The economic case against Brexit has now totally collapsed – spiked
Britain s GDP figures, in particular, have long been weaponised to the end of undermining Brexit. Mainstream media outlets have relished reporting the UK s relatively slow recovery from the Covid pandemic, compared with other advanced economies. BBC News analysis from January this year claimed that The UK is the only major rich economy that remains smaller poorer than prior to the pandemic and Brexit may be a factor . In December 2022, the Financial Times sneered that Britain is the only G7 economy that remains smaller than it was before the pandemic , which apparently suggested that the damage inflicted to the economy s supply side by Covid and Brexit is even larger than previously thought . Also from the FT, in a slickly produced video called The Brexit Effect , public-policy editor Peter Foster pointed to the gap between the UK s performance, which has uniquely suffered Brexit, and the performance of other economies which have not . In fact, as recently as mid-August this year, it was believed that the UK had still not recovered from the pandemic, unlike every other G7 country.
Except last week, Britain s GDP figures were radically revised. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) now says that the UK economy actually recovered from the pandemic recession back in 2021. It turns out that wholesalers and the healthcare sector, in particular, had produced much greater output than previously thought.
These updated figures suggest that the UK economy is as much as two per cent larger than previously believed. This means that the UK can no longer be considered the worst-performing economy in the G7. In fact, post-Brexit, the UK recovered from the pandemic at a similar rate to France and at a faster pace than Germany, Europe s largest economy.
The ONS s revision is extraordinary. As one leading economist put it: The entire UK economic narrative post-pandemic has just been revised away. The very basis for the Remainer elites narrative of doom has now been shattered before our eyes.
Doesn’t this mean the government figures were misinformation?