Lies, incompetence and lasting damage

FACED with the present disruption to the hospitality, food, farming and supply sectors due to the loss of EU workers, Boris Johnson’s Government has turned to clutching at straws in claiming this constitutes a plan for a high wage, high skills economy.

The disruption is not the sharp shock before we are led to the sunny uplands; the damage to the economy is structural and was predicted by the Conservative Party’s own Treasury report “EU Exit Long Term Economic Analysis, November 2018.”

It stated not only that a hard Brexit, as Johnson negotiated, would cost the Exchequer a staggering £72bn each year by 2035, but the present immigration policy would itself inflict a 1.8% reduction in GDP, resulting in a further annual loss of £23.9bn.

The latter is more than the UK spends annually on the police force. It is a tragedy that this Government combines disruptive ideology with lies and plain incompetence, all of which will inevitably lead to lasting damage to the economy.

Mike Baldwin, by email