Brexit is back in the news again. That is partly the aftermath of the budget, discussed in my previous post, which was followed by speeches at the Mansion House by Chancellor Rachel Reeves and the Governor of the Bank of England Andrew Bailey. The latter highlighted the economic damage of Brexit and called for a re-building of relations with the EU “while respecting the decision of the British people”.
It's true that, as economics commentator Simon Nixon observed, this marked a notable break with official Brexit omerta. Still, it was not exactly dynamite stuff. The economics are well-known and the political message was identical to the government’s own stated policy. Indeed, Reeves’ own Mansion House speech said the same thing. In that sense, Bailey’s comments showed the limitations of government policy in that, as he must know, closer relations with the EU will only marginally reduce the ongoing costs of Brexit. So, despite being accused by Matthew Lynn in The Spectator of “reopening the Brexit debate”, Bailey hardly did that, unless even the barest mention of Brexit is now to be described that way.
If his comments attracted attention, it was mainly because of the wider context of now intense discussion about what the coming Trump presidency is going to mean for post-Brexit Britain. In my previous post I suggested that ‘hot takes’ on this were not wise, and to an extent I think that is still the case. Apart from the fact that he isn’t yet in office, he is by any standards a capricious politician. What he may actually do when he comes back to power is highly unpredictable.
Trump’s psychodrama
I don’t mean, of course, that it isn’t already abundantly obvious that it is going to be dire. The choices he is already making for key appointments demonstrate he is going to oversee a depraved, intellectually and morally bankrupt, regime. About the only thing which may save us from the worst is that it may well also be too incompetent and too prone to infighting to deliver what it threatens.
However, within that broad picture, it remains to be seen exactly what he does in terms of the two issues most obviously of concern the UK: defence posture as regards NATO generally and Ukraine specifically, and a blanket hike in trade tariffs. I’ll discuss the latter shortly, and whilst I won’t discuss the former in this post there is a good analysis by Benjamin Martell of Edinburgh University in The New European, building on his and others’ report for the Independent Commission on UK-EU Relations earlier this year.
Beyond the difficulty of predicting what he will do, I think there is an undesirability in doing so. One of the ways in which narcissistic bullies like Trump exert power – and it’s the same in playgrounds, prisons, and some businesses as it is in politics – is precisely to generate a psychodrama of fearful uncertainty around themselves: ‘what will he do? What will we do if he does that? What will he do then if we do that?’
In this way, those around the narcissist become unwittingly complicit in his way of exercising power. It is very difficult to find a way of resisting that kind of power, but one possibility might be to stand back a little from the frenzy. To play it long and cool, rather than short and hot. Admittedly, that is not a luxury open to the heroic defenders of Ukraine, but it might be good advice to the UK. However, as a matter of fact, political actors and commentators here are currently engaged in trying to work out what Trump means. So the frenzy can’t be ignored.
Trump’s tariff threats
In the UK, and very directly connected with Brexit, much of that frenzy has been to do with trade. Specifically, if Trump does impose a blanket 10% or even 20% on imports to the US it would mean, at the upper end of that range, an estimated 0.8% fall in annual UK economic output. That it is not even worse is because the bulk of UK exports to the US are services (which do not attract tariffs) rather than goods. But, in the context of already anaemic growth forecasts, and the very urgent political and economic need for improved growth, that would be quite bad enough. That seems to be the baseline assumption in most commentary, but of course if it turned out to be 10%, or if the uplift was only applied to certain sectors (and depending what these were) the impact would be less. But it still wouldn’t be good.
If any of these scenarios happens, then one response, and it may well be the EU’s response, could be to impose retaliatory tariffs on imports from the US. A trade war, in other words. The UK could do that on its own account, but it is far too small to be able to win a trade war with the US. So this exposes the weakness of post-Brexit Britain. For many of those opposed to Brexit, it re-presents a choice between the EU and the US, to which the answer must be the EU. According to Brexiters, though, the opposite is true (£), and being outside the EU means that the UK could strike a deal with the US on its own account.
Others, by no means confined to Brexiters, see a less stark choice. Peter Mandelson, tipped as the possible next Ambassador to the US, sees a third way, with the unfortunately worded suggestion (£) that the UK could “have its cake and eat it”. It’s a possibility endorsed (£) by the generally acute Financial Times commentator Robert Shrimsley. Similarly, Andrew Haldane, the former Chief Economist at the Bank of England, believes a deal is possible without prejudicing relations with the EU. One reason for making such a claim is that not only are most UK exports to the US made up of services, but it is services trade where the UK has a trade surplus. Given that Trump’s tariffs are aimed at those countries with surpluses in goods trade, the UK isn’t so much his target as potential collateral damage.
What does a ‘deal’ mean?
However, the discussion of all this has already become mired in confusion. That is principally because it has conflated two potentially very different things. One is the old Brexiter dream of a UK-US Free Trade Agreement (FTA), meaning, at its most basic, an across-the-board removal or reduction of all or most tariffs, but potentially including the removal of some non-tariff barriers to trade. The other is a specific deal to be exempted from the blanket imposition of Trump’s new tariffs. An FTA would improve the current terms of trade. An ‘exemption deal’ would simply return terms of trade to the status quo ante.
They are also different in that FTAs typically take a long time to negotiate, whereas an exemption deal, at least in principle, need not. And that reflects the fact that the things required of the UK for an FTA would be likely to involve substantial concessions on regulatory issues (‘chlorinated chicken’ being the symbolic one), especially as regards agriculture and pharmaceuticals. What would be needed for an exemption deal is less easy to predict, but could be things like voluntary export quotas, restrictions on Chinese imports, or agreement to import large quantities of US military equipment – but not, necessarily, regulatory concessions. [1]
These two scenarios therefore have different implications for the other side of the coin, UK-EU relations. An FTA, to the extent it entailed regulatory change, would move the UK further from the EU regulatory orbit. That would derail the current direction of Labour’s ‘reset’ policy, which is primarily based on continuing alignment with the EU. It would certainly derail the centrepiece of that policy, a UK-EU SPS deal (which would entail regulatory alignment on agricultural standards, especially). It would also have implications for Northern Ireland, which would remain bound by EU goods regulations, and thus would ‘thicken’ the Irish Sea Border. A more limited exemption deal might well avoid these things, but would certainly do political damage to the reset in terms of trust, assuming that it left the EU fighting a trade war with the US which the UK had managed to slide out of.
A trade deal with Trump?
Some Brexiters would undoubtedly argue that the distinction I’ve drawn is irrelevant, in that an FTA would also be an exemption deal (even though an exemption deal wouldn’t be an FTA). That’s true, but it doesn’t affect the point that an FTA would take longer to agree, and in the meantime there would be no exemption from the blanket new tariffs. Nor does it recognize the profound political difficulties any UK government would face if it met likely US demands on regulations.
But there is a more fundamental issue. Brexiters, both in the Tory and Reform parties, are now talking as if a UK-US FTA was there for the taking under Trump’s first presidency, and will now be available again. Kemi Badenoch is even claiming (£) that there is an “oven ready agreement negotiated by the last Tory government”. This is nonsense. There was no such agreement [2]. In fact, Trump blew hot and cold about a deal first time round. That’s actually a specific example of my earlier point about how narcissistic bullies use uncertainty to exert power. And even if he ever did offer such a deal, it would be on one-sided terms (that would probably be true under any US administration, but certainly under Trump’s ‘winner takes all’ version of deal-making).
In any case, this latest upsurge of talk about trade talks is exhibiting some of the same deficiencies as the earlier version. One concerns the relative importance to the UK of trade with the US and the EU. Brexiters, including Badenoch, are already wheeling out the misleading claim that the US is the UK’s largest trade partner. That’s misleading because it treats each member of the EU as a separate trade partner. They aren’t, to the extent that all are part of a single market and customs union. Brexiters really can’t have it both ways, saying that EU membership prevented the UK from being independent, especially in trade policy, but then talking as if each EU member is a separate trading entity. Secondly, it resurrects the misleading idea that a UK-US FTA would be much of an economic prize anyway. The previous government’s figures suggest it would provide an additional 0.07% to 0.16% per annum to GDP over 15 years.
Nevertheless, what we are going to see, and are already beginning to see, is Brexiters pretending that there is an easy, perfect solution to the Trump tariffs, but one that the Labour government is refusing to take because it is anti-Trump and pro-EU. We will see, as is also already beginning, Nigel Farage claiming with smirking self-importance that he has his own special relationship with Trump, giving him a unique influence and insight, just as he did first time round. Along with that will be noises from Trump supporters, and again they are already beginning, suggesting a deal is possible if only the UK abandons ‘EU socialism’. Trump will undoubtedly throw fuel on to that fire (‘I offered them a great deal, it was a beautiful deal, but they didn’t want it. I d’know why, I hear they preferred the EU, I d’know, but it was a beautiful deal’).
Beneath this, there is a still more fundamental issue. Trade policy is never wholly about economics, or economic rationality. But this is unusually so for Trump. If it wasn’t he would hardly even be contemplating the blanket tariff, which will increase prices in the US (though, despite what some think, that probably won’t bother his supporters). Instead, trade policy for Trump is about beating his enemies, in this context meaning the EU and China (which may face 60% tariffs). So there’s no point in thumbing through Ricardian theory on comparative advantage to try to understand Trump’s policy. But the corollary is that there’s no point in trying to frame responses in these terms.
In concrete terms, this means that the UK government should not weigh its (distinctly limited) options simply in terms of economic effects. An exemption deal might reduce the immediate economic damage, but its longer-term costs to the UK, both economic and geo-political, would be considerable in terms of the EU and, very possibly, China. The potential Chinese dimension is worth stressing, because at issue for the UK is not a just a two-way tug between the EU and the US, but being stuck between all three blocs. That was brought into focus by Keir Starmer’s attempts this week to improve relations with China, which might well be jeopardized by any form of deal with the US. To put all this another way, the only deals Trump does are those that favour him.
