Just to be clear....
Two, 50 or 100 years: when do leavers think Brexit will pay off?
Jacob Rees-Mogg says the benefits of leaving the EU may not be felt for 50 years – and he’s not the only Eurosceptic asking the people of Britain to wait patiently
Jacob Rees-Mogg
According to one of the most prominent Brexiters, Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, we should see the benefits of Brexit in about half a century. “We won’t know the full economic consequences for a very long time,” he said. “The overwhelming opportunity for Brexit is over the next 50 years.” So, not long to go now!
Amid the overwhelming predictions that our exit from the EU – stated for 29 March – will be disastrous, others have been marginally more optimistic. Here are some of the leading Brexit cheerleaders’ forecasts for when Brexit will finally pay off.
Now
In a speech in 2016, the prominent leave campaigner and then future Brexit secretary David Davis said: “The greatest improvements will come if we grasp the opportunities for free trade with both hands. That means immediately seeking free trade agreements with the biggest prospective markets as fast as possible. There is no reason why many of these cannot be achieved within two years.” By 2024
“If we do the right thing, it will probably take four or five years for Britain to show it is thriving outside the European Union,” said Simon Wolfson, a pro-Brexit Tory peer and the chief executive of the retail chain Next, several months after the referendum.
Boris Johnson has made a similar estimate, stating that he is a fan of Canada’s free trade agreement with the EU, which he said in 2016 would give us a “very bright future”. Canada’s deal took five years of negotiations, concluding in 2014, and is still not entirely in place.
By 2025
By the mid-2020s, we should see “a post-Brexit dividend of £135bn just between 2020 and 2025, with a further £40bn a year from then on”, according to Rees-Mogg, who was quoting figures from the pro-Brexit group Economists for Free Trade. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has said this dividend does not exist.
By 2030
Vote Leave campaign bus
Yes, that bus.
Andrew Lilico, the executive director of the analyst Europe Economics and a leave campaigner, told the BBC last year that “by 2030 we should come out about even”. When it was pointed out to him on Twitter that this did not sound like a great deal, Lilico replied that “it wouldn’t be if one were arguing to leave on the basis of the economics”. Perhaps he missed the Brexit campaign bus that promised an extra £350m a week to the NHS.
By 2060
Giving a speech as part of the BBC’s Brexit Lectures series in April, the international trade secretary, Liam Fox, said he was looking ahead several decades regarding global economic growth. He earmarked post-Brexit opportunities for 2060, when “it is predicted that there will be 1.1 billion middle-class Africans”.
By 2064
The earliest year by which Britain will have finished paying its £37.1bn Brexit “divorce bill”, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility. Most should be paid by the early 2020s, but we will still be making payments for the subsequent four decades. If you make it this far, hang on a few more years to see if 99-year-old Rees-Mogg’s half-century timescale is proved right.
By 2116
Digby Jones, a crossbench peer and former director-general of the CBI, wanted the delegates at the Black Country Local Enterprise Partnership’s annual conference in 2016 to know that he was “a very optimistic guy”. He then went on to say: “I think Britain in 100 years’ time will thank God they came out.”
Never?
Nigel Farage never promised that Brexit “would be a huge success”, he said on LBC radio. “I never said it would be a beneficial thing to leave and everyone would be better off,” said Farage – who has repeatedly said we would be better off – “just that we would be self-governing.”
