Stop Brexit Steve has brutally confronted a senior Treasury minister about the estimated £40bn blackhole Britain has suffered since leaving the European Union.
Pat McFadden was questioned by Steve Bray, the revered anti-Brexit activist, following a broadcast round after a forecasting audit found that the Office for Budget Responsibility’s projections on the impact of leaving the EU have broadly materialised.
“One quick question,” Bray said. “£40bn lost revenue per year from leaving the European Union. That would fill so many holes, wouldn’t it?”
McFadden responded: “We just concluded a really good trade agreement with the EU that will get rid of a lot of the costs and the bureaucracy and the delays for people.
“We don’t want to rerun the argument but we came into office thinking we could get a better deal than the Tories had and, I believe, we have met that promise.”
The OBR had forecast that declining investment and trade volumes would result in a 4% loss in the UK’s long-run productivity post-Brexit.
This is the equivalent of a £40bn tax loss for the exchequer between 2019 and 2024. Over the same period, the government raised taxes by £100bn.
John Springford, an associate fellow at the Centre for European Reform, carried out the analysis of the OBR’s prediction. He told the Times that a “large chunk” of these tax rises would not have been required had the UK remained in the EU or even “chosen a softer form of Brexit.”
And it doesn’t seem like the pain is over yet, with the OBR saying it would take 15 years for the full impact of Brexit to be felt, predicting a 15% drop in trade volumes compared to if the UK had stayed in Europe.
Springford said predictions of Brexit’s impact on the UK economy had “been borne out” and that it was “undeniable” how Brexit had hurt the UK’s economic growth prospects.