Tim Farron has written a powerful article in the FT accusing Theresa May of sacrificing the British economy as Labour stand by and help her.
We have tried to bring sanity to the debate, tabling amendments in the House of Commons to retain single-market membership, to allow EU citizens lawfully resident in the UK to keep their right to remain, and to give the British people a vote on the final Brexit deal. Mrs May, though, is not listening. She has crushed opposition from her MPs and made the political decision to sacrifice the British economy. The situation has been made worse by a divided Labour party that has failed to oppose the government’s Brexit strategy. Labour has not merely failed to provide an opposition, it has conspired to help the Conservatives risk the stability of the UK economy.
He outlines the damage that leaving the single market would do:
For our efforts, we have been denounced as democratic deniers and enemies of the people. It would be amusing if the Conservatives were not pushing Britain towards an economic shock. A series of reports puts the price of leaving the single market as high as £200bn over 15 years. Liberal Democrats are not only standing up for the 48 per cent who backed Remain but also for Leave voters who do not understand why Mrs May would choose to lose regulatory control over exports to our largest market — all against a darkening economic picture. The UK economy is being buoyed by consumer spending but with public-sector wage caps, rising inflation and deep cuts to public spending, few are betting that shoppers will spare the government’s blushes for much longer.
After all, Carolyn Fairbairn, the head of the CBI, said businesses were “reeling” from her hard Brexit speech. Each day throws up another consequence of Brexit that ministers have not considered. The government has just announced plans to build more houses; the only issue is that if the construction industry is to build them and all the other big-ticket infrastructure projects, it will need a 35 per cent increase in labour. Yet if the Brexiters cut all labour access to EU-27 nationals, the UK labour market may shrink by 9 per cent. It is scant consolation for the damage threatened by hard Brexit but many large companies are now looking to the Liberal Democrats as the party of business. The Conservatives, once acclaimed as the party of sound money, have boxed themselves into a nightmare position: they refuse to stay in the single market because of a determination to cut immigration. But doing so without raising the skills of the British workforce would hugely damage the economy.
You can read the whole article here.
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23 Comments
‘Yet if the Brexiters cut all labour access to EU-27 nationals.’
Has there been any such proposal?
We need a crash course in developing our own people into the skills required but we will still need workers from abroad. I can see us stopping EU workers coming here and attracting other nationals resulting in immigration NOT decreasing for they are certainly needed
” A series of reports puts the price of leaving the single market as high as £200bn”
Oh and who wrote those reports, any chance it is the same respected economists who said we would be in recession by now if we voted leave? Every forecast has been proven wrong, this is just more project fear, when are people going to release the public are not buying it. I read one doom / forecast over the weekend which was going on about 2050, My god, they struggle to get there forecasts right in the same 12 month period, do we really have faith in their forecasting liabilities that goes , 10,20,30 years into the future
“it will need a 35 per cent increase in labour. Yet if the Brexiters cut all labour access to EU-27 nationals, the UK labour market may shrink by 9 per cent.”
Again, rubbish.
There are plenty of British Labourers out of work who are more than willing to take up the work. If there was a shortage of labourers / builders then this can be addressed by issuing Visas for this skills class. The point being, the visa would not entitle the holder to social housing or state benefits (resources that are scarce and being rationed to UK Born Citizens) whether you want to admit that or not.
Little Jackie Piper – the government is making reduction in immigration its priority over the needs of the economy, which means cutting EU immigration until industry and agriculture scream. Yes, that is the proposal from the Brexiteers.
Matt:
Your comments remind me of the old story about the man who, thinking he could fly, jumped out of the 105th floor of a skyscraper. As he passed the 68th floor he was thinking “It’s going OK so far.”
@Michael Cole
Why is that?
It is a visa / immigration system that works the world over and works very well for most countries.
Why is our current freedom of movement “illiberal” EU immigration system, better for UK Residents, commonwealth citizens and generally migrants world wide?
Exactly the points made by me in the other thread, here shown to great effect by the article and resonating in response.
Tim makes a good case for a different kind of Btexit, but it is not one that says we are trying to stop it happening altogether, unlike some in other articles.
Then we have too many doom and gloom forecasts that make people quite frankly turned off unless truly obsessed with this subject enough to be swayed.
As a result we have one or two above get the debate to just where we do not need it, but it is not surprising, bandying about frustrations and irritations because of exaggerations.
We really do need a Liberal Democratic emphasis on something other than Newtons equal and opposite reactions !
@Rob Renold – “the government is making reduction in immigration its priority over the needs of the economy”
In it’s stance on going ahead with Brexit it certainly is. However, in general I suggest it isn’t!
I’ve yet to see any evidence that May, as an ex-Home Secretary and thus knowledgeable about the problems, is doing anything substantive about non-EU immigration and/or investing in border controls (ie. laying the groundwork). Given it is her government’s emphasis on reducing immigration, this is something we should be holding her to account, so that her failure to deliver visible results by 2020 can be used in the election campaign…
“You can read the whole article here”. Really? I tried the link and all I got was a page inviting me to spend my pension money on subscribing to the FT! Over to you, Newshound.
