Chancellor cites the UK’s exit from EU alongside austerity and Truss’s mini-budget as issues affecting economy
Good morning. In a much-praised FT column yesterday, Stephen Bush argued that one problem facing the Conservatives today is that “an essential condition for entry into the upper echelons of [the party] is being willing to at least pretend that you think taking Britain out of the EU was a good idea”. As Bush memorably put it, “this is a never-ending lobotomy for the Tories”.
But, to a much lesser extent, Labour has also had a problem with Brexit truth telling. At the last election Keir Starmer knew that he would only win with the support of people who voted to leave the EU in 2016 and as a result Labour avoided any language on Brexit that implied that this group might have been wrong.
Starmer and Reeves are expected to argue that, if it hadn’t been for Brexit, this type of downgrade would not have been needed, and to cite official figures suggesting that if Britain had not left the European Union the economy would be about £120 billion bigger by 2035 than current forecasts suggest it will be.
The message is simple: Farage is ultimately to blame as the man who delivered Brexit with “easy sloganeering” then walked away from the aftermath rather than putting in the hard yards. Or, to put it another way: Farage, not us, is responsible for putting up your taxes.
Austerity, Brexit, and the ongoing impact of Liz Truss’s mini-budget, all of those things have weighed heavily on the UK economy. Already, people thought that the UK economy would be 4% smaller because of Brexit. Now, of course, we are undoing some of that damage by the deal that we did with the EU earlier this year … but there is no doubting that the impact of Brexit is severe and long lasting and that’s why we are trying to do trade deals around the world, US, India, but most importantly with the EU.