Lovely bit of casual racism there.
You can’t do this when you’re in the EU.
Argh, did I post racism here? I sincerely hope not. 
Please let me know what was wrong ok?
P. S.: to be honest our English-teacher told us that “people from England” are very polite, standing nicely in queues at the bus and all that stuff. He/she did not say “people from the UK”.
The bit where you said that British people used to be nice people.
Are you pulling my leg? I did not write “British prople” and I wrote “polite” and not “nice”. Sorry, I fail to find racism in my post. However, if there is some, then of course it is unintentional and I apologize!
Hi
I did not vote to join the EU.
I voted to join the Common Market.
They are two entirely different things.
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Try telling Bruce 
We’ve been through this, When the EEC became the EU Britain was a full member and your elected representatives were part of the creation of the EU. You don’t get to vote on every bit of legislation created by your elected representatives but you can throw them out at the next election if you disapprove of what they do.
Whether you like it or not Britain was a part of the creation of the EU.
Did you vote for the trans pacific trade deal?
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With 40 members of staff and an annual budget of £3.9 million, the Office of Budgetary Responsibility is one of our smaller Quangos, yet among the most powerful. Mere politicians are expected to defer to it – a brief episode of insubordination from Kwasi Kwarteng led to dire retribution. Invariably the OBR is described as “impartial” – though Guido Fawkes has noted it is run by protégés of Torsten Bell, who was Labour’s Director of Policy under Ed Miliband. Though the OBR’s economic forecasts are treated with great deference they often turn out to be wildly wrong.
One of the well-publicised claims from the OBR is that Brexit will result in the UK economy being four per cent smaller “in the medium term” than it otherwise would have been. Given there are so many other factors involved, these claims are impossible to fully prove or disprove. The dire warnings from The Treasury during the referendum did not transpire. Sarah Beament, writing on this site, has pointed out that since 2016 “the UK economy has grown as much as, or more than, all G7 European peers.” The IMF forecasts that this will continue. “That’s despite Brexit,” the remainers quickly retort.
The Centre for European Reform put out a report last year estimating that UK GDP is 5.2 per cent lower due to Brexit. Dr Graham Gudgin, the Chief Economic Adviser to Policy Exchange, rebutted its “use of an implausible and flawed methodology to draw premature conclusions.” Gudgin felt that “a more plausible comparison, between the UK and the other G7 countries, shows no visible impact from Brexit at all.”
Jonathan Portes, of UK in a Changing Europe, says the costs have amounted to around 2.5 per cent of lost GDP. During the same conference, Julian Jessop of the Institute of Economic Affairs said GDP was around one per cent smaller than it would have been, but added that “the short-term impact was always going be negative, before the benefits of bespoke regulation and reduced trade barriers with the rest of the world kicked in.”
The EU has already changed significantly since 2016. So for a valid comparison we need to consider what it would be like for the UK being a member now, rather than then. Rather harder would be to consider what it would be like in five, 10 or 15 years. Similarly, just because Brexit gives us opportunities for deregulation and free trade, the extent and pace with which those opportunities are taken is a matter of choice.
Still, since the OBR had decided to enter into this territory, I thought it would be useful to discover more about their assumptions. Had they given due consideration to the advantages as well as the disadvantages? In the first Freedom of Information request, I asked:
This FOI request relates to the Edinburgh Reforms, the Government’s plans regarding “repealing and replacing EU-era Solvency II – the rules governing insurers’ balance sheets which is expected to unlock over £100 billion of private investment for productive assets such as UK infrastructure.”
Please advise:
What account of the Edinburgh Reforms have you taken, so far, in producing your analysis and writing about the potential effects of Brexit on the economy and public finances?
What account of the Edinburgh Reforms do you plan to take in producing your analysis and writing about the potential effects of Brexit on the economy and public finances?
Then I asked the equivalent questions about “the UK’s accession to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.”
Next, it was the changes to procurement legislation.
The last query I put in concerned the EU Stimulus Package. It has been estimated that had we been EU members, the UK would have been liable to contribute £191 billion to this fund. Had they taken that into account in their calculations about whether we would have been richer in the EU.
