Terence Kealey is an emeritus professor of clinical biochemistry at the University of Buckingham.
In a recent speech to the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), Rishi Sunak said we should be “taking advantage of the incredible opportunity of Brexit [to deliver] huge benefits to our economy”.
If there is an incredible opportunity to deliver huge benefits to our economy, it certainly hasn’t been grasped, because the best current estimates are that Brexit has to date cost the UK 2-3 percent of GDP. But, actually, there never were economic benefits to Brexit.
In 2013, after David Cameron had promised a referendum, the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) offered a prize for the essay that best identified the economic opportunities and benefits of Brexit. The prize was £100,000, which was the equivalent of £134,240 today, so it was a hefty prize that attracted a large number of credible submissions.
The chair of the judges was Nigel Lawson who, like other prominent Brexiteers, lived in France, so he was expert in the institution he was intending we should leave. The prize was won by Iain Mansfield, who as the Director of Trade and Investment at the UK’s embassy in the Philippines, and who as a former employee of the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, was well-versed in trade and business lore and practice.
Entitled A Blueprint for Britain: Openness not Isolation, the prize essay opened with a sentence that was apparently unexceptionable: “Exiting from the EU should be used as an opportunity to embrace openness”. Yet the essay promptly recognised that Brexit would “accelerate the shifting pattern of UK’s exports and total trade away from the EU.”
When Mansfield calculated how much the loss of European trade post-Brexit would be counterbalanced by the gains from non-EU trade, and after he had referenced the most authoritative research, he found the likely economic benefit of Brexit to be 0.1 percent of GDP.
Initially, I had assumed that Mansfield meant an extra 0.1 percent in our annual growth rate, but no: Mansfield estimated that Brexit would provide a one-off benefit of 0.1 percent of GDP. That was the entirety of the anticipated Brexit economic benefit: precisely 2½ weeks of normal economic growth. Thus did the Brexiteer panjandrums concede, long before the referendum, that there was no economic opportunity for Brexit.
So when Sunak, in his recent speech claimed that outside the EU “we now have greater freedoms and flexibility than we’ve had in forty years” he was misspeaking. There is no economic opportunity of Brexit and there never was.
Nor was there a political opportunity. In his essay, Mansfield tried to salvage one by suggesting that “whether or not the UK exits from the EU is a political, not an economic decision.”
Yet, as the US was to reiterate when it repeatedly urged us to stay in the EU, there was no political opportunity from Brexit. Indeed, there was only political danger, because the second sentence of Mansfield’s essay opened by urging that the UK “should pursue free trade agreements with major trading nations such as China, the USA, and Russia”.
By 2013 it had long been obvious that China – via Tiananmen Square, the history of the Cultural Revolution and Great Leaps forward, the conditions of Tibet, the Uighurs and Hong Kong, the perennial threats against Taiwan – was in the grip of a cruel and ruthless dictatorship. Yet the essay suggested we should pivot our trade away from our democratic allies to an undemocratic rival and potential enemy.
By 2013, moreover, it had long been obvious that the U.S., badly burned by the China Shock (which had seen 2.4 million workers to lose their jobs to Chinese imports, and which had seen many more millions of American workers’ wages fall), was not going to rush into further trade deals lightly; yet the essay assumed the opposite.
And by 2013 it had long been obvious that Russia – following its actions in Chechnya and Georgia – was another country in the grip of an awful dictatorship. Yet the essay again suggests we should pivot our trade towards that undemocratic rival and potential enemy.
It might be argued that I make such observations with the help of hindsight. Not so. First, there were many authoritative commentators who, long before 2013, were issuing warnings (in 2012, for example, Mitt Romney described Russia as “our number one geopolitical foe”).
But, second, our adhesion to the EU had always been a geopolitical exercise as we pivoted from Empire to embed ourselves in the emerging bloc of a united Europe. In Winds of Change, Peter Hennessy’s 2019 book, chronicled how Harold Macmillan had campaigned for membership of what was then called the Common Market, precisely to arm Britain geopolitically against potential threats such as expansionist authoritarian dictatorships.
The IEA’s 2013 prize, therefore, was the credentialisation of “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them”. The prize discarded the UK’s long-term geopolitical strategy of security within Europe in favour of a quick buck from trade with authoritarian countries.
The buck would indeed be quick because those countries’ growth—growth off which the Brexiteers hoped to feed—was unstainable. After all, authoritarianism always does crush growth. Moreover, the 68-page essay made no reference to Northern Ireland.
The EU will not disappear: it will always be our closest and largest trading partner, so we will always have to negotiate with it. The easiest way of negotiating with the EU is as a leader from within rather than as a supplicant from outside; yet Sunak, who campaigned for Brexit, still fails to recognise that. Instead, he speaks of opportunities that do not exist and never have.
