This Brexit experiment is failing

It is approximately five years of the £350m per week that the Leave campaign said would be gained by Britain leaving the EU.

In annual terms it is approximately 0.4 per cent of the UK’s GDP, which is about a quarter of the annual growth in GDP that the government included in the 2017 budget for the near future.

As the money will be leaving the UK without any benefit being received in return, then this will be a drag on UK GDP performance. This means that just to ‘stand still’ new trading outside of the EU needs to gain the UK at least 0.4 per cent pa.

Clearly, their assertion that the EU will ‘be falling over themselves to do a deal with the UK’ has proved to be wrong. Similarly, the assertion that there would be no costs associated with an exit has been proven to be wrong.

So far, Leavers have not committed to any projections on the benefits they expect to be gained from trading outside of the EU. But, when they do, we need to be careful about them. However, this goes beyond ‘numbers’.

The claims for ‘regaining sovereignty’ and ‘gaining control of borders’ were also assertions Leavers made with little or no proof provided on how they would be achieved and what impact they would have.

The evidence so far suggests that the experiment of Brexit is going to fail most, if not all, of its criteria of success.

David Taylor

Wombourne