THE GUARDIAN – OPINION:
When the most anti-EU newspapers are pointing to the policy’s inevitable failures, it’s time our government admitted the truth
My love of gardening is grounded in the thrill of renewal: the first snowdrop bulb, the first songbird to break the silence, that shaft of warmth in early March. This week, as a veteran party member and supporter of every Conservative leader from Churchill to Cameron, I have detected something similar: the renewal of my party’s European legacy.
The disastrous consequences of Brexit for
living standards, for our economic wellbeing and for Britain’s reputation abroad, have so far been obscured by Covid, the war in Ukraine and the headline-grabbing story of our prime minister’s lack of
truthfulness and integrity. But this week, the British press perhaps unintentionally revealed the real world that is emerging as a result of Brexit.
While readers of the Guardian have been kept closely informed about the continuing tragedy of Brexit, it’s only now that other parts of the British press have begun to consider the truth of its legacy. The economies of three of the regions that voted most heavily for Brexit were “smaller at the end of last year … than at the time of the vote”, wrote David Smith in the business section of this week’s Sunday Times. Despite a weak pound making Britain’s goods cheap for foreign buyers, “exporters are … struggling”, Jim Armitage wrote in the same paper. “First-quarter figures last week showed exports of food and drink to the EU were down 17%, or £614m, on pre-Covid levels. Exports to non European countries increased by 10.7%, or £223m, but not enough to offset the European decline.”
Brexit was meant to be a “new beginning for the Tory party,” Jeremy Warner wrote this week in the
Daily Telegraph, “but by making trade with Europe more difficult and costly it has so far only added to the country’s travails”. In its coverage of recent OECD warnings, the
Daily Mail reported that the UK economy “is set to flatline next year – performing worse than every other G20 country except for sanctions-crippled Russia”. Most of these countries have also felt the consequences of the war in Ukraine and the Covid epidemic – but not, of course, Brexit.
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Michael Heseltine | Friday, June 10, 2022
I have said this from the very start: Brexit was a stupid idea, is a stupid idea and will remain a stupid idea. Nobody with any understanding of economics would walk away from the largest single market in the world, The Single Market. One doesn't need much of a grasp of economics to understand that to do so would be highly damaging to one's own economy. That the Conservatives have done this, the Party that prides itself on being business-friendly, is totally and utterly incomprehensible. – © Mark Alexander