The cleavage in 21st century politics
This brings us to the final, and deepest, level of what is at stake here, and it is far more important than tariffs on this or that, or small percentages of GDP. It is that what Trump represents, as Brexit does, is what I’ve elsewhere discussed as ‘anti-ruleism’. In the most basic way, his anticipated blanket tariff policy makes a mockery of WTO rules. But his entire approach to politics is one which rejects the rule of law, scientific rationality, and, ultimately, the concept of ‘rational-legal authority’. I try to avoid social science jargon on this blog, but I think it may be useful here.
The sociologist Max Weber developed the idea that modern, industrial societies were increasingly characterised by systemic, codified rules and laws, objectively formulated and applied. So we obey X because s/he is the legitimate holder of the office (of President, or CEO, or whatever), not because of the person holding it. Weber contrasted that with authority that was ‘traditional’ (e.g. monarchy, church) or ‘charismatic’ (derived from the persona of the leader).
Trump fairly obviously seeks to elevate charisma over rules, but more to the point he embodies a hostility to ‘rules’ as a concept of social organization and politics. In this, he shares a common ideology with the ‘disruptor’ tech bosses, like Elon Musk, who now support him, and, in the UK, with their fanboy Dominic Cummings (£). He also shares it with Vladimir Putin, who relies on a peculiar admixture of charismatic and traditional authority, fused with nationalism, and is equally disdainful of the rules-based international order.
It is also shared by Boris Johnson, exhibited by the way that he (for perhaps idiosyncratic reasons) and the Brexit Jacobins (for reasons of fanaticism) believed it was acceptable to dispose of all conventions and institutions, including parliament itself, in order to ‘get Brexit done’. It is shared by Liz Truss, who still insists those institutions caused her downfall. Emblematic of this is the hostility of both Trump and the Brexiters to bureaucracy and, especially, the civil service, which, not coincidentally, was emblematic, for Weber, of rational-legal authority. That hostility is shared by Kemi Badenoch, in her aggressive diatribes against ‘the bureaucratic class’. Such anti-ruleism is obviously connected with populism, but it isn’t identical to it (there’s a book to be written there). The disjuncture is what did for Boris Johnson, when his disdain for the Covid rules fell foul of the populist idea that ‘rules should apply to all of us’.
There are many different ways of understanding these developments. One way might be to see them in terms of the latest phase in the unwinding of the politics of the Cold War (that would need another book). Another, even more epochal, would be to see them as a kind of Counter-Enlightenment, in which the eighteenth-century battles over rationality are being re-fought but in the other direction (that’s a third book). Of course, the Trump presidency will not last forever. But there is a sense that deep and profound changes are now established in the US and elsewhere. And why not? Despite the brief moment when some claimed ‘the end of history’, history never ends.
However they are framed, the key point is that these developments are about far more than international trade. That is not surprising, because Brexit itself was about far more than trade with the EU; more, even, than membership of the EU. Needless to say, these are not the terms in which most people are framing the current situation, although Rafael Behr of the Guardian comes close to doing so. If it were framed that way then, indeed, the whole question of Brexit would be re-litigated. It is clear that the government have no intention of doing that.
Will Starmer’s government rise to the challenge?
Nevertheless, in terms of the division I have presented here, Keir Starmer is very much on one side, being almost the epitome of rational-legal authority or, so to speak, ‘ruleism’. That is something to be grateful for, yet even framed in the narrower terms of trade and tariffs his government’s response so far is rather wishy-washy. Reeves has spoken of seeking to do a deal with the US “whether that's through a free trade agreement or through further improvements in our trade and investment flows”. But in the same interview she pledged that “we’re not going to allow British farmers to be undercut by different rules and regulations”, effectively ruling out an FTA. As for some exemption deal on new tariffs, she just says that “we'll make the case for free and open trade”. What does that mean in practice? Who knows.
Perhaps, when Trump’s intentions become clearer then so will those of the British government. But my hunch is that they won’t. I don’t think that the government is, as I put it earlier, playing it long and cool. I think it will simply try to muddle through, dodging or fudging the choices in the hope that they become irrelevant, if only through the decisions made by other countries. Arguably, in a situation in which the UK has so little leverage and so few good choices available, that has a certain pragmatism. But as a response to the bigger framing of those choices gestured towards in this post it is wholly inadequate.
Why are Labour in this situation? In some ways it is because, faced with Trump, any British government, like the governments of many other countries, has an almost impossible problem. But, just as, for Britain, Brexit adds to all the economic problems that other countries face, so too does it add to the Trump problem. For this government, in particular, that is compounded by its commitment to a Brexit policy which it does not believe in but is unwilling, and perhaps unable, to repudiate.
Notes
[1] This is my amateurish take on the question. For more detailed analysis (though I think it is pretty much compatible with mine) from trade experts, see Sam Lowe’s Substack newsletter, David Henig on the UK Trade Policy Observatory blog, and Dmitry Grozoubinski’s guest post on Ian Dunt’s Substack newsletter.
[2] It may be that Badenoch was referring to the previous government’s statement of the case for such an agreement (2020) Even if so, that was, emphatically, not an agreement with the US, still less one which is now ‘oven ready’ to be signed with Trump.
Showing posts with label Bank of England. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bank of England. Show all posts
Friday, 22 November 2024
Friday, 30 September 2022
The week the wheels came off the Brexit Britain bus
The political ambitions of the libertarian wing of the Brexit Ultras have always been ambivalent. On the one hand, they have largely preferred to complain of betrayal from the sidelines rather than take any responsibility or, if accepting ministerial office, to quickly resign rather than engage with the pragmatic realities of Brexit. On the other hand, they have hankered to be in charge not just so as to create ‘true Brexit’, but the ‘real Conservatism’ of which Brexit was a part and to which it was a gateway.
With the advent of Truss’s premiership, they have eschewed the sidelines in favour of governing and, with a rapidity that even their sternest critics would have thought it cruel to predict, have been exposed as utterly incompetent, both politically and economically, and in the most basic of ways. It is deeply ironic that this has happened at the hand of ‘the markets’ which they so slavishly fetishize.
Anatomy of a crisis
The occasion, of course, was last Friday’s tax-cutting ‘mini-budget’. “At last! A true Tory Budget”, the Daily Mail drooled, whilst Nigel Farage simpered about “the best Conservative Budget since 1986”. Yet, whether despite or because of this fidelity to Conservatism, and as anticipated in my previous post, there was an immediate crisis in the currency and bond markets, with the value of the pound falling to its lowest ever level on Monday, and the cost of government borrowing in the form of gilts or bonds rising very sharply. Amongst numerous knock-on effects, pension funds, which invest heavily in such bonds, came within hours of mass insolvency on Wednesday afternoon, threatening a major breakdown of the financial system and requiring major emergency temporary action from the Bank of England. This, in combination, with a clear signal from the Bank that interest rates will rise in due course, which eased pressure on the pound, has effected a degree of stabilization, but markets remain jittery and it’s by no means clear that this crisis has run its course, especially as regards gilts.
These weren’t routine or trivial market movements, but an overwhelming and brutal vote of no confidence in the government’s plans. Specifically, they were a vote of no confidence in the decision to cut taxes, or not implement previously planned tax rises, and to fund this through borrowing. Again as anticipated in my last post, the government’s refusal to allow its plans to be scrutinised independently by the Office for Budget Responsibility added to market alarm. So, too, did Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s casual reaction over the weekend, even suggesting further tax cuts to come. The rout continued on Monday when, as Paul Donovan, Chief Economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, put it, “investors seem to regard the UK Conservative Party as a doomsday cult”.
Throughout the week, the absence of public statements from Truss or Kwarteng compounded this impression, and when Truss did emerge on Thursday morning it was to re-confirm the government’s policy and downplay the market reaction, as well as denying it had anything much to do with the mini-budget. To the extent she admitted any connection it is the false one that markets didn’t like the costs of the energy bill support part of the budget, when in fact it was the tax cuts. It has since emerged that this and the equally false claim that what is happening in the markets is a global event due to the Ukraine War rather than something specifically affecting the UK are to be the government’s lines of defence.
Amongst the most significant events was when, on Tuesday, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) issued what BBC Economics Editor Faisal Islam described as a “stinging and unusual rebuke” to the UK. What made it so unusual was that such IMF warnings are usually made to emerging markets, not leading global economies. I mentioned in my previous post that aspects of the economic situation resemble those which occasioned the IMF’s 1976 bailout of the UK, and its statement this week that it is “closely monitoring” developments in the UK carried echoes of that. It was also, like the comments of other international players and the decisions taken by traders, a reminder that, no matter what Brexiter ‘sovereignty’ fantasists may think, the UK can never be ‘independent’ of the wider world within which it is a relatively small player. Most fundamentally, the Brexiters’ belief that they can create their own reality, and that all opposition can be swept aside as ‘Project Fear’ or ‘remainer sabotage’, was tested almost to the point of destruction.
These events have been widely reported and there’s no point in me adding more to that. Instead, I want to tease out more about the Brexit aspects and implications.
The Brexit mini-budget
At one level, the mini-budget had very little to do with Brexit in that, so far as I can see, the only provision within it that wouldn’t have been possible whilst a member of the EU is the planned removal of the cap on bankers’ bonuses. That isn’t unimportant, politically, but it’s not what spooked the markets. However, it is the budget of the Brexit Ultras and it is intimately bound up with Brexit. In case anyone doubts that, it was underlined by Farage’s endorsement. Even more explicitly (£), John Longworth, one of the most immoderate of the Ultras, regards it as part of Truss’s battle “for the future of Brexit Britain”. It’s a sentiment widely shared in Brexiter circles, with the Bruges Group tweeting that “remain media are talking up market panic … to derail Brexit”.