In its response, the OBR said:
“In the case of the CPTPP, we have not produced a forecast since the agreement was announced, although we are aware of the UK government’s published estimate of the potential impact on UK GDP. We have not made any explicit changes to the forecast for the ‘Edinburgh reforms’. The Procurement Bill continues to make its way through the legislative process and so remains incomplete. We have not taken any explicit judgements for its effect on the economic and fiscal forecasts. We have not considered any impact of the EU stimulus bill as it is not a policy that directly affects the UK public finances, other than via its impact on our forecast for global GDP and exchange rates which is not separably identifiable.”
It added:
“Our March forecast incorporates our judgement that the post-Brexit trading relationship between the UK and EU, as set out in the ‘Trade and Cooperation Agreement’ (TCA) that came into effect on 1 January 2021, will reduce long-run productivity by 4 per cent relative to remaining in the EU.
“We do not attempt to track the counterfactual path for the UK had we remained in the EU as we are legally obliged to produce forecasts on the basis of current government policy (and are specifically forbidden to look at alternatives). As a result, we do not have any information on how any policy changes might have impacted the UK had we remained a member of the EU.”
So when it comes to trade with the EU the OBR cheerfully comes up with a figure “relative to remaining in the EU”. But when it comes to dodging the bullet of paying another £191 billion into the EU, it does “not attempt to track the counterfactual path”.
The OBR comment on CPTPP – “we are aware of the UK government’s published estimate of the potential impact on UK GDP” sounds like a sneering reference to the claim, highlighted by the BBC, that it would only boost growth by 0.08 per cent. That figure was indeed taken from an official analysis. But that estimate (from a couple of years ago) was for “static modelling” to increase growth by £3.3 billion. The report added that “this increase is not an economic forecast… UK exports have the potential to grow by 65% by 2030, not included in the static estimates…For example, as CPTPP expands to include Thailand and South Korea, the impact on UK GDP rises from +1.8bn to +£5.5bn.” So the 0.08 per cent figure is a complete misrepresentation.
As Greg Hands wrote on this site, CPTPP has: “Half a billion consumers. A combined GDP of £9 trillion. A naturally pro-free trade club.” To ignore the benefit to our economy of joining it, or to suggest the benefit will be negligible, is quite absurd. But that is the way to fit the OBR narrative.
When it comes to the Edinburgh Reforms and the procurement changes – both likely to have hugely positive financial impact – the OBR admits to completely ignoring them.
No matter how detailed and sophisticated the OBR’s computer modelling might be we come up against “garbage in, garbage out” as the American computer technicians put it. With the wrong, or incomplete inputs, the outputs will be wrong. With the allegiances of its staff, confirmation bias from the OBR is scarcely a surprise. Nor that its forecasts tend to be even more wayward than those from the alphabet soup of its rivals.
Each week I suppose I could send the OBR more FOI requests as further Brexit freedoms are seized. What about the likely benefit of a free trade deal with Switzerland? Or saving businesses £1 billion a year by reduced reporting requirements on working hours? Or the £180 million boost to our wine industry by scrapping red tape?
We shall see what reality brings us in the years and decades to come. In the interim, the media and the political class should treat the OBR with a bit more scepticism.
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Yup. “Conservative Home” is clearly going to be unbiased. So much so that its a home I’d like to see under the hammer. But don’t fret, within two years and a change of government the tone about Brexit will continue to change and the hard Brexit fans will be marginalised. Enjoy.
You obviously don’t read Conservative Home or you wouldn’t have made those comments. As far as Brexit is concerned it has as many remainers as it does Brexiteers.
And your post is a funny comment to make coming from a Brit living in France are you trying to say you are unbiased.
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What are you on about now ?
There wasn’t a referendum on the Trans Pacific Trade Deal.
You’re in fantasy land.
Why would the UK rejoin a failed political block it voted to leave ? One things is 100% certain that Farage will be the next prime minister if he takes over from Richard Tice in the Reform Party.
And that looks more and more likely every day.
The Fringe benefit the most from the CEP. They are sh*tting themselves that the UK will buy from other nations and not from them. Only 25% of UK food comes from the EU now and that figure is falling. 65 million customers left the CEP and thats a big hole for France to fill.
When Strathmore says he wants the UK to rejoin the EU to save it from itself (and all that guff) what he really means is that the EU needs our money.
