What the commentators said
The British public seem untroubled by the spectre of a calamitous no-deal Brexit, said Larry Elliott in The Guardian. It’s regarded as just “another millennium bug”. And people are certainly right to be sceptical of dire Treasury predictions. Before the EU referendum, the Treasury warned that a Leave vote would cause an almost immediate recession, a collapse in house prices and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs. As it is, unemployment has fallen to its lowest rate since 1975, the property market is holding up and in the last quarter figures show that the UK economy is actually growing faster than the eurozone. It makes sense to prepare for the worst, but most people are assuming that the UK and EU will cobble together an agreement eventually: the markets put the chances of no deal at only 10%.
What Hammond and the other financial doomsters forget is that Britain didn’t vote to leave on the basis of economics in any case, said Phil Mullan on Spiked. Most people did so due to “concerns about dwindling democracy and sovereignty”; only one in 20 Leavers in the Ashcroft exit polls said their main concern was economics.
It’s certainly hard to discern much economic logic in Brexit, said Matthew Norman in The Independent. This week, May toured South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya in an effort to reassure Britons that increased trade with Africa’s largest economies could help mitigate the costs of a no-deal Brexit. But you only have to look at the trade figures to see how unrealistic this idea is. The UK exports around £7bn in goods to those three countries annually. By contrast, UK exports to the EU are worth about £240bn a year. Brexiteers would counter that point by citing their favourite statistic, about how “90% of global growth in the coming decade will be outside the EU”, said Rafael Behr in The Guardian. The implication is that we can either languish in the EU “slow lane” or embrace new global opportunities. But that’s a “false dichotomy”. You can be in the EU and still exploit trade opportunities further afield. After all, “Germany’s biggest trading partner is China”.