So, given that the Brexiters themselves regard the mini-budget as integral to Brexit, it’s reasonable to say, as Robert Shrimsley of the Financial Times did (£), that “Brexit ideology lies behind the UK’s market rout”. It’s abundantly clear to even the feeblest intelligence that those Brexiters now include Truss, for all the fury of Dominic Cummings’s denials (directed at me!) on the inane grounds that she supported remain in 2016. As I pointed out during the campaign, she is now a ‘born again Ultra’, perhaps the more fanatical for being so, and was extravagantly endorsed by the leading Ultras, making the fact that she was once a remainer the most tedious and least relevant thing to say about her.
As so often before, Brexiter responses to the crisis they created have been confused and contradictory. Some in the government prissily said they could not comment on market events, as if some new Trappist ordinance of political propriety has been invented. Others downplayed what has happened, suggesting that the market reaction is either trivial or transient, or even that it has little or nothing to do with the budget but is simply a result of a strengthening dollar (which doesn’t explain why the pound fell against all major currencies, or what happened in the bond market). Outrageously, some, like Crispin Odey, hedge fund manager, Tory and Vote Leave donor, and sometime employer of Kwarteng, blamed “remainers”. Peak insanity was reached by Daniel Hannan, who blamed the crash not on the mini-budget, but market fears of a Labour government!
In addition, or instead, some Brexiters blamed the Bank of England (BoE) for having failed to increase interest rates by enough, early enough, or to have reacted immediately to the crisis so as to support sterling and control inflation. That argument is more complicated than their others. There is a case that last week’s pre-budget interest rate rise should have been larger, although it’s not a straightforward one because doing so would also have been likely to impact on the cost-of-living crisis by pushing up mortgage rates.
Nevertheless, it was the government’s mini-budget, not the BoE, that caused this crisis and there is something bizarre about a government simultaneously taking inflationary measures it says will boost economic growth, whilst relying on the BoE to take measures to reduce inflation and choke off growth. Indeed, part of the reason for market nervousness is that the institutions of financial and economic governance are not acting in a consistent and coordinated way, something flagged up by Mark Carney, the former BoE Governor whose actions did much to preserve a degree of economic stability after the Brexit referendum vote. Perhaps the BoE could have acted earlier, though had it done so it's easy to predict that then it would have been accused of overreaction and of trying to undermine government policy. In any case, what is even more bizarre is the spectacle of Brexiters, with their disdain for experts, technocrats and unelected bureaucrats, positioning the BoE as having responsibility to save the government from itself. Or perhaps it is not bizarre, so much as a reflection of the Brexiters’ reflex refusal ever to take responsibility for anything even when in government.
Government by cultists
That refusal has as its counterpart the distinctively Brexity idea, now taken over wholesale by this Brexit government, that they are beleaguered revolutionaries of true Conservativism fighting the (presumably false) conservatism of ‘the Establishment’. The notion of Brexit as an anti-Establishment insurgency has been a ludicrous one ever since the 2016 referendum was won, and Brexit became adopted as the central policy and national strategy. It is even more so now that the Brexit Ultras are unequivocally in charge of government, though of course it is a standard populist trope, familiar from the Trump presidency.
What we have seen this week is that the Brexiters have added ‘the markets’ to the increasingly long and diverse list – encompassing the ‘Woke’ Blob, the civil service in general and the Treasury in particular, the BoE, remainers, rejoiners, the National Trust, the BBC – of enemy forces they must confront in the name of revolutionary purity.
Longworth explicitly included the City in this list, whilst unnamed government figures suggested that traders were enacting “a plot by the left” which will have come as a surprise to them. Similarly, the Daily Mail reported that senior Tories blame “City Boys” for “sparking economic chaos” with traders “trying to make money out of bad news”. Well colour me shocked. Haven’t these free-market ideologues worked out that ‘trying to make money’ is what traders always do, indeed it’s all that they do? Do they think that ‘City Boys’ care about making government policy look good? And aren’t these the same ‘City Boys’ who, according to Kwarteng, are the brightest and the best who must be encouraged to come to London by uncapped bonuses? Aren’t they, for that matter, good ol’ City Boys like Crispin Odey?
The IMF, which has long been on the Brexiters’ list of enemies, also came under attack for its comments. For example, Brexiter economist Andrew Lilico was outraged by its “left-wing” intervention, to the point that he advocated the UK should “withhold its IMF contributions”. It is a strange world in which the IMF is considered ‘left-wing’ (or even, as Brexit Party ex-MEP Lance Forman had it, “socialist” and under the influence of the EU), and the idea of withholding contributions seems to conjure up a vision where Brexit is the gateway to exiting any and every international institution, in a permanent revolution of endless Brexits.
Also triggered by the IMF, David Frost opined, contradictorily, that its comments were “somewhat eccentric” yet reflected its “highly conventional approach”. This is indicative of the fact that what is at stake is more than Brexiter whinging about the enemies that beset them. This government, and its semi-intellectual underlabourers in think tanks and the media, are convinced that they are the custodians of a new truth. The markets and their economists are “attached to the old way of doing things” as Patrick Minford put it, to the extent that “there is no sterling crisis except in the minds of idiots” (£). Similarly the BoE has “not got the memo” about the “economic consensus crumbling” according to Paul Marshall (£), investment manager and Vote Leave donor. Thus arch-Brexiter journalist Allister Heath insists (£) Liz Truss must “hold her nerve” and defy the “orthodoxy” of “the elites”.
Their problem is that, as the market reaction shows, the ‘old ways’ still hold and the ‘economic consensus’ remains. Calling it an “orthodoxy” is accurate, but that very accuracy shows why decisions to “defy” it are foolish. That’s why investors regard the Tory government as a ‘doomsday cult’, and responding that investors are ‘idiots’, ‘conventional’ or even ‘socialists’ makes no difference, except perhaps to re-enforce them in that view.
As I put it in my last blog, traders simply don’t care about the theories of Patrick Minford, or of the broader IEA-derived analysis of the cultist government. Indeed, one of the few semi-amusing features of Brexit is the spectacle of all these free-trade, free-market economists going into contortions to explain how erecting trade barriers doesn’t damage trade and, now, why markets don’t understand how to price currencies or debt. It’s this stupidity that accounts for the fact that, apparently, market traders talk of the demand for a “moron risk premium” in order to hold sterling assets and fund UK debt.
But is there a cunning plan?
However, there is a different interpretation of all this doing the rounds on social media*, in which, far from being utterly incompetent, the Brexit government has a skilful, if malevolent, plan. It is an interpretation which comes in two variants.
One version is that the government deliberately crashed the markets, secretly giving hedge fund traders and others – with whom the current government has strong links of networks and party funding – advance notice so that, as indeed happened, they could short the markets and make fortunes. It doesn’t really make sense, though, because no such secret information would need to be passed – it was obvious even to me, and widely predicted, what was going to happen if the mini-budget pursued the policies Truss had openly advocated during the leadership campaign. Indeed that’s why the pound was beginning to fall once it became clear she was almost certain to win.
It also doesn’t make sense given the huge political price of the crisis. Some suggest that the government is so fanatical that it does not care about winning elections, or already thinks the next election is lost, and will inflict any amount of damage in order to pave the way for disaster capitalists to swoop in. Even, some say, the government ministers devising this scenario are doing so in expectation of lucrative employment with hedge funds and the like. But I’ve never met or heard of a politician who having devoted years to a political career has so cavalier an interest in its continuing success, and it seems extremely improbable that it would characterise an entire government.
And if it really does, then why provide energy bill support, so plainly at odds with small state, libertarian ideology? Indeed that seemed to be Truss’s position early in the leadership contest, when she spoke against giving people “handouts”, only to change tack when it became clear what the political consequences would be. The same applies to the theory of a deliberately engineered market crash.
The second variant of the ‘cunning plan’ interpretation is that the market reaction was anticipated by the government with the intention of providing a justification for a subsequent full budget including massive public spending cuts, as well as ‘supply side’ deregulation of labour rights, planning, and environmental standards, in order to ‘satisfy the markets’. On this account, the government manufactured the current crisis as a step to that pre-existing end goal.
In reality, it is highly unlikely that any government would deliberately create such a crisis, again because of the political consequences. Whatever any government’s agenda may be, it can only deliver it if it is in power and able to exercise power. That remains true even if the agenda is a secret one to enact some Ayn Rand-like laying waste to society and the state or, at least, a massive rolling back of the state. It still requires being in power, and being in power for a considerable amount of time, and with very little opposition or constraint. Yet some, such as Guardian journalist Polly Toynbee, think this week’s crisis will put the Conservatives out of power for a generation and many Tory MPs fear just that. But if the analysis that the government wouldn’t want a crisis because of the political consequences isn’t accepted, then why would it feel the need to provoke a crisis to justify spending cuts, rather than simply make the cuts and face the political consequences of doing so?
I suppose that those who believe the ‘cunning plan’ theory, in either variant, will never be persuaded otherwise, despite its inherent implausibility. One thing about such theories is that (ironically, rather like those of the Brexiters) they constantly twist the available evidence to ‘prove’ themselves. For example, until very recently Rishi Sunak appeared in such theories as the arch-libertarian, product of Goldman Sachs, former hedge fund partner and, supposedly, masterminding the introduction of ‘Charter Cities’ into the UK. Surely if the plan to deliberately crash the markets existed then he would be part of the government delivering it, perhaps even leading that government? And if he had been then, inevitably, that would have been cited as ‘proof’ of this secret plan. Yet, in fact, it was he who, during the leadership campaign, repeatedly denounced the “fairy tale” of Trussonomics, anticipating exactly the effects it would have on currency and bond markets and rejecting it as irresponsible.
No, just incompetence
So my own view is that, in their arrogance and delusion, this Brexit government, and its cheerleaders, really do believe it has found a new ‘unconventional’ economic model and did not expect the market reaction, and that although a full November budget was certainly planned, including the announcement of the deregulatory ‘supply side reforms’ that will supposedly deliver the growth to pay for tax cuts, it was not going to include significant spending cuts which, instead, were anticipated for after Truss had won the election on the back of what they expected to be a growing economy. Then, with the legitimacy of a fresh mandate and a compliant parliamentary majority, she would declare it was time to shrink public spending but without coupling that with the tax cuts that would already be in place.
