Chancellor refuses to acknowledge the Brexit elephant in the room - Yorkshire Post Letters

Jeremy Hunt's Autumn Statement began with mention of the adverse effects of the Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine which, he considered, created a £55bn 'black hole' in Government funding.

What he did not mention was the 'elephant in the room': Brexit. Recently there has been an increasing deluge of financial experts stating their views.

Michael Saunders, who left the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) this summer, stated: “The UK economy as a whole has been permanently damaged by Brexit. It’s reduced the economy’s potential output significantly (and) eroded business investment. If we hadn’t had Brexit, we probably wouldn’t be talking about an austerity budget this week. The need for tax rises (and) spending cuts wouldn’t be there, if Brexit hadn’t reduced the economy’s potential output so much.”

Professor Swati Dhingra, a present member of the MPC, said that food prices were 6 per cent higher because of Brexit, and continued: “It’s undeniable now that we’re seeing a much bigger slowdown in trade in the UK compared to the rest of the world. The simple way of thinking about what Brexit has done to the economy is that in the period after the referendum there was the biggest depreciation that any of the world’s four major economies have seen overnight. That contributed to increasing prices and reduced wages.”

Perhaps the most telling admission comes from the assistant editor of the Telegraph, Jeremy Warner, who recently admitted: “Downbeat predictions by the Treasury and others on the economic consequences of leaving the EU, contemptuously dismissed at the time by Brexit campaigners as ‘Project Fear’, have been on a long fuse, but they have turned out to be overwhelmingly correct, and if anything have underestimated both the calamitous loss of international standing and the scale of the damage that six years of policy confusion and ineptitude has imposed on the country.”

The Office for Budget Responsibility has always maintained that Brexit will cause a long-term loss of 4 per cent of the UK's GDP. A recent analysis by the Centre for European Reform found that by the end of 2021 UK GDP was already 5.2 per cent smaller than it would have been had we not left the EU. In fiscal terms this equates exactly to the £55bn 'black hole' in Government revenue.

In 2016, we were lied to by a group of Conservatives obsessed by ideology and in Boris Johnson's case, a greed for power. In 2019, the same group, supported this time by the whole Conservative Party, lied to us in order to maintain power. They have been disastrous for the country. We should not forgive them.