in the publicly available HMT forecast...

Christopher Snowdon ✔ @cjsnowdon

It's the predictions that are old news, not the text, although a lot of the text is exactly the same too. http://velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/money-for-old-rope-with-jolyon-maugham.html …

So there's Snowdon immediately shifting the goalposts when challenged, from "Oh, this is old news, he's citing quotes from a published command paper from last year as some sort of scoop, aren't remainers just the thickest? Do chime in my friendly Leavebots" to "the tune sounds roughly the same and we voted Leave anyway, so we don't need to waste precious intellectual capacity actually thinking about anything."

But Maugham's having none of it:

Link to tweet

Jo Maugham QC ✔ @JolyonMaugham

But (most of) the snips are not predictions, Christopher. They are objectively verifiable facts. Why don't you tackle them?

Snowdon's response if you click through to view this whole tweet thread below is all too predictably *fingers in ears* "La la la can't hear you" (with echoes from bots and blow-ins):

Link to tweet

If a simple 20-odd tweet thread can rattle Leavemaniacs' cages so severely, imagine what might happen if these conclusions gained wider currency!