Matt: “Why is that?”
My comment was in response to your statement “Every forecast has been proven wrong, this is just more project fear …”. Sooner or later the proverbial will hit the fan. Already we are seeing in rising shop prices the inflationary effect of the decline in value of £sterling arising from Brexit.
We have not left the EU yet and even when we do it will take some time for the benefits and/or disadvantages to become clear so all this talk is premature although there are clear signs that not everything in the garden is as nice as the Brexiteers might wish or the Remainers fear. The economy is being propped up by absurdly low interest rates at the wish of the Government because they fear economic collapse before talks with the EU even start. This is adversely affecting the recovery of the banking system as is evidenced by the failure of the Co-op Bank yesterday. The loss of this bank, though not in itself a disaster for the UK, would set back attempts to reform the banking system towards a more consumer friendly version.
@Michael Cole
“My comment was in response to your statement “Every forecast has been proven wrong, this is just more project fear”
And what I said was true, the projections and forecasts by the Bank of England, the IMF, the treasury and the EU commission where all wrong, they have admitted they were wrong and they have raised their forecasts for the UK economy.
“Already we are seeing in rising shop prices the inflationary effect”
Inflation has hit 1.8%, still below the Governments 2% target.
The economy needs some inflation to maintain growth and be healthy.
If we had zero inflation you would be screaming and warning about deflation.
Matt: There was zero inflation during the period of the economy’s greatest growth.
How do we know that the latest forecasts by the BoE, IMF, Treasury and EU are any more realistic than the ones they made before ? We don’t. No one knows so stop pretending we do.
@nvelope2003
“We don’t. No one knows so stop pretending we do.”
I suggest you re-read the posts before throwing around accusations, I never said their latest forecasts were right, I said their previous forecasts which remainers relied upon that predicted doom and gloom were wrong. The same people are still trying to use the same false arguments on the economy now. The likes of whom have learnt nothing from their failed campaign of project fear and are stuck on this merry go round.
Moving forward with the debates is doomed because remainers simply refuse to change tact and believe if they keep trotting out the same old thing, by some miracle, people will start believing it.
Matt: They were right about the collapse in the value of the pound. The Remain campaign was much too negative but the sort of predictions they made are the sort of things that politicians say and most people are used to a certain amount of exaggeration though that does not make it right or helpful to the voter. The point I was trying to make was that no one really knows what will happen when we leave the EU. It might be a wonderful triumph for the UK if it still exists by then or it could be a disaster economically. I do not particularly like the present EU but having been brought up during the Second World War I considered that its many failings were better than the endless wars which have plagued Western Europe over tha centuries. We have had over 70 years of peace and the cost of corruption and various inefficiencies is vastly out weighed by the enormous benefits conferred by peace .
Maybe you are not aware of the immense destruction of lives and property caused by war. And please do not say it is all down to Nato as that was the body which was set up to discourage potential attacks from Russia. Again no one knows whether our fears were justified or not. Insurance policies cost money, they are not free.
Matt: “The same false arguments about the economy” – how do you know they are false ? The fact that a campaign has failed does not make it wrong. If a political party loses an election because it failed to get enough voters to vote for it does that mean they should just give up ? The people who wanted us to leave the EU failed for over 40 years to get us out but now they seem to have won. I see no reason why those who want us to stay in should not spend however long it takes to get what they believe in. Surely that is fair ?
@nvelope2003
“The Remain campaign was much too negative but the sort of predictions they made are the sort of things that politicians say and most people are used to a certain amount of exaggeration ”
The remain campaign relied on forecasts from economists, the IMF, the Bank of England, The IFS, The Treasury, The EU commission. All were proven wrong and admitted they were wrong, yet some remain campaigners still seem to rely on the same flawed arguments. You are not going to win any arguments on that basis.
““The same false arguments about the economy” – how do you know they are false ?”
They are false because they have proven to be false, history albeit 8 months has proven it to be false as the predictions about what was going to happen “immediately” upon a vote leave {Note not after we left} did not transpire, The Bank of England now admits that economists have a credibility problem.
“The people who wanted us to leave the EU failed for over 40 years to get us out but now they seem to have won. ”
The reason it took us 40 years is because up until now the government would not give us a vote, even though referendum in 1975 was about the common market and not the EU as it is now, had we been given the vote earlier I suspect we would have been out of the EU a lot earlier.
” I see no reason why those who want us to stay in should not spend however long it takes to get what they believe in. Surely that is fair ?”
Yes that is absolutely fair as long as it is done fairly and done so by trying to block the current referendum result which was to leave the EU
@matt
You claim all the economic forecasts were wrong. The key prediction from the Treasury was that if we left the EU the economy would be 6% smaller by 2030 than it would otherwise. Do you have a time machine?
