Thread by @mafevema

Each week brings fresh reports of what is now in danger of becoming a national calamity. Agriculture faces a growing crisis, with implications for the availability & price of basic foodstuffs, &there is a widespread shortage of both basic & vital medicines (latest: HRT drugs) 🧵

https://twitter.com/chrisgreybrexit/status/1519938861295620096

Consumer confidence is at a 50-year low, not least because of inflation and the cost-of-living crisis, whilst the Office for Budget Responsibility expects this year to see the biggest fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s

By June 2018, the vote to leave had already raised consumer prices by 2.9%, costing the average household £870, with a related sharp decline in real incomes. Once Brexit actually happened, it introduced further inflationary pressures in terms of labour shortages & higher costs of

trading with the EU. The eminent economist Adam Posen this week estimated that 80% of UK inflation is attributable to Brexit.

This week also saw publication of a major study showing Brexit has caused a 6% increase in food prices & another study which confirms a dramatic fall in the number oftrade, especially export, relationships with the EU (in practice large numbers of small firms have dropped out)

the  IMF Outlook published this month has the UK set to be the slowest-growing G7 economy in 2023 at 1.2% (compared with 2.4% average for advanced economies and 2.3% average for Euro area) and to have higher inflation, at an average of 6.3% over the next two years,

than Germany (4.2%), France (2.9%) and Italy (3.9%) as well as the non-EU G7, and higher than the advanced economies average (4.1%) and the Euro area average (3.8%).*

In other words, it’s not just Covid, Ukraine, and global energy and supply chain factors, which have affected all countries. Something particular has happened to the UK and it has a name: Brexit.

Faced with a burgeoning economic crisis, this post-Brexit government is bereft of workable ideas. Its flagship policy has proved an economic dud, but it is inherent in the government’s very formation to be unable to admit that, or to produce any policies that might ameliorate it.

Having smashed up the old order, all they can do is stare in slack-jawed bemusement at the rubble around them, like a convention of peculiarly vandalistic village idiots who accidentally got control of a wrecking-ball.

Thank you @chrisgreybrexit for articulating so well the multiple absurdities & lies of Brexit. #BrexitReality