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Treasury figures from Budget confirm there was no £350m a week Brexit dividend
The Treasury has confirmed that it will not be getting an extra £350 million a week after Britain stops paying into the EU budget, despite false claims by Brexiteers during the referendum.
Britain is in fact expected to be overall poorer by £1,200 per person because of Brexit’s economic drag, according to the government’s spending watchdog.
The chancellor’s red budget book shows the gross EU contributions saved by the UK will be around £42 billion over the next five years, rather than the £91 billion claimed under the false figure publicised by Boris Johnson in 2016.
But the money is not expected to benefit the public finances as the majority needs to be spent on British domestic replacements for EU programmes.
It comes as the government’s own Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) puts the cost to the British economy of Brexit so far at around 2 per cent of GDP a year, or about £40 billion.
The body continued: “Real business investment has barely grown since the referendum, whereas our March 2016 forecast assumed it would have risen more than 20 per cent by now. We expect this shortfall to be partly reversed as the specifics of the trading relationship are clarified, hence reducing uncertainty.
“But, working in the other direction, we expect the adverse effect of higher trade barriers to build through our five-year forecast period and beyond.”
Figures released by the Office for National Statistics this morning show that the economy has flat-lined, even before the effects of coronavirus bite.
Inside Politics newsletter
Britain is expected to enter a recession over the coming months, in part thanks to the effects of the virus – meaning it will be difficult to disentangle the effect of Brexit. Independent 11 Mar
UK’s antivirus measures disguise radicalisation of Brexit
For the longer Prime Minister Boris Johnson holds power, the faster Brexit is evolving into a project more extreme than most British people thought likely or desirable at the time of the UK’s 2016 referendum.
There is no better recent example of the radicalisation of Brexit than the government’s disclosure last week that it intends to take the UK out of the European Union Aviation Safety Agency, the EU body that upholds safety standards in the air industry.
The government’s defence is simple: Brexit must exclude involvement in any EU regulatory system. Pragmatic pan-European co-operation and the interests of business are therefore to be sacrificed on the altar of national independence.
To grasp how radical Brexit is becoming, compare the Johnson government’s approach to the EU-UK negotiations that started on March 2 with positions outlined by London between 2017 and 2019.
In her January 2017 speech at Lancaster House, Theresa May, Mr Johnson’s predecessor as prime minister and Conservative party leader, promised that “as a priority, we will pursue a bold and ambitious free trade agreement with the European Union . . . a new strategic partnership between the UK and the EU.”
This is emphatically not the aspiration of Mr Johnson’s government. Instead he and his ministers are revelling in what Professor Chris Grey of Royal Holloway, University of London, calls “sheer, dogmatic, remorseless antipathy to anything and everything remotely connected with the EU”.
But EU negotiators are increasingly concerned about the UK’s willingness to honour the binding commitments on Northern Ireland’s status contained in last year’s UK withdrawal deal.
The Irish question may evolve into the acid test of how extreme Mr Johnson and his Brexit Jacobins really are. Financial Times 11 Mar
London Brexit talks in doubt because of coronavirus
Brexit talks due to take place in London next week have been thrown into doubt because of the coronavirus, Michael Gove has confirmed.
Gove told MPs fresh concerns about the second round of talks going ahead as planned had been raised by Brussels counterparts this morning.
About 150 delegates from Brussels were due to arrive in London for three days of talks next Wednesday.
Gove also said there was a question mark over the inaugural meeting of the EU-UK joint committee, on which he will sit, on 30 March.
Gove was answering questions at the first Brexit select committee hearing since the election.
He defended the decision not to publish an impact assessment of the EU deal the government is pursuing despite issuing a 60-page assessment last week on the impact a deal with the US would have.
As Gove tried to make light of the apparent contradictory positions the government had adopted on impact assessments, he accidentally poured water over his phone and briefing papers.
He was grilled by MPs over checks on goods to Northern Ireland and other key subjects on which the UK and the EU have clashed.
He declined to answer questions about the checks mandated by the Northern Ireland protocol, saying: “That will be a matter for the joint committee.”
The Labour MP Stephen Kinnock accused the government of misleading voters during the general election campaign by claiming there was an “oven-ready Brexit” when “in fact it was at the back of the frozen food section” and nowhere near completion.
Gove hit back saying a frozen food version of Brexit would just take “longer for the microwave to ping” and in any case it was possible to get something like the “Marks and Spencer deal you get – a starter, main course and a pudding and you decide which ones you want to get but all for £9.99”. Guardian 11 Mar
