Alex Massie Alex Massie

Tory attacks on the Brexit impact report will help Corbyn

The good news is that the latest civil service analysis of the most likely impact of Brexit is more optimistic than previous civil service estimates of Brexit’s consequences for the British economy. The bad news is that they’re still pretty gloomy. The best case scenario, modelled for officials at the Department for Exiting the EU, envisages a two per cent hit to GDP by the 2030s. The worst, trading in a ‘No deal is better than a bad deal’ environment, suggests an economy eight per cent smaller than would otherwise be the case. 

As Brexit bonuses go this seems on the thin side. No wonder the reaction to Buzzfeed’s scoop on the latest analysis is an exercise in proving the reality of confirmation bias. If you’re a Remainer, you’re probably in a ‘Told You So, You Fools’ mood this morning; if you’re a Leaver, you might be arguing it’s all meaningless anyway because you can’t make reliable estimates of something so complicated and uncertain as the state of the British economy in 15 years’ time. The secret truth no-one wishes to ever admit, you will say, is that no-one knows anything. It’s all a crap shoot, so don’t worry and feel the sweet breeze of national liberation instead. 

Be that as it may, Tories rubbishing these estimates might pause to think about the longer-term implications of their harrumphing. At the next general election, whenever it may be, the Conservative message is going to go large on the impact of a Labour victory on the British economy. 

There are two obvious and immediate problems with this approach. First, warning you can’t afford to take a ‘risk’ on Prime Minister Corbyn loses some of its salience when your party has spent the past several years baking greater risk into the country’s economic prospects than any government has since, well, since the 1970s.

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