With Brexit, the UK has achieved the gold standard of self-harm
In my last column I suggested that Brexit is the biggest act of self-harm inflicted on the British economy since the return to the gold standard in 1925. Even arch-Brexiter Jacob Rees-Mogg has recently admitted that implementing the next stage of the bureaucracy associated with Brexit would be an “act of self-harm”. I did not make that up.
As minister for Brexit opportunities he has the sisyphean task of searching for such opportunities. One of the few he is reported to have come up with is the chance to abandon EU rules on the manufacture of vacuum cleaners, thereby making them more powerful and less environmentally friendly. I am not making that up either.
Why is the cartoonists’ favourite Lord Snooty character having such problems? The answer is staring him and British business in the face: Brexit is proving an unmitigated disaster and having a seriously deleterious impact on the economy. It is aggravating the inflation problem and having such a drastic impact on output, and hence living standards, that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development forecasts the UK will next year be the worst-performing economy in the G20 apart from, er, Russia.
Our dreadful prime minister – still in place at the time of writing – talks of growth and investment. But the truth is that investment has collapsed under Brexit, a development that is hardly a signal for growth.
As the saying goes, “those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad”. When the Conservative chairman of the Commons defence committee, Tobias Ellwood, recently pointed out that the answer to repairing the economic damage the UK has inflicted on itself, as well as to the otherwise intractable problem of the Northern Ireland protocol, would be to
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