The "mini" Budget was really the culmination
of the economic policies that have been put
in place since the Brexit vote.
A very particular idea of sovereignty
over economic good sense.
We couldn't ship anything to the EU, nothing.
It's bordering on disastrous.
The Brexiteers haven't really formulated a cogent case
as to why Brexit is going to deliver a dividend.
There is a political conspiracy of silence
around the effects of Brexit.
It spans the government, it spans the Labour Party.
Make Brexit work.
The UK's decision to leave the European Union
is an act of economic self-harm.
In terms of prices, investment, and in terms of trade,
we're seeing negative effects, not a pandemic effect, not
an energy crisis effect.
These are very clearly Brexit effects.
When the UK voted to leave the European Union in 2016,
it seemed like a simple decision between leaving and staying.
What we've ended up with, through many years
of back and forth, has been pretty much
the hardest, least aligned version of Brexit
that you could get.
We're not part of the European single market.
We're not part of the customs union.
We just have a very bare bones free trade agreement.
And the costs of that have become clear over time.
Of course, those have been masked
by the Covid-19 pandemic, which shut down economies
all over the world.
And then the crisis in Ukraine, which
has scrambled global energy markets,
helped to drive inflation.
But we're just now starting to see
the Brexit effect coming through and it's not
particularly pretty.
Let June the 23rd go down in our history as our Independence
Day.
We've got our country back.
We see it, first of all, in terms of the original vote
to leave the EU.
That sent the pound down about 10 per cent
against our trading partners, and that
makes imports more expensive.
It also makes your exports more competitive.
But in this case, our exports didn't budge.
They didn't go up at all, but our import prices went up,
and that raised inflation by about 2 per cent to 3 per cent.
So that simply made people poorer.
When it's been calculated that the immediate cost of that
was about 870 pounds per household.
I'm Dani Loughran.
I'm the Managing Director of Aston Chemicals, a speciality
chemical distributor for the personal care industry.
Well, our freight costs went up.
Everything that's costed in dollars around the world
became more expensive if you're paying in sterling,
and that was caused by Brexit.
For many years, the Brexit side of the debate
felt they won the argument because there hadn't been
much absolute panic in markets.
In the recent "mini" Budget, Kwasi Kwarteng
really spooked the markets.
Sterling absolutely plummeted, then
subsequently recovered a bit.
But more serious was what's happened
to government borrowing costs, because the financial markets
have taken the view that the Budget was effectively
reckless.
You remember the statement we've had enough of experts.
The "mini" Budget was really the culmination
of the economic policies that have been put
in place since the Brexit vote.
Brexit's proponents refused to even discuss
the idea that Brexit's a factor in the UK's performance.
Brexit opponents, or Remainers, want
to pin everything on Brexit.
The truth is inevitably somewhere in between.
But to say that Brexit isn't a factor in what you're seeing
in the UK performance is silly.
Of course, it is.
We're starting to see a very interesting pattern emerging,
comparing Britain with the performance
of other advanced economies.
After the pandemic, there was a trade recovery
by all the other G7 countries and Britain's trade recovery
has been more or less flat.
So the UK fell behind in its trade intensity.
One of the other things you can measure
is the drop off in the number of trade relationships
between smaller companies in the UK
and their foreign counterparts.
And that's important because it tells you
something about trade patterns, but also
tells you something about the way
that smaller companies in the UK used
to grow by gradually expanding their business,
selling stuff into the European single market,
and that's simply not happening anymore.
The LSE has calculated that the number of relationships
between the UK and the EU fell by about a third
in the first six months after the Trade and Cooperation
Agreement came into force.
The Resolution Foundation has calculated
that the long run hit to wages will be 470 pounds per person.
Brexit has increased bureaucracy.
Many small businesses have really
struggled to get to grips with that.
I'm Kiran Tawadey.
Hampstead is an organic tea company.
We import tea from all over the world
and sell it all over the world.
We were told that we would have the most amazing deal.
We're going to get our sovereignty
and we were going to keep all the advantages
of being in the EU.
As a business, we were dumb enough to believe that.
Come January last year, we got an order from Italy,
we shipped it, as normal, thinking
there'll be a little bit of paperwork
and we'll figure it out.
And it sat for 12 weeks in different customs' houses.
So the reality was very different.
I'm Rob.
I'm Vicky.
And we co-founded Little Star Jewellery in 2017
as a husband and wife team.
The plan was always to establish the brand in the UK first,
and then Ireland, onwards to France, onwards to Germany.
The whole question of Brexit didn't really
come into my thought much because at no point
did I think it would be as complicated for businesses
to grow and to develop.
