Brexit caps 40 years of Conservative failure that Starmer fears to oppose
F irst we hear from the International Monetary Fund that the UK economy is bottom of the G7 class. Then come the absolutely disastrous export figures for October-December from the Office for National Statistics: the volume of exports was more than 9% below the pre-pandemic average. This compares with a double-digit increase in Italy’s exports – er, yes, a country which is still a member of the European single market.
There was a time when devaluation of the pound revived exports. No longer. Brexit and the damage wreaked by a succession of Conservative governments have seen to that. The pound has been spectacularly devalued against the dollar and the euro since the Brexit referendum. This has done precious little to boost exports but has had an all too obvious effect on import prices. Hence inflation in the UK is worse than in other industrial countries – thanks to, guess what, Brexit.
The nation is slowly waking up to the disaster. It was always going to be personal experience and the obvious malfunctioning of ways of life we took for granted that would drive the message home.
The thinning of supermarket shelves was an early sign. The dreadful delays at channel ports have been another. Ministers’ attempts to blame anything but Brexit have made them an even bigger laughing stock than they already were. Multinationals, for obvious reasons, no longer see Britain as a base for their operations in the single market, because it isn’t.
I say Britain advisedly, for, as Rishi Sunak has noted, in remarks which qualify for the expression “blowing the gaff”, that one part of the UK remains in the single market: the part, Northern Ireland, which President Joe Biden visited last week and where he urged the Democratic Unionist party to
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