The end of the Brexit debate

I'd love to be able to guarantee that this will be my last post ever about the merits of the Brexit vote.

Given that the trade deal to replace the present transitional arrangements which runs out of the end of the year has yet to be agreed, and the present COVID-19 pandemic may or may not make an extension necessary, such a promise would be a hostage to fortune.

The Brexit argument, and the tribes into which it divided people, continues to cast a long shadow over UK politics including the discussion of Coronavirus issues. It is obvious, for example that for some of the more hard-line people on both sides of the former Brexit argument, the first test they apply when assessing what someone says or writes about COVID-19 is whether they were on the "right" side of the Brexit debate and some of them don't even try to hide it.

But for me, and I strongly suspect for the great majority of the electorate, certainly those who were not fierce partisans of either side, the debate about whether Britain should have left the EU is as dead, irrelevant, impossible to resolve and a matter of ancient history as the debate between Pharaoh Akhenaten and the Priests of Ra some 3,500 years ago.

Among other reasons, that is because COVID-19 has given both sides a perfect alibi. 

Although both economists who thought the impact of Brexit on the UK economy would be far more severe, and a small minority who thought it would actually make Britain better off, did exist, the overwhelming consensus among economists was that after fifteen years Britain would be worse off by a modest amount than we would have been had we not left, but better off than we were in 2016. 

One economic study suggested, for instance that Britain's economy might grow by 30% inside the EU or 24% out of it over the next decade and a half.  The Treasury analysis was something similar.

It should not be a controversial statement the majority of economists both at the time of Brexit and up to the beginning of this year thought that the UK economy would grow over the next fifteen years whether we were inside or outside the EU, but that it would have grown a little faster had we remained members. 

Unfortunately because of the catastrophist language thrown around by both sides and the inability of some people to understand the distinction between saying that something will make us "worse off" in the sense that the UK will be less rich than we would have been, and "worse off" than we are now, there may be people reading this who have trouble with it.

However, being economists rather than epidemiologists, none of us knew that there was going to be a pandemic this year.

Coronavirus will make Britain and the rest of the world significantly worse off in absolute terms in the short and medium term.

I hope nobody will disagree with me that the most optimistic (e.g. least bad)  estimates of what COVID-19 is doing and will do to the UK economy are far worse than what any reputable economist thought Brexit would do to the UK economy.

Given that this catastrophe, in economic terms as well as the cost in premature deaths which has rightly been the main concern, hit less than three months after Britain finally left the EU and while we were still in the one year transition phase, COVID-19 has guaranteed that we will never be able to answer the question of whether and how much Brexit made the UK better or worse off.

It has made any attempt to answer the question by looking at the economic outcome almost as  pointless and irrelevant as carrying on with an argument about whether it had been a good idea to have a car repainted after the car has been hit by a drunk-driver and written off.

Brexit is last year's argument. It's over.

It's time to move on, deal with COVID-19, and build a new society which can cope better with the next pandemic, including a new relationship with the EU 27 countries as neighbours and friends.