Remember, when we were part of the single market,
you could throw a box of tea or a packet of bangers
into the back of a van in Birmingham
and just drive it to Barcelona, or Bonn, or Brussels
without let or hindrance.
Now you can't do that.
The reality was January to June, we couldn't ship anything
to the EU, nothing.
It's 27 countries, they all have different borders,
they all have different rules.
And we were treated as a third country.
And we just had to suck it up.
Come May, I decided I needed to do something.
I said, what if I set up my own entity in Europe
and made that the master distributor for our company
and for our products.
And rather than sending small consignments
at a time, which were very costly, and complicated,
and time-hungry, and resource-hungry why not
just do one big consignment every so often.
Clear customs, all those formalities, VAT once,
and then distribute out of the warehouse
to all of your clients in the European Union.
That means less business taking place in the UK
and more business taking place in the European Union.
It became just unviable for us to continue
to export from the UK and use the UK
as our European distribution hub.
Lorries would sit there for days on end.
So we moved our entire European business to Poland.
That immediately halved the amount
of product coming through this warehouse.
We are now using fewer freight partners
in the UK, more in Germany and Poland,
paying our customs duties to EU countries.
We're employing fewer people in the UK and more in Poland.
It's a reduction in money that we
are paying to the UK economy.
We were lucky that we were able to do that.
We've got some agents in France.
We're doing really well in the Netherlands and in Spain.
All of that has just disappeared.
We lost so much business overnight with Holland,
but it doesn't mean that we have enough business already
established that we'd go and set up an office in Amsterdam.
It's not viable for a business of our size of two people.
Getting the product to customers in the European
Union would have been 2 days, has now become 21 days.
The only angle for us around that
is to do deals with distributors,
but those people work on between 30 per cent
and 35 per cent margins.
We're left with virtually nothing
or we let the business go.
We got a Dutch sales agent who opened over 30 doors
in the space of two months, was over 30 customers have become 2
because only 2 of them can actually
be bothered with the implications of what they've
got to do to get stock from us.
It's just too much of a headache.
That is the long-term danger for the British economy.
That smaller companies that used to expand
by starting to move into European markets,
which was very easy to do before 2016,
will simply just not do that.
We were just upsetting all our customers.
One of them actually said to us, we
don't want to deal with the UK anymore
when we can find equal products from within the EU.
So I'm really sorry.
It was a tough conversation.
We went to a trade show.
No European customers came to the UK pavilion.
And we overheard one of them saying,
there's no point going there.
With Brexit, we don't even know what's going to happen.
So there's no point trying to build new alliances
with British suppliers.
The damage from non-tariff barriers
is it puts the UK behind a wall.
The European Union, 27 countries,
that have one set of rules for the movement of goods, people,
capital, and labour.
It's broadly more cost, more aggro, more uncertainty,
more delays, less efficiency.
In some cases, a sort of unequal playing
field with competitors overseas.
A French company will buy from Germany
because they'll probably be able to get the same product easier
and without any of the extra costs
that we're having to apply to get it out of the UK.
We design all of the range here, and then we
send it out to manufacturers in Thailand and Hong Kong.
We have a tariff for it coming into the UK,
then have to pay another tariff when
we're sending out of the UK, because it's not
produced in the UK.
The EU is very bureaucratic.
Before that we were within the bureaucracy and now
we're outside of it.
The whole story about EU red tape
making things more difficult for businesses from our perspective
is a complete lie.
Since 2016, business investment has
been growing in all other G7 countries, but not in the UK.
You can see that for a very long time business
investment was an upward curve in the UK,
but since 2016 in particular and the Brexit vote,
it's been plateauing.
And the government's been trying to rectify this.
It's been throwing lots of money at it.
They've introduced something called the superdeduction,
where you get huge allowances if you invest
in capital and innovation, but it hasn't really
shifted the dial.
And really worrying for the future of our economy
because in the end, investment drives
the capital and the ability for economies
to grow into the future.
And some people are saying, I mean,
Brexit's not the only thing by any stretch of the imagination,
but something is going on.
There might be a small effect that the UK is a more service
sector driven economy than others.
But France is just as much of a service sector
economy as the UK.
Germany, big manufacturing economy,
isn't that much more of a manufacturing
economy than the UK.
And in every other country, we've
seen much more business investment.
This is the Brexit effect.
People don't know the direction of the UK economy.
Inevitably business investment doesn't grow as strongly.
We've seen in all areas, in prices, in terms of investment,
and in terms of trade, we're seeing negative effects
due to Brexit, which we can now pinpoint as a Brexit effect,
not a pandemic effect, not an energy crisis effect.