If my interpretation is right, the government’s plan is now in tatters, and the expectation is that the November budget will feature huge spending cuts (£) (and perhaps reversing the tax cuts, as some Tory MPs want, which can’t be ruled out though it seems unlikely at the moment). That may seem to be the same outcome as version two of the ‘cunning plan’ that I’ve rejected, but my point is that the government would not, from choice, have initiated spending cuts before the election but afterwards, because of the political unpopularity of such cuts. Otherwise, why not just have held a normal budget this Autumn, featuring both tax and spending cuts, avoiding a market crisis altogether, taking a political hit, no doubt, but nothing compared to that which they now face.
For this government was already politically weak, and as a result of this crisis is now much weaker. Although the libertarian cabal has taken control of the government, both it and Truss have many opponents amongst MPs and, as I remarked in a post during the leadership campaign, the current Tory Party is so riven by factions as to be unleadable, with rebellions an ever-present possibility. This week’s crisis has laid that bare, with, almost astonishingly given how new her premiership is, reports of letters of no confidence in Truss being submitted by some MPs and threats of backbench revolts.
Crucially, the latest opinion poll, published yesterday evening, shows a massive 33% Labour lead, an increase of 16% since the mini-budget. That may not last, but it’s very possible that the government will not recover from this crisis, rather as happened after Black Wednesday in 1992 when the immediate fall in the polls was actually smaller.
It’s not just a matter of the electorate reacting fearfully to headlines of market turmoil and the sense that the government has lost control, it’s the impact on prices, most obviously petrol, and on mortgages, with several major lenders withdrawing fixed-rate offers this week and rates certain to increase, as well as predicted significant falls in house prices, perhaps by as much as 15%. This comes on top of the acute existing energy and general inflationary problems voters face, and their negative reaction can only be compounded if this crisis is immediately followed by, and seen to be the cause of, a new round of deeply unpopular ‘austerity’ spending cuts. The consequence is that Truss is now much less likely to win the next election and, possibly, won’t even survive until then.
Ultimately, the key point as regards the competence of this government by cult is that actually it’s irrelevant whether the crisis was the unexpected consequence of last Friday’s mini-budget decisions or was indeed ‘the plan’. Either the government was too incompetent to anticipate the scale of market reaction, or too incompetent to anticipate the scale of the political consequences of that reaction.
The dangers of cultism
The question about design versus incompetence has a wider significance. Throughout the Brexit process there have always been some, mainly remainers, who are adamant that it is driven by Machiavellian master strategists who conceal themselves behind a façade of stupidity and incompetence. To my mind, it is an absurd notion: not only did the Brexiters never have a single, unified, strategy but also everything I have seen or heard about them suggests that they really are just as incompetent in private as in public.
So now that we have a government of the libertarian Brexiters, it genuinely believes – egged on by its think tank advisors – that it is in possession of a new truth, one despised and ignored by the ‘experts’ whom they see as financially and intellectually invested in the ‘old way’ of doing things. That truth informs the fantasy economics of this ‘budget for growth’ but encompasses the entirety of the Brexit project, including the persistent, hubristic delusion of the UK’s power to dictate terms to the world around it and the fantasy which accompanies it about what ‘sovereignty’ means.
It rests upon a fanaticism, completely at odds with reality, shored up by the impregnable arrogance and mulish stubbornness of mediocrity. The most dangerous thing about it is not that these fanatics refuse to listen to any warnings, whoever they come from, it is that the more they hear those warnings the more convinced they are of their own rightness. This is the Brexiter logic I have written about so many times before (I think the first time was May 2017) in which every piece of evidence that proves their claims wrong is re-interpreted as proof that they are right.
That perverse logic is compounded in government by the creation of a groupthink bunker from which all dissent is banned, external constraints regarded as sabotage, and everything outside regarded as the treacherous machinations of the enemy. Some of the responses from the Brexiters to what has happened this week show the virtual insanity that is required in order to sustain this view of the world.
The bigger picture
This is an utterly disastrous approach to running the country, and it was brutally exposed as such by what happened this week. This, I think, was about much more than the government’s plans to increase debt. For one thing, it’s just the latest example of how the pound has ebbed and flowed since Brexit, always dropping when it seemed as the most extreme Brexiters would prevail (e.g. in getting ‘no deal Brexit’) and rising when it seemed that some degree of relative pragmatism was in the offing, though overall the general trend was always downwards.
Much more importantly, whilst the Donovan comment about a ‘doomsday cult’ being in charge of the UK was at one level a specific reference to Truss’s government it surely reflects a wider view of the UK since Brexit. That view isn’t simply to do with this or that budget, or even anything specific or measurable. It’s the more general reputational and cumulative effect of seeing a country which for six years has taken bizarre decisions, picked needless fights with its allies, showcased political instability, been cavalier about institutional probity, constitutional propriety and the rule of law, and all the other pathologies of Brexit and its aftermath. Throughout all of this has been the underlying presence and power of, indeed, a doomsday cult of Brexit Ultras, impregnable to evidence and reason. We are now seen, rightly, as a country which has become less reliable, less stable and less trustworthy, and, in some fundamental way, detached from reality.
So the market chaos this week and the economic crisis it has caused are contextualised by the general lack of confidence in such a country as well as providing an example of Brexiter fantasies, and specifically those of the budget, being found out by reality. In that sense, the current crisis is a crisis of Brexit.
A nation’s currency isn’t necessarily a reliable measure of its standing, and if it is then it’s a crude one and certainly not only one, and it is affected by many things. But it tells us something. Consider, then, that since the day before the referendum, when it was worth $1.49, to the pound’s lowest point of $1.03 this week – just six short years, though how long they seem – sterling has lost an astonishing one third of its value. It’s as good a measure as any of what Brexit has cost us economically, whilst symbolizing far, far more than our economic losses.
*I usually provide links when discussing the claims and arguments of others so that readers can judge whether I am representing them accurately and fairly. In this case I haven’t found any public figure making this argument which instead comes from numerous small social media accounts and it would be unfair to identify them. But the argument is being made by a significant number of such accounts, so is clearly widespread, which is why I am discussing it.
With the advent of Truss’s premiership, they have eschewed the sidelines in favour of governing and, with a rapidity that even their sternest critics would have thought it cruel to predict, have been exposed as utterly incompetent, both politically and economically, and in the most basic of ways. It is deeply ironic that this has happened at the hand of ‘the markets’ which they so slavishly fetishize.
Anatomy of a crisis
The occasion, of course, was last Friday’s tax-cutting ‘mini-budget’. “At last! A true Tory Budget”, the Daily Mail drooled, whilst Nigel Farage simpered about “the best Conservative Budget since 1986”. Yet, whether despite or because of this fidelity to Conservatism, and as anticipated in my previous post, there was an immediate crisis in the currency and bond markets, with the value of the pound falling to its lowest ever level on Monday, and the cost of government borrowing in the form of gilts or bonds rising very sharply. Amongst numerous knock-on effects, pension funds, which invest heavily in such bonds, came within hours of mass insolvency on Wednesday afternoon, threatening a major breakdown of the financial system and requiring major emergency temporary action from the Bank of England. This, in combination, with a clear signal from the Bank that interest rates will rise in due course, which eased pressure on the pound, has effected a degree of stabilization, but markets remain jittery and it’s by no means clear that this crisis has run its course, especially as regards gilts.
These weren’t routine or trivial market movements, but an overwhelming and brutal vote of no confidence in the government’s plans. Specifically, they were a vote of no confidence in the decision to cut taxes, or not implement previously planned tax rises, and to fund this through borrowing. Again as anticipated in my last post, the government’s refusal to allow its plans to be scrutinised independently by the Office for Budget Responsibility added to market alarm. So, too, did Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s casual reaction over the weekend, even suggesting further tax cuts to come. The rout continued on Monday when, as Paul Donovan, Chief Economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, put it, “investors seem to regard the UK Conservative Party as a doomsday cult”.
Throughout the week, the absence of public statements from Truss or Kwarteng compounded this impression, and when Truss did emerge on Thursday morning it was to re-confirm the government’s policy and downplay the market reaction, as well as denying it had anything much to do with the mini-budget. To the extent she admitted any connection it is the false one that markets didn’t like the costs of the energy bill support part of the budget, when in fact it was the tax cuts. It has since emerged that this and the equally false claim that what is happening in the markets is a global event due to the Ukraine War rather than something specifically affecting the UK are to be the government’s lines of defence.
Amongst the most significant events was when, on Tuesday, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) issued what BBC Economics Editor Faisal Islam described as a “stinging and unusual rebuke” to the UK. What made it so unusual was that such IMF warnings are usually made to emerging markets, not leading global economies. I mentioned in my previous post that aspects of the economic situation resemble those which occasioned the IMF’s 1976 bailout of the UK, and its statement this week that it is “closely monitoring” developments in the UK carried echoes of that. It was also, like the comments of other international players and the decisions taken by traders, a reminder that, no matter what Brexiter ‘sovereignty’ fantasists may think, the UK can never be ‘independent’ of the wider world within which it is a relatively small player. Most fundamentally, the Brexiters’ belief that they can create their own reality, and that all opposition can be swept aside as ‘Project Fear’ or ‘remainer sabotage’, was tested almost to the point of destruction.
These events have been widely reported and there’s no point in me adding more to that. Instead, I want to tease out more about the Brexit aspects and implications.
The Brexit mini-budget
At one level, the mini-budget had very little to do with Brexit in that, so far as I can see, the only provision within it that wouldn’t have been possible whilst a member of the EU is the planned removal of the cap on bankers’ bonuses. That isn’t unimportant, politically, but it’s not what spooked the markets. However, it is the budget of the Brexit Ultras and it is intimately bound up with Brexit. In case anyone doubts that, it was underlined by Farage’s endorsement. Even more explicitly (£), John Longworth, one of the most immoderate of the Ultras, regards it as part of Truss’s battle “for the future of Brexit Britain”. It’s a sentiment widely shared in Brexiter circles, with the Bruges Group tweeting that “remain media are talking up market panic … to derail Brexit”.
