The Guardian’s in-house Brexit apologist

It is sometimes easy to forget that there are actually two main types of Brexit supporters. Both are fantasists but the one we hear most from are the hard right Tory kind, who think leaving the EU is a chance to slash workers’ rights, destroy human rights, unleash “real capitalism” and create a Singapore-on-Thames for the benefit of an ultra-rich elite. The rest will have to accept the meagre rewards that trickle down from the top.

But the second group are still there, the hard left who hated the EU because they thought it was some kind of pro-capitalist, anti-worker rights conspiracy. People like Jeremy Corbyn wanted to leave the EU so they could be Cuba-on-Thames.

That kind of thinking helps explain why Larry Elliot, in The Guardian, has written a column saying it would be bad for the UK to re-join the sinking ship that is the EU. In his view, the EU is a hot-bed of far right, anti-immigration governments and an economic basket case.

The Guardian, which is the only pro-EU broadsheet around, is therefore arguing against re-joining with almost exactly the same arguments as the Daily Torygraph.

Larry Elliot, the paper’s economics editor, tries to justify his stance by once again wheeling out the ridiculous and desperate last-minute claims by George Osborne in the days and hours before the referendum, when he could feel the result slipping away from him. No one then or since has taken them seriously, but Osborne has left a nice stick with which to beat the Remainers. Remarkably, The Guardian is now using it.

No, the British economy did not collapse, house prices did not implode and there was no need for an emergency budget the day after the referendum result, we have known that for seven years now. But the pound did collapse and Brexit has been doing serious damage to the British economy ever since.

Elliot does not even mention the work by the Office for Budget Responsibility that shows Brexit will cost 4% of UK GDP. Nor does he mention the work by many other serious and well-respected economists and research organisations that think the damage is far worse.

He does not mention Brexit’s role in the collapse in trade intensity, damage to UK importers and the added border costs, the collapse of Foreign Direct Investment and higher inflation.

Somehow the investments by Nissan and Microsoft in the UK show that all is fine and dandy, while the rapid advance of China and America in new hi-tech industries is enough to show that the EU is ossifying and a failure. Unfortunately, the UK’s achievements in these areas are generally far worse than even the EU’s.

Funnily enough Elliot also claims in his column that “Brexit provided opportunities to do things differently, but those opportunities have so far not been exploited.” I find it hard to believe he now appears to agree with the right-wing Brexit ultra-camp that thinks Brexit has been betrayed by the “woke blob”, because I am pretty sure they think The Guardian is the house magazine of the “woke blob”. But what opportunities he sees are not made clear.

Instead, we are told that the arguments for re-joining are dead, because the EU is an economic basket case. I can only assume he wrote this article before The Resolution Foundation’s report on how much wealthier the French and Germans are than us. If we were as tragically inept as the Germans and the French, we would all be £8,000 a year better off.

As for the rise of the far right on the continent, Elliot seems to look at Brexit as having acted as a political safety valve for the UK – it allowed the political energy of the extremists to be dissipated. But the rise of Reform, the fascist riot at the Cenotaph, a government trying to illegally ship asylum seekers to Rwanda and threatening to leave the European Convention on Human Rights – these things are happening here, now.

It is the UK government that is threatening to leave the ECHR, tear up human rights laws and overrule the courts, so that they can pander to the far right. The so-called “safety valve of Brexit” is really a government in hock to the bigots.

Re-joining the EU would not solve all of these problems. The UK has heaped self-harm upon self-harm. Brexit is just one more self-imposed disaster.

But Elliot need not worry about re-joining the EU and being dragged down even further by Brussels. In our current state it is the EU that wouldn’t have us.