These are very clearly Brexit effects.
Plainly there's been a huge impact on the British economy
caused by the Covid pandemic.
Equally the supply chain effects of the Ukraine war,
particularly on the energy price.
It would be ludicrous to claim that problems facing
the British economy are exclusively down to Brexit,
but what you can do is to draw a comparison between Britain
and other countries.
We see the UK pretty close to the bottom of the league table
in terms of the forecast for economic growth,
particularly in 2023.
So the UK essentially sees no growth at all.
And the only country that was worse than the UK
was sanctioned Russia.
You can explore the gap between the UK's performance, which
has uniquely suffered Brexit, and the performance
of other economies that have not.
The UK government would argue that's something
to do with the bungee jump effect of the pandemic
where Britain went down, then came back up more quickly,
and now things are settling down again.
I think it's really easy for the government
to try and push the Brexit effect under the carpet
and blame everything onto Covid, and now everything
onto Ukraine.
I can see it in the figures and in the way
that our business is operating that we were really
hit badly by Brexit last year.
We've put measures in place that are
detrimental to the British economy unfortunately,
but will help us.
The Office for Budget Responsibility
thinks that ultimately Brexit will
cause the UK to be 4 per cent worse off.
It's about 100bn pounds a year that the economy is not
producing 40bn pounds of tax revenues or so.
We are poorer because we're not getting that economic growth
that we otherwise would have done.
The Brexiteer notion of a Brexit dividend
is often based around the idea that the UK
can have a nimbler economy.
It can deregulate.
The difficulty is, when you deregulate, you create
a separate regulatory system.
The chemical industry spent 500mn pounds
over a decade registering their chemicals in the European
Union, which gave them access to the British market and 27
other countries.
They're now having to re-register
all of those chemicals for a separate UK register
at a cost now estimated by the government at 2bn pounds.
So what we've essentially done is ask industry
to spend billions of pounds duplicating a regime that
already existed in the EU.
And because we want to be sovereign,
we want to be different, we're building our own.
But that is just cost.
I don't understand anyone who says that deregulation is going
to be a benefit to industry.
From my industry's point of view,
it is nothing but extra costs, bureaucracy, and work
for no advantage whatsoever.
It's a British business.
After we've left, the EU has faced a recruitment crisis.
Areas like construction, hospitality, social care,
agriculture.
Again, you can argue till you're blue in the face about how
much of that is Brexit, how many people left because of Brexit,
or how much of that was because of Covid.
Some people would argue that's for the better,
that we've cut off that supply of cheap European Union labour
that was able to come across to work in the UK under free
movement.
The idea eventually is that companies will invest more
in machinery and other ways to enhance productivity
to compensate.
But it's certainly caused some disruption in the short-term.
And the idea that the government was putting forward last year
that this was all part of the plan
to develop a high-skilled, high-wage economy
was problematic at the time and is problematic today.
So the end of free movement means
that the economy is reshaped.
For some industries, like hospitality and construction,
or soft fruit growing, that creates a painful period
of adjustment because those industries
were predicated on the idea that there would be free movement.
But ultimately that's a political choice.
We don't have to have a soft fruit industry.
We had one as a result of free movement.
We now have to decide if we want one going forward.
The long running row over Northern Ireland,
creating a border in the Irish Sea
to avoid the north-south border returning
on the island of Ireland has poisoned EU-UK relations.
The EU is using us as a negotiating chip
and saying that Britain can't join the Horizon Science
Research Project, which is worth 95bn euros,
hugely important to British scientists
and British universities.
But it's blocked because the British government
is trying unilaterally to rip up its obligations in Northern
Ireland.
While we have that attitude still in place,
I think it's very difficult to see our trading
relationships improve.
The discussion about Northern Ireland and its future trading
relationship was one of the things that bedevilled
the negotiations about Brexit.
Everybody knew it was going to be a problem,
but we did the deal anyway.
We voted for Brexit.
We signed a so-called Northern Ireland Protocol,
which Boris Johnson and Lord David Frost,
the former Brexit minister who negotiated the Northern Ireland
Protocol, spent the last several years trashing.
I seem to think it's become of some surprise
that the European Court of Justice
applies EU rules to Northern Ireland when they have agreed
that Northern Ireland should remain as part of the EU
single market for goods.
The one thing I say about the Northern Protocol
is that it's given Northern Ireland's an incredible trading
position in Europe.
It's the only place in the whole of Europe,
which has one foot in the UK single market
and another foot in the European Union single market.
It's an unwelcome fact for Brexiteers
that Northern Ireland has become an economic success story
and booming, certainly in terms of inward investment.