Terence Kealey is an emeritus professor of clinical biochemistry at the University of Buckingham.
In a recent speech to the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), Rishi Sunak said we should be “taking advantage of the incredible opportunity of Brexit [to deliver] huge benefits to our economy”.
If there is an incredible opportunity to deliver huge benefits to our economy, it certainly hasn’t been grasped, because the best current estimates are that Brexit has to date cost the UK 2-3 percent of GDP. But, actually, there never were economic benefits to Brexit.
In 2013, after David Cameron had promised a referendum, the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) offered a prize for the essay that best identified the economic opportunities and benefits of Brexit. The prize was £100,000, which was the equivalent of £134,240 today, so it was a hefty prize that attracted a large number of credible submissions.
The chair of the judges was Nigel Lawson who, like other prominent Brexiteers, lived in France, so he was expert in the institution he was intending we should leave. The prize was won by Iain Mansfield, who as the Director of Trade and Investment at the UK’s embassy in the Philippines, and who as a former employee of the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, was well-versed in trade and business lore and practice.
Entitled A Blueprint for Britain: Openness not Isolation, the prize essay opened with a sentence that was apparently unexceptionable: “Exiting from the EU should be used as an opportunity to embrace openness”. Yet the essay promptly recognised that Brexit would “accelerate the shifting pattern of UK’s exports and total trade away from the EU.”
When Mansfield calculated how much the loss of European trade post-Brexit would be counterbalanced by the gains from non-EU trade, and after he had referenced the most authoritative research, he found the likely economic benefit of Brexit to be 0.1 percent of GDP.
Initially, I had assumed that Mansfield meant an extra 0.1 percent in our annual growth rate, but no: Mansfield estimated that Brexit would provide a one-off benefit of 0.1 percent of GDP. That was the entirety of the anticipated Brexit economic benefit: precisely 2½ weeks of normal economic growth. Thus did the Brexiteer panjandrums concede, long before the referendum, that there was no economic opportunity for Brexit.
So when Sunak, in his recent speech claimed that outside the EU “we now have greater freedoms and flexibility than we’ve had in forty years” he was misspeaking. There is no economic opportunity of Brexit and there never was.
Nor was there a political opportunity. In his essay, Mansfield tried to salvage one by suggesting that “whether or not the UK exits from the EU is a political, not an economic decision.”
Yet, as the US was to reiterate when it repeatedly urged us to stay in the EU, there was no political opportunity from Brexit. Indeed, there was only political danger, because the second sentence of Mansfield’s essay opened by urging that the UK “should pursue free trade agreements with major trading nations such as China, the USA, and Russia”.
By 2013 it had long been obvious that China – via Tiananmen Square, the history of the Cultural Revolution and Great Leaps forward, the conditions of Tibet, the Uighurs and Hong Kong, the perennial threats against Taiwan – was in the grip of a cruel and ruthless dictatorship. Yet the essay suggested we should pivot our trade away from our democratic allies to an undemocratic rival and potential enemy.
By 2013, moreover, it had long been obvious that the U.S., badly burned by the China Shock (which had seen 2.4 million workers to lose their jobs to Chinese imports, and which had seen many more millions of American workers’ wages fall), was not going to rush into further trade deals lightly; yet the essay assumed the opposite.
And by 2013 it had long been obvious that Russia – following its actions in Chechnya and Georgia – was another country in the grip of an awful dictatorship. Yet the essay again suggests we should pivot our trade towards that undemocratic rival and potential enemy.
It might be argued that I make such observations with the help of hindsight. Not so. First, there were many authoritative commentators who, long before 2013, were issuing warnings (in 2012, for example, Mitt Romney described Russia as “our number one geopolitical foe”).
But, second, our adhesion to the EU had always been a geopolitical exercise as we pivoted from Empire to embed ourselves in the emerging bloc of a united Europe. In Winds of Change, Peter Hennessy’s 2019 book, chronicled how Harold Macmillan had campaigned for membership of what was then called the Common Market, precisely to arm Britain geopolitically against potential threats such as expansionist authoritarian dictatorships.
The IEA’s 2013 prize, therefore, was the credentialisation of “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them”. The prize discarded the UK’s long-term geopolitical strategy of security within Europe in favour of a quick buck from trade with authoritarian countries.
The buck would indeed be quick because those countries’ growth—growth off which the Brexiteers hoped to feed—was unstainable. After all, authoritarianism always does crush growth. Moreover, the 68-page essay made no reference to Northern Ireland.
The EU will not disappear: it will always be our closest and largest trading partner, so we will always have to negotiate with it. The easiest way of negotiating with the EU is as a leader from within rather than as a supplicant from outside; yet Sunak, who campaigned for Brexit, still fails to recognise that. Instead, he speaks of opportunities that do not exist and never have.