So, are the remainers wrong, then?

Project fear is back – and it’s as wrong as ever.

Remainers are gleefully pointing to our economic problems, but ignoring the crises affecting much of Europe

Not my words. They’re from the Tory Daily Telegraph of 28 October 2022.

The Telegraph hits out

Anyone who’s gleeful about the present state of the British economy is clearly no friend of the country, and their views should be treated with deep scepticism. Most remainers, and I include myself among them, look at the UK economy with horror and disappointment, with no inclination to glee or gloating.

Any Brit over 30 today had a chance to vote in the 2010 election. I hope they remember how things were back then. Britain was suffering economically, not for anything it had done wrong itself, but because of the worldwide crisis precipitated by the crash of the financial markets. That was due to the irresponsible deregulation of the financial markets 25 years earlier, under the economic direction of Ronald Regan in the States and many leaders in Europe, notably Maggie Thatcher. None of that, however, stopped Conservatives blaming Labour for what had gone wrong.

In reality, Labour turned things around, with then Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling getting the country back to growth in just seven quarters.

The Conservatives claimed that Labour had caused the disaster and they would have to take office to solve the ballooning public debt crisis through austerity policies. Those, they promised, would return the economy to health and strength. 

Enough people believed the Conservatives to elect them.

The Conservatives inherited an economy emerging from recession. Within months, they had plunged it back in. 

They inherited a nation benefitting from free trade with its major partners, its neighbours in Europe. Today, they’ve broken those ties by leaving the EU, and trade with Europe is collapsing. 

They inherited a National Health Service in a stronger position and delivering higher-quality services than ever in its history. Today people are dying in ambulances outside hospitals, or at home before the ambulances can even get to them.

They haven’t even solved the problem they identified as their highest priority, of huge public debt. Today, debt is higher than when they came to power. 

On top of that, the fifty-day premiership of Liz Truss left the economy in a tailspin, with double-digit inflation, wages falling in real term, and pension funds close to bankruptcy until they were bailed out by the Bank of England.

All the government now promises is more austerity. In other words, more of the same. Twelve years on, having made problems far worse than whey they were berating Labour for them, they’re asking us to believe that the answer is to go for the same ideas all over again.

The Telegraph is right, though, to say that many other parts of Europe are suffering too. There’s an international economic crisis and that explains some of the problems Britain is facing. Let’s be fair to the Tories and allow that as part of the explanation for today’s difficulties, even though they weren’t fair enough themselves, back in 2010, to allow the same explanation to the Labour government when it faced a still more serious global crisis than today's. 

What still needs explaining, in any case, is why Britain’s performance is worse than anyone else’s in the G7, the group of the seven biggest economies in the world.

Even in the G20, of twenty major economies, it is underperforming every single country bar Russia. It may not be an accident that Russia has a government more incompetent than any of the others, as it’s shown by its disastrously misjudged invasion of Ukraine. 

So why is Britain doing so much more badly than most? 

That’s a stark question for those, like the Telegraph, who think Brexit has nothing to do with it. 

Britain’s doing significantly less well than the European countries that didn’t leave the EU. It’s hard to write that off as a mere accident. It’s hard not to see it as the key factor behind the difference in Britain’s performance. 

After all, the only other explanation would be the sheer incompetence of a government that promised us it had the solution in 2010, then made things worse for twelve years, and is now offering to go around exactly the same cycle again. 

Come to think of it, it’s perfectly possible that both explanations are true.