That led to five years of instability. It damaged the standing of a series of prime ministers and prime ministers. And corporate investment was also halted. According to Prime Minister Jeremy Hunt, Brexit is the main reason for the UK economy’s dismal performance in recent years. Really?
If Hunt wants to find the real culprit, he doesn’t have to look far. Admittedly, the chaotic voting process helped little, but Germany and France did not fare much better. It was the lockdown and his own punitive tax hikes that crushed his growth.
A conference organized by the left-wing Resolution Foundation will never be a sympathetic venue for a Conservative prime minister. Still, Mr Hunt probably won a few brownie points from his audience yesterday for blaming Brexit for the slowdown in economic growth.
When asked about political instability, he claimed: “We went through Brexit. That led to the suspension of Parliament. That led to an incredibly difficult period politically… and then the pandemic hit.” If voters had voted to remain, we would have grown by 2% to 3% every year, inflation would have been contained, real wages would have risen and everyone would have been happier.
Maybe it just worked out with the people in the room. The problem is that, upon closer inspection, Hunt’s argument makes no sense at all. Firstly, leaving the EU did not lead to the suspension of Parliament. It was Theresa May’s foolish decision to call an early general election and the disastrously incompetent campaign that followed that cost the Conservative Party its majority.
And years of political instability were only caused by organized efforts to overturn the referendum result. If everyone had accepted that outcome in 2016, we would have been able to move forward quickly and spend our time much more productively thinking about how to make Brexit a success.
More importantly, it doesn’t match data from across the continent. After six months of zero GDP growth in the past quarter, Germany is expected to enter a full-blown recession early in the new year. Economic growth in France is once again slumping towards zero. If Brexit is the explanation for our country’s poor performance, why are the countries that remained doing so poorly?
In fact, it was the lockdown that crushed the economy. During the pandemic, we racked up huge debts, destroyed work ethics with furlough schemes and working from home, created backlogs in health services and other public services, and undermined our productivity potential. .
As a result, we imposed huge tax increases to try to get our finances back on track. This included a hugely damaging increase in corporate taxes that hurt competitiveness and undermined incentives to address frozen thresholds that had caused tax revenues to skyrocket. By again trying to blame Brexit, Mr Hunt is simply shirking his own responsibility for his current predicament, as well as that of his boss, Chancellor and former chancellor Rishi Sunak. .
It is a shameful avoidance and he should be ashamed. Instead of trying to divert attention, he should start correcting the mistakes we made during the lockdown. We need to get people back into the workforce, we need to get businesses to invest again, and we need to move much faster than we have in the past to embrace the deregulatory opportunities created by Brexit. there is.
Blaming Brexit may get some cheap applause from some quarters, but it will do nothing to get Britain’s economy back on track.