News
The new Prime Minister Andy Burnham claimed that the vote to leave the EU in 2016 has ushered in a decade of low economic growth. Our Advisory Council member Julian Jessop has responded here: "Why Andy Burnham is wrong on Brexit".
In short, Brexit has not turned out to be the car crash that many feared. Some still describe it as a slow puncture for the British economy. In reality, it may turn out to be little more than a bump in the road. And if that road takes us further away from the emerging disaster that is the EU, then all the better!
Meanwhile, The Times reported that "Britain [is] 'to be spared' fresh round of Trump tariffs". In the words of the paper "Trump has consistently threatened extra tariffs on the EU after a series of cases where tech giants based in the US have been fined hundreds of millions of euros under the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA)."
The UK may still come into the firing line, as the UK has recently introduced similar legislation. The US government has also consistently complained about the UK's Digital Services Tax. But for now, it looks like the Trump administration will target the EU first. And if the UK does indeed avoid these additional tariffs, this would of course be another benefit of Brexit.
And on the subject of Brexit benefits, here is a big one: on Tuesday the UK secured full access to the £13 trillion CPTPP trading bloc. Other members are Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam - but none from the EU...
Our friends at the Great British Business Council have published a detailed assessment of the proposed UK-EU Reset, written by our Advisory Council member Catherine McBride. In short, the Reset would be bad for British taxpayers, young people, and businesses. In every single part of the Reset, the UK would be giving up its sovereignty and agreeing to blindly follow EU regulations, with costs running into the tens of billions of pounds.
Briefings for Britain have published another timely debunking of claims that the UK economy is significantly smaller than it would have been without Brexit. The popular doppelganger approach is particularly flawed, as shown by the fact that it produces even bigger output losses if applied to France or Germany! You can read a summary here.
Meanwhile, Jamieson Greer, the US trade representative, has accused the UK of failing to take advantage of Brexit by aligning with EU rules, and closing its market to US goods.
He told the FT: 'That’s how we interpret it… based on my conversations with the UK, where I say, "Hey, you’re free of the EU. Why don’t you liberalise a little bit?" And they say, "Well, we have to wait and see what the EU says about it." You know that is a problem for us and that’s challenging.'
Asked whether the UK was using Brexit to its advantage, he bluntly replied: 'No, they're not.'
