On Friday you’ll proudly hold your head high to celebrate five years of Brexit. Or, if you were a staunch Remainer, be wringing your hands it ever happened.
I shall be doing neither. As I’ve mentioned here before, my view has not changed from the article I wrote during the referendum: “My personal position on Europe is that we are better off in, though I don’t think it would be a disaster of we pulled out.”
Some of the downsides have been barely noticeable, but come to a tidy sum when added together. The average family will spend £250 more a year on food than it would if we’d stayed in the EU.
Prices have gone up by a quarter over the last five years. Most of that hike would have happened anyway,. but, according to the LSE which tracks these things, eight per cent of it – £4.80 a week – is directly down to Brexit.
Wages are more difficult to quantify but are thought to be around five per cent lower than if we had remained. Our workers are paid less than French and German ones, but on the bright side they’re on a better whack than Italians.
If you holiday in Europe you’ll be charged five times more to withdraw cash on your debit card and six times more on a credit card – yet that still amounts to only £1.50 per £100 which you’re unlikely to begrudge while happily sunning yourself.
The claim of an extra £350million for the NHS was quickly debunked.
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Some of the negative effects of Brexit were masked by Covid, and the run on loo paper at the beginning of the pandemic had more to do with the lavatorial obsession of the British than any EU border hold-ups.
If there is ever another pandemic then stockpiling black market toilet paper is a surefire way to get rich.
Had we had the continental affection for bidets I guess they would have been in short supply, too, but as we don’t they weren’t.
PM David Cameron and his Chancellor George Osborne failed to grasp that the referendum was always going to be an emotional decision, not a practical one.
Vote Leave’s Dominic Cummings felt the national pulse in a way Cameron and Osborne never did and came up with the simple but brilliant slogan: “Take back control”.
It caught the public mood perfectly. This was about sovereignty, for British laws to be made in Britain. for control of our borders – though as 460,000 EU workers quickly left, non-EU ones poured in to replace them.
If sovereignty was what you wanted by voting leave then you got your wish. But it came at a price, though not as big as Cameron and Osborne predicted in Project Fear.
Brexit didn’t cause a recession, the pound didn’t collapse, house prices didn’t fall by 18 per cent, basic rate income tax didn’t go up by 2p nor higher rate by 3p.
Vote Leave was no better. They said the NHS would have an extra £350million a week when we stopped sending money to Brussels. That claim should have been thrown under a bus, not put on one.
It was inaccurate because the EU rebate took that down to £250million, and the NHS didn’t even get its hands on that.
It was like saying you paid a butcher a tenner for a steak while ignoring the £3 you got back in change.
Five years on the question remains whether the cost of sovereignty was a price worth paying.
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The promised frictionless trade with the EU never happened. Even consignments of cream crackers needed to be signed off by a vet because of the tiny dairy content.
Both campaigns were atrocious for their dishonesty, and neither gave much thought to that bit of the UK which shares a land border with the EU.
Rishi Sunak’s Windsor Framework helped and Northern Ireland can now enjoy Cumberland pork sausages without health checks.
But the province is still governed by some EU laws which don’t apply elsewhere in the UK. The unionists are understandably uncomfortable with that because it drives a coach and horses through unionism.
Five years on the question remains whether the cost of sovereignty was a price worth paying. But if you’re still fretting over that here’s something to cheer you up.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in America, who set the Doomsday Clock ticking towards Armageddon, this week put it at 89 seconds to midnight, a second closer than it was last year.
So there’s only 1 min 29 secs to go before there’s nothing left to worry about.