So, given that the Brexiters themselves regard the mini-budget as integral to Brexit, it’s reasonable to say, as Robert Shrimsley of the Financial Times did (£), that “Brexit ideology lies behind the UK’s market rout”. It’s abundantly clear to even the feeblest intelligence that those Brexiters now include Truss, for all the fury of Dominic Cummings’s denials (directed at me!) on the inane grounds that she supported remain in 2016. As I pointed out during the campaign, she is now a ‘born again Ultra’, perhaps the more fanatical for being so, and was extravagantly endorsed by the leading Ultras, making the fact that she was once a remainer the most tedious and least relevant thing to say about her.
As so often before, Brexiter responses to the crisis they created have been confused and contradictory. Some in the government prissily said they could not comment on market events, as if some new Trappist ordinance of political propriety has been invented. Others downplayed what has happened, suggesting that the market reaction is either trivial or transient, or even that it has little or nothing to do with the budget but is simply a result of a strengthening dollar (which doesn’t explain why the pound fell against all major currencies, or what happened in the bond market). Outrageously, some, like Crispin Odey, hedge fund manager, Tory and Vote Leave donor, and sometime employer of Kwarteng, blamed “remainers”. Peak insanity was reached by Daniel Hannan, who blamed the crash not on the mini-budget, but market fears of a Labour government!
In addition, or instead, some Brexiters blamed the Bank of England (BoE) for having failed to increase interest rates by enough, early enough, or to have reacted immediately to the crisis so as to support sterling and control inflation. That argument is more complicated than their others. There is a case that last week’s pre-budget interest rate rise should have been larger, although it’s not a straightforward one because doing so would also have been likely to impact on the cost-of-living crisis by pushing up mortgage rates.
Nevertheless, it was the government’s mini-budget, not the BoE, that caused this crisis and there is something bizarre about a government simultaneously taking inflationary measures it says will boost economic growth, whilst relying on the BoE to take measures to reduce inflation and choke off growth. Indeed, part of the reason for market nervousness is that the institutions of financial and economic governance are not acting in a consistent and coordinated way, something flagged up by Mark Carney, the former BoE Governor whose actions did much to preserve a degree of economic stability after the Brexit referendum vote. Perhaps the BoE could have acted earlier, though had it done so it's easy to predict that then it would have been accused of overreaction and of trying to undermine government policy. In any case, what is even more bizarre is the spectacle of Brexiters, with their disdain for experts, technocrats and unelected bureaucrats, positioning the BoE as having responsibility to save the government from itself. Or perhaps it is not bizarre, so much as a reflection of the Brexiters’ reflex refusal ever to take responsibility for anything even when in government.
Government by cultists
That refusal has as its counterpart the distinctively Brexity idea, now taken over wholesale by this Brexit government, that they are beleaguered revolutionaries of true Conservativism fighting the (presumably false) conservatism of ‘the Establishment’. The notion of Brexit as an anti-Establishment insurgency has been a ludicrous one ever since the 2016 referendum was won, and Brexit became adopted as the central policy and national strategy. It is even more so now that the Brexit Ultras are unequivocally in charge of government, though of course it is a standard populist trope, familiar from the Trump presidency.
What we have seen this week is that the Brexiters have added ‘the markets’ to the increasingly long and diverse list – encompassing the ‘Woke’ Blob, the civil service in general and the Treasury in particular, the BoE, remainers, rejoiners, the National Trust, the BBC – of enemy forces they must confront in the name of revolutionary purity.
Longworth explicitly included the City in this list, whilst unnamed government figures suggested that traders were enacting “a plot by the left” which will have come as a surprise to them. Similarly, the Daily Mail reported that senior Tories blame “City Boys” for “sparking economic chaos” with traders “trying to make money out of bad news”. Well colour me shocked. Haven’t these free-market ideologues worked out that ‘trying to make money’ is what traders always do, indeed it’s all that they do? Do they think that ‘City Boys’ care about making government policy look good? And aren’t these the same ‘City Boys’ who, according to Kwarteng, are the brightest and the best who must be encouraged to come to London by uncapped bonuses? Aren’t they, for that matter, good ol’ City Boys like Crispin Odey?
The IMF, which has long been on the Brexiters’ list of enemies, also came under attack for its comments. For example, Brexiter economist Andrew Lilico was outraged by its “left-wing” intervention, to the point that he advocated the UK should “withhold its IMF contributions”. It is a strange world in which the IMF is considered ‘left-wing’ (or even, as Brexit Party ex-MEP Lance Forman had it, “socialist” and under the influence of the EU), and the idea of withholding contributions seems to conjure up a vision where Brexit is the gateway to exiting any and every international institution, in a permanent revolution of endless Brexits.
Also triggered by the IMF, David Frost opined, contradictorily, that its comments were “somewhat eccentric” yet reflected its “highly conventional approach”. This is indicative of the fact that what is at stake is more than Brexiter whinging about the enemies that beset them. This government, and its semi-intellectual underlabourers in think tanks and the media, are convinced that they are the custodians of a new truth. The markets and their economists are “attached to the old way of doing things” as Patrick Minford put it, to the extent that “there is no sterling crisis except in the minds of idiots” (£). Similarly the BoE has “not got the memo” about the “economic consensus crumbling” according to Paul Marshall (£), investment manager and Vote Leave donor. Thus arch-Brexiter journalist Allister Heath insists (£) Liz Truss must “hold her nerve” and defy the “orthodoxy” of “the elites”.
Their problem is that, as the market reaction shows, the ‘old ways’ still hold and the ‘economic consensus’ remains. Calling it an “orthodoxy” is accurate, but that very accuracy shows why decisions to “defy” it are foolish. That’s why investors regard the Tory government as a ‘doomsday cult’, and responding that investors are ‘idiots’, ‘conventional’ or even ‘socialists’ makes no difference, except perhaps to re-enforce them in that view.
As I put it in my last blog, traders simply don’t care about the theories of Patrick Minford, or of the broader IEA-derived analysis of the cultist government. Indeed, one of the few semi-amusing features of Brexit is the spectacle of all these free-trade, free-market economists going into contortions to explain how erecting trade barriers doesn’t damage trade and, now, why markets don’t understand how to price currencies or debt. It’s this stupidity that accounts for the fact that, apparently, market traders talk of the demand for a “moron risk premium” in order to hold sterling assets and fund UK debt.
But is there a cunning plan?
However, there is a different interpretation of all this doing the rounds on social media*, in which, far from being utterly incompetent, the Brexit government has a skilful, if malevolent, plan. It is an interpretation which comes in two variants.
One version is that the government deliberately crashed the markets, secretly giving hedge fund traders and others – with whom the current government has strong links of networks and party funding – advance notice so that, as indeed happened, they could short the markets and make fortunes. It doesn’t really make sense, though, because no such secret information would need to be passed – it was obvious even to me, and widely predicted, what was going to happen if the mini-budget pursued the policies Truss had openly advocated during the leadership campaign. Indeed that’s why the pound was beginning to fall once it became clear she was almost certain to win.
It also doesn’t make sense given the huge political price of the crisis. Some suggest that the government is so fanatical that it does not care about winning elections, or already thinks the next election is lost, and will inflict any amount of damage in order to pave the way for disaster capitalists to swoop in. Even, some say, the government ministers devising this scenario are doing so in expectation of lucrative employment with hedge funds and the like. But I’ve never met or heard of a politician who having devoted years to a political career has so cavalier an interest in its continuing success, and it seems extremely improbable that it would characterise an entire government.
And if it really does, then why provide energy bill support, so plainly at odds with small state, libertarian ideology? Indeed that seemed to be Truss’s position early in the leadership contest, when she spoke against giving people “handouts”, only to change tack when it became clear what the political consequences would be. The same applies to the theory of a deliberately engineered market crash.
The second variant of the ‘cunning plan’ interpretation is that the market reaction was anticipated by the government with the intention of providing a justification for a subsequent full budget including massive public spending cuts, as well as ‘supply side’ deregulation of labour rights, planning, and environmental standards, in order to ‘satisfy the markets’. On this account, the government manufactured the current crisis as a step to that pre-existing end goal.
In reality, it is highly unlikely that any government would deliberately create such a crisis, again because of the political consequences. Whatever any government’s agenda may be, it can only deliver it if it is in power and able to exercise power. That remains true even if the agenda is a secret one to enact some Ayn Rand-like laying waste to society and the state or, at least, a massive rolling back of the state. It still requires being in power, and being in power for a considerable amount of time, and with very little opposition or constraint. Yet some, such as Guardian journalist Polly Toynbee, think this week’s crisis will put the Conservatives out of power for a generation and many Tory MPs fear just that. But if the analysis that the government wouldn’t want a crisis because of the political consequences isn’t accepted, then why would it feel the need to provoke a crisis to justify spending cuts, rather than simply make the cuts and face the political consequences of doing so?
I suppose that those who believe the ‘cunning plan’ theory, in either variant, will never be persuaded otherwise, despite its inherent implausibility. One thing about such theories is that (ironically, rather like those of the Brexiters) they constantly twist the available evidence to ‘prove’ themselves. For example, until very recently Rishi Sunak appeared in such theories as the arch-libertarian, product of Goldman Sachs, former hedge fund partner and, supposedly, masterminding the introduction of ‘Charter Cities’ into the UK. Surely if the plan to deliberately crash the markets existed then he would be part of the government delivering it, perhaps even leading that government? And if he had been then, inevitably, that would have been cited as ‘proof’ of this secret plan. Yet, in fact, it was he who, during the leadership campaign, repeatedly denounced the “fairy tale” of Trussonomics, anticipating exactly the effects it would have on currency and bond markets and rejecting it as irresponsible.
