The original “bastard”

John Redwood was one of the original “bastards” that John Major should have thrown out of his cabinet – and 30 years later, he is still wittering on about Brexit.

The man whose finest hour in politics was attempting to sing along with Hen Wlad Fy Nhada when made Welsh secretary, is the author of a new Daily Telegraph piece: “We’re being lied to about the ‘benefits’ of the Single Market”.

Like the rest of the motley crew that pushed Brexit on the British people, Redwood is now obviously terrified that the tide is turning. And so we have crazed headlines about Starmer taking us back into the EU, he won’t. There are other wild assertions, such as that you can’t measure the damage Brexit has done to the British economy – you can indeed measure it – and now Redwood is claiming that the Single Market is a disaster, and that we are well rid of it.

To make this claim, he needs some wonderfully agile intellectual acrobatics. For a start, he thinks the single market is “not so much a market as a way of grabbing power and exercising control”. Power and control over dishwasher standards and widget sizes is apparently a sly way to take over the UK.

It is remarkable that, while a member of the single market, Britain maintained its independent nuclear deterrent and foreign policy, and its own budgets and army, as did all the other members of the EU. Perhaps we got out just in time? Well, a quick glance across to the continent shows that those EU member states still have control of those things.

Then, and I really love this one: “The UK economy grew by two thirds in the two decades before 1972 when we joined the EEC and its common market. Our growth dropped down to a half in the two decades that followed.” Which seems to suggest that the Thatcherite/Monetarist experiment was a total disaster – the very experiment that Redwood campaigned for, championed, promoted, helped organise and believed in, the one that we are constantly told transformed Britain into a dynamic, efficient and successful country. It’s good to hear the truth at last.

Then, Redwood writes, the 1991-2 recession was caused by the EU and the Exchange Rate Mechanism. He finds no space to mention the Tory party’s complete mishandling of Britain’s membership of the Exchange Rate Mechanism, or its sudden and disastrous decision to withdraw from it, with all the catastrophic fluctuations that caused in interest rates and the value of sterling. It was all that pesky Single Market’s fault.

The manufacturing industry was, claims Redwood, destroyed by tariff free competition from the EU, and not by the Tory government’s appalling monetarist experiment. It is rather strange for a free-market supporter to complain that free and fair competition destroyed British manufacturing – very odd.

Redwood also seems to have forgotten that the Single Market was the brainchild of one M. Thatcher. Maybe he doesn’t want to mention her role in the “disaster”. Ever the gentleman.

Now apparently the single market is complex, and rule bound, costly and protectionist. Which is weird because we have kept most of the rules and desperately need to comply with them in order to sell anything into our single largest market – which is the Single Market.

He then tells us that our current debt and borrowing rules have been inherited from the EU and that he wants to set us free. How? Yes you guessed it – with lower taxes, fewer limits on borrowing and “working with US corporations” which control the future. So, Trussenomics again.

Let us then not rely on Redwood for an impartial or even competent analysis of our economic history, as he has, as the Americans say, “skin in the game”.
Let me just leave you with the analysis of the late Professor Nicholas Craft, perhaps the pre-eminent economic historian of our age, in a paper he wrote in 2016 for the Social Market Foundation:

“Since the UK joined the European Economic Community in 1973 up to the eve of the recent crisis (the credit crunch), its relative growth performance vis-à-vis major European economies… has improved. While growth slowed down everywhere from the 1970s after the ‘golden age of post-war growth’ the extent of the slowdown was more marked in France and Germany than in the UK.”

“From the mid-1990s to the crisis, UK growth was the strongest of these three countries… after the 1970s relative economic decline vis-à-vis France and Germany ceased at least through 2007.”

In short, we were falling behind France and Germany and were the sick man of Europe until we joined the EU, got rid of trade barriers and tariffs and helped create the Single Market – it transformed the British economy.
The credit crunch ended that trend. Then in 2016, Redwood and his Brexit supporting friends took what was left of Britain’s economic model, and buried it.