@Andrew Melmoth “@matt You claim all the economic forecasts were wrong.”
Perhaps not all of them, but it was hardly economists’ finest hour (https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jan/05/chief-economist-of-bank-of-england-admits-errors). Maybe some of them had also once predicted doom if we did not join the euro.
Although much maligned for his comment, “People in this country have had enough of experts”, Gove did have a point. People, including Lib Dems, are inclined to trust the experts with whom they they agree and mistrust the ones with whom they disagree. Both sides of an argument wheel out their own experts to the point that joke definitions of “expert” seem as good as any (My favourites, Expert: someone that used to be pert, or a compound word in which “x” is an unknown quantity and a “spurt” is a drip under pressure).
@Andrew Melmoth
“You claim all the economic forecasts were wrong. The key prediction from the Treasury was that if we left the EU the economy would be 6% smaller by 2030 than it would otherwise. Do you have a time machine?”
The economic forecasts were wrong are you claiming otherwise? clearly there 6% forecast will be wrong because the economy out performed expectations in the final 2 quarters of 2016 and growth forecasts for this year and following years have been revised upwards. Does this mean by 2030 the economy will be 6% smaller? who knows it maybe 10% smaller, it maybe 10% larger. The point is the economists don’t have a clue, they did not predict the banking crisis financial crash, they have been hopelessly wrong on their forecasts time and time again.
The treasury do not get their forecasts right on an annual basis; I have little faith in their ability to forecast 13 years ahead.
And No I do not have a time machine do you? I am not the one relying on arguments based on economists’ forecasts, you are.
@matt
You claimed all the economic forecasts were wrong. This is simply false. Some of the forecasts were right, some were wrong, and some we can’t possibly know yet.
What we do know is that 85% of our trade is either with the EU or under deals brokered by the EU. Throwing away the trade deals you have with 80 countries isn’t an obvious path to prosperity esp when you consider a) the deal we get with the EU will have to be worse than membership if the EU wants to survive b) we have a lot less to offer to other countries in terms of the size of market than the EU does c) we are in the horribly weak situation of needing deals much more than all the other countries who haven’t just torn up all their trade deals d) the economy will suffer during the period, probably at least as decade, while we try desperately to cobble something together. Initially we’ll probably have to do the sort of awful deals Switzerland has to do where they basically say – we’ll give you everything that you want, what will you give us in return?
@Andrew Melmoth
“You claimed all the economic forecasts were wrong. This is simply false.”
Actually I claimed the IMF, the Bank of England, The IFS, The Treasury, The EU commission were all wrong and they were and they have admitted they were.
“What we do know is that 85% of our trade is either with the EU or under deals brokered by the EU. Throwing away the trade deals you have with 80 countries isn’t an obvious path to prosperity ”
Fact check your 85% claim please.
The EU is hopeless at making trade deals, the EU’s protectionist policies see’s huge exclusions in agricultural trade, mostly to protect the EU sugar Beet trade which is heavily subsidised by tax payers
Financial services that uk is most reliant on has never been a priority in EU trade agreements.
The European Commission itself says that “over the next ten to 15 years, 90% of world demand will be generated outside Europe”.
In order for the UK to prosper we need to be outside the confines of the EU’s protectionist policies.
Do you really believe that the problems with Greece is ever going to be solved by the EU? It is going to come crashing out of the EU in the not to distant future, be in no doubt about it.
Italy is a ticking time bomb with it’s mountain of bad debts. It’s economy has not grown since joining the Euro back in 1999.
The further away we are from this disaster the better
Peter Watson: Economics is not an exact science so it is inevitable that the predictions of economists cannot be relied upon, although as a whole they might be useful in certain circumstance. The main problem with economists is that they seem to use such skills as they possess to promote their own political or ideological views and as a result they pick and choose the facts that suit them rather than trying to be objective.
I would still rather be treated by a skilled and experienced doctor or surgeon than rely on an untrained practitioner and if accused of a serious crime I would prefer to pay a good lawyer than go to a court unrepresented. Would you like to use a bridge that was designed by someone without knowledge and some experience of engineering ? It is time to stop bashing experts and judges of the Supreme Court but we should always be a little sceptical.
Matt: You are a convinced opponent of the EU and so you will look for all the evidence that suits your case, just as those who wish to stay in the EU do. However, although some of the predictions of immediate catastrophe have fortunately not materialised, though some have, the remainers do not seem to have told outright untruths such as those about the NHS which appeeared on the famous battle bus. I have heard certain Brexiteers still maintaining they were true though most just keep their heads down.
The fact is that this is a very emotive issue and some people will say things which they think will help their case even if they ought to know they may not neccesarily be true.
Being a pragmatic person I hope that leaving the EU will bring the prosperity that those who want to leave think or say it will, but as a sceptic in all human affairs I am not entirely convinced and I do regret the break up of an institution which had the potential to be of great value in maintaining peace and security, sadly brought down by its greedy and over zealous leaders, just as the Communist system was in 1989.