No, just incompetence
So my own view is that, in their arrogance and delusion, this Brexit government, and its cheerleaders, really do believe it has found a new ‘unconventional’ economic model and did not expect the market reaction, and that although a full November budget was certainly planned, including the announcement of the deregulatory ‘supply side reforms’ that will supposedly deliver the growth to pay for tax cuts, it was not going to include significant spending cuts which, instead, were anticipated for after Truss had won the election on the back of what they expected to be a growing economy. Then, with the legitimacy of a fresh mandate and a compliant parliamentary majority, she would declare it was time to shrink public spending but without coupling that with the tax cuts that would already be in place.
If my interpretation is right, the government’s plan is now in tatters, and the expectation is that the November budget will feature huge spending cuts (£) (and perhaps reversing the tax cuts, as some Tory MPs want, which can’t be ruled out though it seems unlikely at the moment). That may seem to be the same outcome as version two of the ‘cunning plan’ that I’ve rejected, but my point is that the government would not, from choice, have initiated spending cuts before the election but afterwards, because of the political unpopularity of such cuts. Otherwise, why not just have held a normal budget this Autumn, featuring both tax and spending cuts, avoiding a market crisis altogether, taking a political hit, no doubt, but nothing compared to that which they now face.
For this government was already politically weak, and as a result of this crisis is now much weaker. Although the libertarian cabal has taken control of the government, both it and Truss have many opponents amongst MPs and, as I remarked in a post during the leadership campaign, the current Tory Party is so riven by factions as to be unleadable, with rebellions an ever-present possibility. This week’s crisis has laid that bare, with, almost astonishingly given how new her premiership is, reports of letters of no confidence in Truss being submitted by some MPs and threats of backbench revolts.
Crucially, the latest opinion poll, published yesterday evening, shows a massive 33% Labour lead, an increase of 16% since the mini-budget. That may not last, but it’s very possible that the government will not recover from this crisis, rather as happened after Black Wednesday in 1992 when the immediate fall in the polls was actually smaller.
It’s not just a matter of the electorate reacting fearfully to headlines of market turmoil and the sense that the government has lost control, it’s the impact on prices, most obviously petrol, and on mortgages, with several major lenders withdrawing fixed-rate offers this week and rates certain to increase, as well as predicted significant falls in house prices, perhaps by as much as 15%. This comes on top of the acute existing energy and general inflationary problems voters face, and their negative reaction can only be compounded if this crisis is immediately followed by, and seen to be the cause of, a new round of deeply unpopular ‘austerity’ spending cuts. The consequence is that Truss is now much less likely to win the next election and, possibly, won’t even survive until then.
Ultimately, the key point as regards the competence of this government by cult is that actually it’s irrelevant whether the crisis was the unexpected consequence of last Friday’s mini-budget decisions or was indeed ‘the plan’. Either the government was too incompetent to anticipate the scale of market reaction, or too incompetent to anticipate the scale of the political consequences of that reaction.
The dangers of cultism
The question about design versus incompetence has a wider significance. Throughout the Brexit process there have always been some, mainly remainers, who are adamant that it is driven by Machiavellian master strategists who conceal themselves behind a façade of stupidity and incompetence. To my mind, it is an absurd notion: not only did the Brexiters never have a single, unified, strategy but also everything I have seen or heard about them suggests that they really are just as incompetent in private as in public.
So now that we have a government of the libertarian Brexiters, it genuinely believes – egged on by its think tank advisors – that it is in possession of a new truth, one despised and ignored by the ‘experts’ whom they see as financially and intellectually invested in the ‘old way’ of doing things. That truth informs the fantasy economics of this ‘budget for growth’ but encompasses the entirety of the Brexit project, including the persistent, hubristic delusion of the UK’s power to dictate terms to the world around it and the fantasy which accompanies it about what ‘sovereignty’ means.
It rests upon a fanaticism, completely at odds with reality, shored up by the impregnable arrogance and mulish stubbornness of mediocrity. The most dangerous thing about it is not that these fanatics refuse to listen to any warnings, whoever they come from, it is that the more they hear those warnings the more convinced they are of their own rightness. This is the Brexiter logic I have written about so many times before (I think the first time was May 2017) in which every piece of evidence that proves their claims wrong is re-interpreted as proof that they are right.
That perverse logic is compounded in government by the creation of a groupthink bunker from which all dissent is banned, external constraints regarded as sabotage, and everything outside regarded as the treacherous machinations of the enemy. Some of the responses from the Brexiters to what has happened this week show the virtual insanity that is required in order to sustain this view of the world.
The bigger picture
This is an utterly disastrous approach to running the country, and it was brutally exposed as such by what happened this week. This, I think, was about much more than the government’s plans to increase debt. For one thing, it’s just the latest example of how the pound has ebbed and flowed since Brexit, always dropping when it seemed as the most extreme Brexiters would prevail (e.g. in getting ‘no deal Brexit’) and rising when it seemed that some degree of relative pragmatism was in the offing, though overall the general trend was always downwards.
Much more importantly, whilst the Donovan comment about a ‘doomsday cult’ being in charge of the UK was at one level a specific reference to Truss’s government it surely reflects a wider view of the UK since Brexit. That view isn’t simply to do with this or that budget, or even anything specific or measurable. It’s the more general reputational and cumulative effect of seeing a country which for six years has taken bizarre decisions, picked needless fights with its allies, showcased political instability, been cavalier about institutional probity, constitutional propriety and the rule of law, and all the other pathologies of Brexit and its aftermath. Throughout all of this has been the underlying presence and power of, indeed, a doomsday cult of Brexit Ultras, impregnable to evidence and reason. We are now seen, rightly, as a country which has become less reliable, less stable and less trustworthy, and, in some fundamental way, detached from reality.
So the market chaos this week and the economic crisis it has caused are contextualised by the general lack of confidence in such a country as well as providing an example of Brexiter fantasies, and specifically those of the budget, being found out by reality. In that sense, the current crisis is a crisis of Brexit.
A nation’s currency isn’t necessarily a reliable measure of its standing, and if it is then it’s a crude one and certainly not only one, and it is affected by many things. But it tells us something. Consider, then, that since the day before the referendum, when it was worth $1.49, to the pound’s lowest point of $1.03 this week – just six short years, though how long they seem – sterling has lost an astonishing one third of its value. It’s as good a measure as any of what Brexit has cost us economically, whilst symbolizing far, far more than our economic losses.
*I usually provide links when discussing the claims and arguments of others so that readers can judge whether I am representing them accurately and fairly. In this case I haven’t found any public figure making this argument which instead comes from numerous small social media accounts and it would be unfair to identify them. But the argument is being made by a significant number of such accounts, so is clearly widespread, which is why I am discussing it.
Friday, 3 November 2017
Now politics is moving fast - but in what direction?
In my
previous post, I argued that economics is moving faster than the politics of
Brexit. Further confirmation of that came this week when the car industry urged
the government to
provide clarity “within months” because investment decisions cannot be
postponed much longer. Meanwhile, financial services have been saying the same
thing but making the sharper point that from early 2018 the value
of agreeing any transition period will “start to erode” as the relocation
decisions will have already begun to be made. Although people talk of the
danger of a ‘cliff edge’ in March 2019, in a sense there is a mini-cliff edge
much earlier than that, perhaps in March 2018.
But we are no longer just in the terrain of making predictions about the effects of Brexit. An NIESR report this week shows that households are already an average £600 a year worse off and that this is “directly attributable” to the Brexit vote. We also now have food rotting unpicked in fields largely because of the difficulties of recruiting EU workers and, similarly, growing problems in nurse recruitment and in other sectors. Also this week the Bank of England identified Brexit as having a damaging effect on the economy leading, in part, to the raising of interest rates.
However no one could deny that politics is now also moving very fast. The trouble is that whereas the economics is going in one direction only it’s not clear where politics is going at all. On the specifics of Brexit there are occasional signs that, belatedly and at snail’s pace, the government are admitting some of the complexities of Brexit, for example with Liam Fox’s recognition that his previous assertion that the UK could just cut and paste EU trade deals after Brexit was incorrect. But for every such small step forward there are contradictory statements on such basic issues as whether no deal means no deal or a “bare bones” no deal (i.e. no trade deal but deals on discrete matters such as air travel); on whether or not there could be a trade deal with the EU completed (£) by March 2019 with an implementation period to follow; on whether and how talks might be speeded up, and on a raft of other things.
Overall, there is very little sign, publicly anyway, of the government taking heed of the detailed technical realities such as those spelt out again this week by Sir Ivan Rogers in his evidence to the Treasury Select Committee. Rogers, it will be recalled, was formerly the UK Ambassador to the EU until he was hounded out of office by the Brexit Ultras back in January. It’s possible that we may get some further clarity on Brexit if (and depending on to what extent) the government’s sectoral impact assessments get released. Forcing this has been perhaps the only effective thing as regards Brexit that Labour have done since the Referendum. It’s conceivable that if they are detailed and alarming then this will change the terms of debate considerably. It is notable that the extremely pro-Brexit Daily Express has this week begun to publish stories reporting, rather than ridiculing as ‘Project Fear’, the likely adverse consequences of Brexit. As the bad news piles up there’s just a sense that things are shifting, but not fast enough to make a difference yet.
Of course the big political story of the week concerns sexual harassment and the unfolding events around this seem likely to further destabilise an already highly precarious minority government. It is more than conceivable that we are not very far away from the government falling, both as a result of scandal but also because, in any case, it just isn’t going to be possible to keep fudging all of the detailed issues around Brexit. Once the fudge ceases, the Tory party will almost certainly implode and/or the support of the DUP that enables the Tories to govern will collapse.
If that happens, it will open up highly unpredictable possibilities which could give an opportunity for a government to do what should have been done by Theresa May right from the start. Namely, to provide some proper political leadership not just of Westminster but of the country as a whole. Such leadership would acknowledge and respect the divisions within the country, acknowledge the full complexities of Brexit, acknowledge the unavoidable trade-offs and constraints, and acknowledge in particular the yawning gap between what leave voters were promised and what is actually deliverable. Parroting about ‘the will of the people’ is no longer, if indeed it ever was, good enough. In short, there needs to be a comprehensive rejection of the politics of “easy answers” which was superbly dissected by David Allen Green in the FT this week.
