A new front in the Brexiteers’ war on reality

The Policy Exchange, which calls itself an independent charity think tank but whose funding is unknown and whose relationship with the Tory right is closer than that of Siamese twins, is at it again.

This time it has found – like other Brexiteer “experts” before it – that the impact of leaving the EU on exports is nowhere near as bad as we thought. Apparently, all that work by the Office for Budget Responsibility, the LSE and every other academic and independent economist has been wrong, wrong, wrong.

It turns out that we were always bad at exporting to the EU, that we were especially hard hit by Covid and that a change in tax breaks which coincided with Brexit damaged key sectors of the British economy. Nothing to do with Brexit at all! Fancy that!

The report, accurately titled Less Than Meets The Eye, comes with a foreword written by the former chancellor and Remain campaigner Jeremy Hunt, although it is a strange kind of endorsement. Hunt finds various fences to sit on, criticising both what he sees as “flawed” and overly pessimistic impact reports but also the “hyperbolic” Brexit boosterism of the likes of Boris Johnson. As we used to say in the Brexit wars, he wants to have his cake and eat it.

Hunty shows what a poor choice he was as chancellor when he writes “the half-decade of political instability that followed Brexit took its toll on governance and neither business, nor the population at large, would thank the government for reopening these questions”. Strange because I can think of a lot of businesses who would like nothing better, and quite a large segment of the population too.

In essence, the report claims that the impact of Brexit has been overstated by selective use of statistics, but offers its own very selective use of statistics to ‘prove’ this.

The economist Jonathan Portes, says “it says there are a bunch of other things going on at the same time which complicate the interpretation of the statistics, and that’s true, there always are. It doesn’t negate the fact that UK goods exports have performed very badly since Brexit, and considerably worse in the years running up to Brexit, and there is a wide variety of analysis that concludes that Brexit is at least partly responsible for that.”

The trade expert David Henig goes further, calling the report “utterly lacking in credibility”, “focusing on small illustrations that deny any impact of changed trading arrangements” and “just another attempt to selectively pick some evidence to show why the UK-EU economic relationship defies the normal rules of economics. It doesn’t.”

I fear there will never be an end to the right attempting to rewrite Brexit history. It is interesting that The Policy Exchange, like all the others, does not go as far as claiming that leaving the EU has delivered any economic benefits. I have yet to read one that claims the British economy is soaring as a result, just that things are not as bad as claimed.

The Brexiteers would clearly prefer it if the horrendous mistake which they backed was now treated like some ancient, private family scandal that should never be mentioned in polite society and which no one should ever try to solve or even address, while the latest expert advice is not to talk about it at all but to sweep it under the carpet.

But the growing recognition of the truth means that from time to time they will emerge with magical analysis of why everyone else is wrong and only the pure of heart can see that numerous special circumstances just happened to hit the UK uniquely hard at just the same time.

This is what the Policy Exchange have now done. They are kidding themselves, and all of us.