One of the reasons it's doing well
is because it has a place in the European single market
for goods.
It's exactly the same trading position with the European
Union that the whole of the UK had
until a couple of years ago.
There is a political conspiracy of silence around Brexit
and the effects of Brexit.
It spans the government, it spans the Labour Party
in particular.
It's very hard to separate out the effects of Covid
and the effects of Brexit.
The governor of the Bank of England
doesn't want to talk about it.
It's become a kind of taboo around this whole subject.
We absolutely need an honest debate
about the economic effects of Brexit.
Once you had a government, of whichever party willing to look
at the facts, then they could start
saying it looks as if Brexit has hurt us.
It's making you poorer.
This is what our evidence suggests.
The evidence will say that, by the way.
And then once you say that to the public
and keep repeating it, you can start opening the debate.
Politically, the truth is neither party
can be honest about Brexit.
The Tory Party doesn't want to be honest
that the actual choice that Brexit presents
is between being a rule-taker, between subjugation,
like Norway, and self-harm, which
is all the economic damage that comes from walling yourself off
from your nearest and biggest market.
And the Labour Party doesn't want to talk about Brexit
because it reminds voters why they voted Tory.
The Labour Party, as the Tory's frame it,
tried to block Brexit.
This is still a live rail in British politics.
People don't want to go anywhere near Brexit.
It's divided the country.
It's divided communities.
It's divided families.
But in a way, that shields us from a debate,
which we should be having, about how we can make Brexit
functioning in a way which doesn't distort the economy.
People who speak out against Brexit
are often decried as Re-moaners or Re-maniacs.
We're all being asked to accept something
which in 2015 was only the official policy of the UK
Independence Party.
Conservative Party, the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats,
Greens, trade unions, the CBI, the whole of British political
and civic society believe Britain was better off inside
the European Union.
And yet we are all being told we have to pay allegiance.
This is a new national policy.
I expected there to be a one year down the road recap
what went wrong, and what was right, and how we can fix it,
but we haven't seen that.
It would be really good to hear what other people's
experiences have been.
There might be some good news stories, I don't know.
I haven't heard any.
I find it hard to think of anyone who said,
this has been brilliant for my business.
Some businesses will win as a result of Brexit.
Businesses that can produce products
for the UK market that are now too complicated or too
difficult to import from the EU.
That doesn't necessarily mean that the UK economy is winning.
EU-based companies have gained some of our contracts.
The EU freight companies that are gaining our freight
business, that isn't in the UK anymore,
they're all doing quite well.
The people in Poland that we've had
to employ in warehouses rather than people in the UK,
they're doing quite well.
In theory, the city of London is a place
where the UK being able to make its own rules
should be important.
This is our sector that we're the best at,
that we know the most about.
We were responsible for a lot of rule
making while we were within the EU.
To date, we haven't seen the results of that.
The predictions of doom for the city of London
were always overdone.
Big institutions, in particular, spent time actually
quite early on in the process Brexit proofing
their operations so that they could operate legally
whatever the outcome was.
What we've seen since then I think
is a slow drip where business and people get relocated
to other places where it makes more sense for them to be.
The city was the natural place to do financial business
in Europe and Brexit introduced a question mark into that.
We weren't given enough information.
We weren't told what Brexit would actually look like.
The losers will be some of the younger people
who voted against Brexit.
If you look at the age profile of people who voted for leave,
there's a vote amongst the older members of the population.
The younger generation will start to discuss this topic.
They can't travel easily anymore.
They need a nomad visa if they want to work in Europe.
They can no longer invest in Europe easily.
And with the geopolitical situation on a knife-edge,
it would be nice to be a part of a bigger group.
And I feel sorry that we aren't for the next generation.
Don't watch people who are not rich Remainers.
Will Britain leave the EU on time?
Sure.
You certainly hear conservatives who
say that if you can't demonstrate
the benefits of Brexit by the next election,
you're going to be in serious trouble.
And so you have the creation of jobs like Brexit Opportunities
Minister.
Leaving the European Union is the most fantastic opportunity
for the United Kingdom.
The benefits of Brexit are always just around the corner.
If this happened six years ago, by now,
somebody in government, given the fact
this is a Brexiteer government, should have identified
what the benefits are.
The Brexiteers haven't really formulated a cogent case
as to why walling the UK off from its largest
market on its doorstep will lead to a better economy.
When the government unleashed its Brexit opportunities
document, what was the number one item?
That you were going to have a crown
stamp back on your pint pot in the English pub.
The Vote Leave side presented a very optimistic view
of what the British economy would look like after Brexit,
including a massive series of deregulation, Britain
buccaneering around the world, striking trade deals
around the world.