It is almost certainly too late for May to provide this kind of leadership now. Even for a new government with a new Prime Minister it would need political skill of an extraordinary kind. Nor could it just be a matter of the Prime Minister: what is needed is leadership from across the political class but also a kind of multi-lateral rhetorical disarmament from all of those, on both sides and at all levels, who are passionately engaged in all this. That includes, on the one side, dropping all of the relentless nastiness about saboteurs, traitors and enemies of the people; and, on the other side, dropping the endless derogatory insults about thick, racist Brexshitters. In particular, it means almost all of us accepting that we won’t get everything we want, whatever the government does (including following its present course).
In such a climate we might then be able to seek some form of extension to the Article 50 period and to pursue what is probably the only politically and economically viable solution to the current mess which is single market membership via EEA/EFTA, and membership of the various other agencies such as Euratom which are precluded by the ECJ redline. The entire UK approach deriving from the Lancaster House speech would therefore have to be abandoned – not because it is going to fail but because it already has failed. We already know for certain that what was set out then and in the White Paper cannot be achieved within the time available, and almost certainly that it cannot be achieved within any time frame.
So another approach is needed. This would not, to say the least, be easy, either domestically or diplomatically. But nor is the present approach. Indeed, there is no easy course of action available. But if we don’t get to a situation something like I’ve just described within a very few months then it will be too late to avoid catastrophe. A side-effect of the current scandals afflicting the government might – just – be to take politics quickly enough to the point where it is possible.
Update (5/11/17): Consistent with the argument in this post, the President of the CBI is today reported as suggesting that a transition deal needs to be agreed by March 2018, and that the government should drop its existing ‘red lines’ over the form that a deal should take.
But we are no longer just in the terrain of making predictions about the effects of Brexit. An NIESR report this week shows that households are already an average £600 a year worse off and that this is “directly attributable” to the Brexit vote. We also now have food rotting unpicked in fields largely because of the difficulties of recruiting EU workers and, similarly, growing problems in nurse recruitment and in other sectors. Also this week the Bank of England identified Brexit as having a damaging effect on the economy leading, in part, to the raising of interest rates.
However no one could deny that politics is now also moving very fast. The trouble is that whereas the economics is going in one direction only it’s not clear where politics is going at all. On the specifics of Brexit there are occasional signs that, belatedly and at snail’s pace, the government are admitting some of the complexities of Brexit, for example with Liam Fox’s recognition that his previous assertion that the UK could just cut and paste EU trade deals after Brexit was incorrect. But for every such small step forward there are contradictory statements on such basic issues as whether no deal means no deal or a “bare bones” no deal (i.e. no trade deal but deals on discrete matters such as air travel); on whether or not there could be a trade deal with the EU completed (£) by March 2019 with an implementation period to follow; on whether and how talks might be speeded up, and on a raft of other things.
Overall, there is very little sign, publicly anyway, of the government taking heed of the detailed technical realities such as those spelt out again this week by Sir Ivan Rogers in his evidence to the Treasury Select Committee. Rogers, it will be recalled, was formerly the UK Ambassador to the EU until he was hounded out of office by the Brexit Ultras back in January. It’s possible that we may get some further clarity on Brexit if (and depending on to what extent) the government’s sectoral impact assessments get released. Forcing this has been perhaps the only effective thing as regards Brexit that Labour have done since the Referendum. It’s conceivable that if they are detailed and alarming then this will change the terms of debate considerably. It is notable that the extremely pro-Brexit Daily Express has this week begun to publish stories reporting, rather than ridiculing as ‘Project Fear’, the likely adverse consequences of Brexit. As the bad news piles up there’s just a sense that things are shifting, but not fast enough to make a difference yet.
Of course the big political story of the week concerns sexual harassment and the unfolding events around this seem likely to further destabilise an already highly precarious minority government. It is more than conceivable that we are not very far away from the government falling, both as a result of scandal but also because, in any case, it just isn’t going to be possible to keep fudging all of the detailed issues around Brexit. Once the fudge ceases, the Tory party will almost certainly implode and/or the support of the DUP that enables the Tories to govern will collapse.
If that happens, it will open up highly unpredictable possibilities which could give an opportunity for a government to do what should have been done by Theresa May right from the start. Namely, to provide some proper political leadership not just of Westminster but of the country as a whole. Such leadership would acknowledge and respect the divisions within the country, acknowledge the full complexities of Brexit, acknowledge the unavoidable trade-offs and constraints, and acknowledge in particular the yawning gap between what leave voters were promised and what is actually deliverable. Parroting about ‘the will of the people’ is no longer, if indeed it ever was, good enough. In short, there needs to be a comprehensive rejection of the politics of “easy answers” which was superbly dissected by David Allen Green in the FT this week.
It is almost certainly too late for May to provide this kind of leadership now. Even for a new government with a new Prime Minister it would need political skill of an extraordinary kind. Nor could it just be a matter of the Prime Minister: what is needed is leadership from across the political class but also a kind of multi-lateral rhetorical disarmament from all of those, on both sides and at all levels, who are passionately engaged in all this. That includes, on the one side, dropping all of the relentless nastiness about saboteurs, traitors and enemies of the people; and, on the other side, dropping the endless derogatory insults about thick, racist Brexshitters. In particular, it means almost all of us accepting that we won’t get everything we want, whatever the government does (including following its present course).
In such a climate we might then be able to seek some form of extension to the Article 50 period and to pursue what is probably the only politically and economically viable solution to the current mess which is single market membership via EEA/EFTA, and membership of the various other agencies such as Euratom which are precluded by the ECJ redline. The entire UK approach deriving from the Lancaster House speech would therefore have to be abandoned – not because it is going to fail but because it already has failed. We already know for certain that what was set out then and in the White Paper cannot be achieved within the time available, and almost certainly that it cannot be achieved within any time frame.
So another approach is needed. This would not, to say the least, be easy, either domestically or diplomatically. But nor is the present approach. Indeed, there is no easy course of action available. But if we don’t get to a situation something like I’ve just described within a very few months then it will be too late to avoid catastrophe. A side-effect of the current scandals afflicting the government might – just – be to take politics quickly enough to the point where it is possible.
Update (5/11/17): Consistent with the argument in this post, the President of the CBI is today reported as suggesting that a transition deal needs to be agreed by March 2018, and that the government should drop its existing ‘red lines’ over the form that a deal should take.
Friday, 6 January 2017
The debate about economic forecasts
The statement by the Bank of
England that its forecasts of the effects of Brexit have proved wrong has
been greeted
with glee by Brexiters and led to economic
forecasting in general being denounced. There is no doubt that economic
forecasting is a problematic activity, but it is important to make several
points about the Brexit forecasts.
First, they were an attempt to respond to the Leave campaign’s claims that the UK would flourish or at least come to no harm if people voted to leave. Those were every bit as much forecasts as those of the Remain campaign, even though they were not backed up with any analysis. Similarly, claims about the £350M a week for the NHS if we left, the fall in immigration if we left, and the prospect of Turkey and other countries joining the EU if we didn’t leave were all forecasts, and they have all now been disowned by leading leavers.
Second, like all economic forecasts, those made during the Referendum campaign were based upon assumptions and simplifications. Most importantly, many of them, including that made by the Treasury, assumed what was then believed to be inevitable namely that Article 50 would be triggered immediately after a vote to leave (see paragraph 1.42 of the Treasury short-term forecast). It wasn’t, and instead we have been in a limbo since. So far as the BoE forecast is concerned, it did not (bizarrely, perhaps) factor in the actions that it, itself, would take if the vote was to leave: quantitative easing and a cut in interest rates. Both those things happened, and mitigated the effects of the vote, but they were not cost-free and the price of them is being paid by pension funds and savers. So whilst some of the adverse effects the BoE predicted have not so far occurred, it is because of other adverse effects created by the BoE’s attempts to prevent their predictions coming true: the cost of the vote has been displaced and deferred, not avoided.
Third, it is simply not the case that the vote has passed without very severe economic consequences. The rapid fall of sterling is the most obvious, and would in any other circumstances have been understood as an economic catastrophe. The knock on effects of inflation are beginning to be felt. And there have been significant deferrals or abandonments of investment. Most economists continue to believe that the long-term effects of Brexit will be bad. At the very least, the jury is still out and some things can be said with certainty: whenever the government indicates that a hard Brexit is in prospect, the pound falls; and the government’s fiscal position has deteriorated to the extent of £59 billion over five years as a result of the vote. This isn’t just ‘forecasting’, it means real additional cuts in public services, which will affect real people’s lives, which wouldn’t have occurred if the Brexit vote hadn’t happened. Again, in any other circumstances this huge collapse in public finances would have been seen as a major economic crisis. Post-Brexit it is all but ignored.
Fourth, and it is a version of the first point, although Brexiters are now decrying economic forecasting, they are happy enough to take as gospel those that have recently been provided by lobby group Change Britain saying that hard Brexit would make the UK £450M a year better off and create 400,000 new jobs. If forecasting is so discredited then why should we believe these figures?
Similarly, much Brexiter attention has been given to a report by a group of Cambridge economists saying that the official forecasts were wrong and that there would be little economic effect from Brexit. Seldom can an academic working paper have been accorded such respect! What is striking about that is, first, that we can be sure that had reached different conclusions it would have been derided as the work of the elite (or ignored altogether) and, second, that what is being lauded is the application of a new and as yet unproven model of economic forecasting. In short, there is much confirmation bias in play here.