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Good news, about the UK, in today’s DT
" Apparently, it is fine to trumpet when “Brexit Britain” is doing badly, but unacceptable to point out when other major economies are faring worse. The troubles of our neighbours are not a reason to cheer –but context is important.
If you want to pick the “sick man of Europe”, try Germany. The latest data show that the EU’s largest economy shrank in each of the past two quarters, as consumer spending crumbled under the weight of high inflation and a slump in real wages.
This continues a trend. Since the vote to leave the EU in 2016, the UK economy (as measured by GDP) has grown by 5.9 per cent. German GDP has only increased by 5 per cent.
Other European countries are not in much better health. The French economy has grown by 8 per cent since 2016. This is partly due to the embracing of more business-friendly policies, including cuts in corporation tax (sadly abandoned in the UK). But it also reflects massive state intervention during the energy crisis, which has hamstrung the main supplier (EDF) and saddled French taxpayers with a huge bill. France’s sovereign credit rating was downgraded by Fitch last month, with a warning that its public finances are “weaker than peers”.
Italy has posted the fastest growth of the major European economies since the pandemic. But this strong performance has been flattered by a construction boom, fuelled by subsidies and tax breaks, which has now hit the wall. Its rebound also needs to be seen in the context of the lost decade of growth since the global financial crisis: the Italian economy is still 3 per cent smaller than it was at the start of 2008.
The failure of their predictions means that Remainer doomsayers have had to fall back on three other types of evidence. The first is to compare the performance of the UK with other major European economies on goods trade, business investment or inflation, instead. If you carefully select the numbers and time frames, it is possible to paint a bearish picture. But there are alternative explanations (such as the different impacts of Covid and the energy crisis in each country) that have little to do with Brexit.
The second trick is to rely on forecasts from bodies such as the IMF and OECD. There are many problems here. One is that these like-minded organisations have a negative view of Brexit, so this is bound to be reflected in their projections. It is also telling that the IMF has already had to revise up its 2023 growth forecasts for the UK by a full percentage point – and is now predicting that the UK economy will grow faster over the next five years than those of Germany, France or Italy.
The third approach is to run mathematical models to prove that the UK economy would have done better (or less badly) had we remained in the EU. These models – such as the “doppelgänger” published by the Centre for European Reform (CER) – are based on well-established methods and should be taken seriously. However, it is hard to construct a robust counterfactual given the large global shocks of the past few years. The results also typically fail a basic “smell test”: the CER model suggests that the UK economy would have grown nearly twice as quickly since 2016 if we had voted to Remain.
Others have claimed that UK food-price inflation would have been a third lower without Brexit. But food prices have risen by about the same in the UK as in the euro area since 2019, and by a lot more in Germany."
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Where and when did I say that the UK is going to re-join the EU? I think I can see the problem with so many of your replies - you’ve not actually read what the other person wrote. I put forward the idea that after the next UK general election there would be a new government and this would accelerate the softening of Brexit. Not that the UK is going to re-join the EU.
PS ‘Reform’ will do one of two things. Either disappear within the next 2-3 years, or split the Tories in two and join with the hard right of the Conservative party. Create a new party (Re-Con ??). That would make both leftover Tories and Re-Con unable to get a majority and thus unelectable as a government in the forseeable future. Perhaps that is the true Brexit benefit. Who’d have guessed?
Oh, so you just want our money then and the UK being force to obey the EU rules but without being a member ?
It’s even worse.
You don’t understand the Brexit vote - it’s not party political. There are millions of votes in Labour constituencies that voted to leave the EU. What Reform will do is split the conservative vote and the labour vote, while the Lib Dems and Greens will split Labour and Conservatives even further through protest votes.
The Brexiteers, and those that despise socialism, open borders, the removal of our freedoms and state rule will vote in droves for Nigel Farage.
Look at this graph that will help explain.
Really? I am surprised you aren’t whinging about not voting on joining an economic agreement that could change into a political union in the future. Who knows?
You have described the 2016 referendum. 7 years on from that it is only about what a party in power will do with what we have now. How that government works to improve the rather poor state of affairs that the tories have “gifted” the nation. This all about party politics. On the periphery parties like Reform, without the clarion call of how super better everything will be with Brexit, will remain on the edges. No matter how animated a few people get about such a party.