There have been some trade deals,
but they've mainly been with countries that Britain already
had a trade deal with through the European Union.
Australia really is the only one exception to that.
Signing a free trade agreement with New Zealand or Australia
has ups and downs of the UK economy,
and is probably very, very marginally positive.
But it's nothing like losing a free trade agreement
and losing the frictionless trade you had with your biggest
trading partner that's only 20 miles away across the channel.
We lose 4 per cent of our GDP by Brexit.
We gain 0.08 per cent by the government's own estimate
through this trade deal with Australia.
All the attempts to lay out exactly what a Brexit
dividend looks like have thus far been totally unconvincing
and that's on the trade agreement front,
on the regulatory front, or the deregulatory front.
The best case scenario is that a Brexit dividend
is lots and lots of little changes
that in aggregate add up to something meaningful.
There's no sort of great idea that
is out there at the moment.
When the Brexiters said, oh, Brexit
will unleash Britain's global potential,
that made me very annoyed because we
weren't sitting on our laurels just easily
selling into France.
Everyone was already doing that.
We were already trading with the whole of the rest of the world.
Making things more difficult for us to sell into the EU
did not make anything easier.
Boo.
Brexit.
We have heard Project Fear again and again, on and on it goes,
but that all the aspects of Project Fear
so far have been wrong.
We were promised a punishment budget, that never happened.
We were promised an increase of unemployment by 800,000
by voting to leave, that did not happen.
Remainers did themselves no service
by claiming that immediately after a Brexit vote
that Britain's economy would crash into recession
and millions of people would be unemployed.
I mean, that hasn't happened, and probably
was never going to happen.
The Project Fear tag was very effective
from the Leave campaign and lasts to this day.
I think the trouble is that Brexit is boring, and detailed,
and wonky, it was hard to talk about that wonky detail
around trading arrangements, and customs unions,
and paperwork in a political campaign.
Get Brexit Done, it was one of the most effective election
slogans you've seen.
We didn't even start to dig into those questions
until after the vote was finished.
The type of Brexit we decided to pursue
was economically the most harmful.
There was always a spectrum of economic impact versus ability
to make our own choices around things like regulation.
The European Union is not a superpower in the way
that the United States is a superpower,
but it is a regulatory and trading superpower.
Collectively, it's the world's largest market
and it harmonised all of its rules to allow everybody
to trade more freely.
And it forced other countries and trading
blocs to follow EU rules in many ways.
We can no longer blame European rule makers
for decisions and policies that we don't like or outcomes
that we don't like in our own economy.
With sovereignty comes a degree of ownership.
I think we can conclude, one, that Brexit was
an act of economic self-harm.
Two, that the losers will be the nation as a whole,
but also some of the poorest people,
because ultimately, we are poorer as a nation.
That hurts more vulnerable people more.
Third, I think something from economics we can say
is that we can't run referendums on very
simple economic slogans, and it's
dangerous to try and weaponise economics.
Brexit is a slow puncture.
It's not a car crash.
So that doesn't mean that Brexit creates an unemployment
crisis in the UK, but it may mean
that over time, UK workers find themselves
in less productive jobs and that makes
the economy smaller than it otherwise would have been.
It makes wages lower than they otherwise would have been.
The slow puncture analogy has been right from 2016,
but I think the "mini" Budget is that first sign
that if we push things too far, not only are you going
to begin to hear much more of an audible hiss,
but you might even have a blowout.
It's bordering on disastrous.
I don't think there's any real public awareness of this.
Even if we go and visit my mum for a weekend
and talk to her about the difficulties we face,
she'll go, oh, really?
I thought we had a deal.
Nothing's ever in the news about it.
Nobody else seems to be voicing any concerns, apart from maybe
you on Twitter.
Brexit wasn't all about the economy.
It was about stopping the free movement of people.
It was about repatriating a sense of agency
into the UK economy.
The trouble was the Brexiteers and those
who sold it were not honest about the trade-offs
and the costs of that, which actually, economically,
outweighed the benefits.
It is legitimate to have a discussion
about national sovereignty and taking back control.
You could have had that argument,
but you have to accept that there
will be some economic impact.
The trouble was Boris Johnson famously
adopted a cakist approach, to have your cake and eat it.
Cakism, or cherry-picking, as Michel Barnier used to call it,
this idea that you could retain all the access you wanted
to the EU single market and still be
free to go off on what you might call your buccaneering Brexit.
It was that Cakism that was slowly but surely exploded
by the process of negotiating with the EU.
And we're still paying the price of that, really,
because people have never been prepared to accept or identify
the trade-offs and then start talking
about what you can do about it.