With all that said, I have always been reluctant to try to quantify the effects of Brexit and in various talks I gave before the Referendum refused to do so. I have adopted the same approach on this blog (for example on last September’s OECD statement, and in the very first post I said that there was no point in following each and every economic indicator whilst we were still in the EU). Instead, what should command out attention is the logic of different institutional arrangements. What I mean by that is that leaving the EU is a massive institutional change for the UK. That ought be to common ground between Brexiters (or else – why leave?) and Remainers (or else – why care that we are leaving?).
If that is so, then [given that 50% of our trade is with the EU and another 16% via EU trade deals – so – 66% of our trade – and given that some, at least of our foreign direct investment relates to single market membership, and given that many of our industries from agricultural harvesting to the most advanced science are dependent on free movement] how could it be anything other than true that it will have massive economic effects? No country has ever tried to simultaneously detach and re-attach itself to the global economy, with no clear process or timescale or terms for doing so, and that in itself makes predictions all but impossible, except to say that the consequences will be hugely destabilizing. For sure Brexiters might say, as some do, that any price is worth it. For them, no economic forecast matters. Or that in the long run the effects will be positive - and what is that other than an economic forecast, albeit based not on data modelling but on blind faith?
First, they were an attempt to respond to the Leave campaign’s claims that the UK would flourish or at least come to no harm if people voted to leave. Those were every bit as much forecasts as those of the Remain campaign, even though they were not backed up with any analysis. Similarly, claims about the £350M a week for the NHS if we left, the fall in immigration if we left, and the prospect of Turkey and other countries joining the EU if we didn’t leave were all forecasts, and they have all now been disowned by leading leavers.
Second, like all economic forecasts, those made during the Referendum campaign were based upon assumptions and simplifications. Most importantly, many of them, including that made by the Treasury, assumed what was then believed to be inevitable namely that Article 50 would be triggered immediately after a vote to leave (see paragraph 1.42 of the Treasury short-term forecast). It wasn’t, and instead we have been in a limbo since. So far as the BoE forecast is concerned, it did not (bizarrely, perhaps) factor in the actions that it, itself, would take if the vote was to leave: quantitative easing and a cut in interest rates. Both those things happened, and mitigated the effects of the vote, but they were not cost-free and the price of them is being paid by pension funds and savers. So whilst some of the adverse effects the BoE predicted have not so far occurred, it is because of other adverse effects created by the BoE’s attempts to prevent their predictions coming true: the cost of the vote has been displaced and deferred, not avoided.
Third, it is simply not the case that the vote has passed without very severe economic consequences. The rapid fall of sterling is the most obvious, and would in any other circumstances have been understood as an economic catastrophe. The knock on effects of inflation are beginning to be felt. And there have been significant deferrals or abandonments of investment. Most economists continue to believe that the long-term effects of Brexit will be bad. At the very least, the jury is still out and some things can be said with certainty: whenever the government indicates that a hard Brexit is in prospect, the pound falls; and the government’s fiscal position has deteriorated to the extent of £59 billion over five years as a result of the vote. This isn’t just ‘forecasting’, it means real additional cuts in public services, which will affect real people’s lives, which wouldn’t have occurred if the Brexit vote hadn’t happened. Again, in any other circumstances this huge collapse in public finances would have been seen as a major economic crisis. Post-Brexit it is all but ignored.
Fourth, and it is a version of the first point, although Brexiters are now decrying economic forecasting, they are happy enough to take as gospel those that have recently been provided by lobby group Change Britain saying that hard Brexit would make the UK £450M a year better off and create 400,000 new jobs. If forecasting is so discredited then why should we believe these figures?
Similarly, much Brexiter attention has been given to a report by a group of Cambridge economists saying that the official forecasts were wrong and that there would be little economic effect from Brexit. Seldom can an academic working paper have been accorded such respect! What is striking about that is, first, that we can be sure that had reached different conclusions it would have been derided as the work of the elite (or ignored altogether) and, second, that what is being lauded is the application of a new and as yet unproven model of economic forecasting. In short, there is much confirmation bias in play here.
With all that said, I have always been reluctant to try to quantify the effects of Brexit and in various talks I gave before the Referendum refused to do so. I have adopted the same approach on this blog (for example on last September’s OECD statement, and in the very first post I said that there was no point in following each and every economic indicator whilst we were still in the EU). Instead, what should command out attention is the logic of different institutional arrangements. What I mean by that is that leaving the EU is a massive institutional change for the UK. That ought be to common ground between Brexiters (or else – why leave?) and Remainers (or else – why care that we are leaving?).
If that is so, then [given that 50% of our trade is with the EU and another 16% via EU trade deals – so – 66% of our trade – and given that some, at least of our foreign direct investment relates to single market membership, and given that many of our industries from agricultural harvesting to the most advanced science are dependent on free movement] how could it be anything other than true that it will have massive economic effects? No country has ever tried to simultaneously detach and re-attach itself to the global economy, with no clear process or timescale or terms for doing so, and that in itself makes predictions all but impossible, except to say that the consequences will be hugely destabilizing. For sure Brexiters might say, as some do, that any price is worth it. For them, no economic forecast matters. Or that in the long run the effects will be positive - and what is that other than an economic forecast, albeit based not on data modelling but on blind faith?
Wednesday, 21 September 2016
Reading today's OECD statement
Considerable
caution is needed when dealing with both economic forecasts and media
reporting. When the two are combined, it becomes positively hazardous as with
today’s OECD statement on the impact of Brexit. Read the Independent and you learn that “OECD
halves growth forecast due to EU Referendum vote”, but the Guardian’s pro-Brexit economics editor
Larry Elliot reports that the OECD has “backtracked
on its warning that the UK would suffer instant damage” from the vote. The
pro-Brexit Telegraph takes the same
line, but headlines it under the rather cautious formulation “Brexit
not as bad as feared”. Of course, all three reports are in some sense true.
The first report highlights the OECD cutting its prediction of UK growth in
2017 from 2% to 1%; the second and third increasing its prediction of UK growth
for 2016 from 1.7% to 1.8%.
In any case, there isn’t any point at all in trying to read the economic effects of Brexit yet. Brexiters are keen to insist that what they call ‘Project Fear’ has been discredited because there has been no immediate recession as predicted by, especially, the Treasury. However that is meaningless because all of those predictions were predicated on the understanding that Article 50 would be triggered immediately after a vote to leave, as the then Prime Minister had said would be the case. The Treasury report on the immediate impact of a leave vote is explicit in stating this (paragraph 1.6 on p.12 and paragraph 1. 38 on p.24 of the link).
This didn’t happen – one of the few sensible decisions that Cameron made in this whole saga – and as a result the situation is in limbo. That doesn’t justify any celebration from Brexiters, as there are plenty of negative impacts already and not a single indicator that has shown a positive reaction to Brexit (the fall in sterling may be a positive for exporters, but it wasn’t a positive reaction to Brexit, and of course any positive for exporters is a negative for importers). If they were right about the new opportunities opened up by leaving, you might expect just one such reaction and if the best that can be said is ‘not so bad as feared’ it is hardly a ringing endorsement! Moreover, within that limbo, at least part of the reason why the economy has held up has been the very strong monetary intervention of the Bank of England - for which savers and future pensioners will pay a heavy price.
The short-term predictions cannot therefore be evaluated until Article 50 is triggered, and crucial to the reactions to that will be whether by then it is clear that the government will seek soft Brexit and that the EU are likely to agree to that. If that is not the case (or even if, before Article 50, it becomes clear that it will not be the case) then we will see immediate and negative economic effects. Even so, it will be a long time before the full economic consequences of whatever version of Brexit emerges will be known.
The economic consequences of Brexit are anyway only part of what matters. Less easily quantifiable, and already starting, are the political and what might be called reputational effects. The status of Britain in the world, and its influence in shaping key debates and policies has undoubtedly been diminished. The former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously said in 1962 that “Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role”. In recent years that role had become that of the fulcrum between the US and the EU, and the peaceful post-communist transformation of eastern Europe was perhaps its greatest achievement. Whatever form Brexit takes in terms of trade arrangements that political role has now disappeared for good.
In any case, there isn’t any point at all in trying to read the economic effects of Brexit yet. Brexiters are keen to insist that what they call ‘Project Fear’ has been discredited because there has been no immediate recession as predicted by, especially, the Treasury. However that is meaningless because all of those predictions were predicated on the understanding that Article 50 would be triggered immediately after a vote to leave, as the then Prime Minister had said would be the case. The Treasury report on the immediate impact of a leave vote is explicit in stating this (paragraph 1.6 on p.12 and paragraph 1. 38 on p.24 of the link).
This didn’t happen – one of the few sensible decisions that Cameron made in this whole saga – and as a result the situation is in limbo. That doesn’t justify any celebration from Brexiters, as there are plenty of negative impacts already and not a single indicator that has shown a positive reaction to Brexit (the fall in sterling may be a positive for exporters, but it wasn’t a positive reaction to Brexit, and of course any positive for exporters is a negative for importers). If they were right about the new opportunities opened up by leaving, you might expect just one such reaction and if the best that can be said is ‘not so bad as feared’ it is hardly a ringing endorsement! Moreover, within that limbo, at least part of the reason why the economy has held up has been the very strong monetary intervention of the Bank of England - for which savers and future pensioners will pay a heavy price.
The short-term predictions cannot therefore be evaluated until Article 50 is triggered, and crucial to the reactions to that will be whether by then it is clear that the government will seek soft Brexit and that the EU are likely to agree to that. If that is not the case (or even if, before Article 50, it becomes clear that it will not be the case) then we will see immediate and negative economic effects. Even so, it will be a long time before the full economic consequences of whatever version of Brexit emerges will be known.
The economic consequences of Brexit are anyway only part of what matters. Less easily quantifiable, and already starting, are the political and what might be called reputational effects. The status of Britain in the world, and its influence in shaping key debates and policies has undoubtedly been diminished. The former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously said in 1962 that “Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role”. In recent years that role had become that of the fulcrum between the US and the EU, and the peaceful post-communist transformation of eastern Europe was perhaps its greatest achievement. Whatever form Brexit takes in terms of trade arrangements that political role has now disappeared for good.
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