We’ve come a long way from the days when Brexiteers promised a free trade utopia and an £350m a week to spend on our NHS. Now we have David Davis reduced to warning there will be no Mad Max-style scenario when we leave the European Union.
Anyway, how do we know? The Brexit Secretary refuses to publish his economic risk analysis so we can have an informed discussion about the effects on cities like mine. What evidence has trickled out of his department shows that the UK economy will take a hit – and the further you are away from Greater London, the harder that punch will feel.
At best, with retained access to the single market, we will take a 2 per cent hit to GDP over the next 15 years. At worst, with a so-called ‘Hard Brexit’, this increases to 8 per cent.
That’s hundreds of thousands of jobs taken out of the economy. Moreover, we know the impact will be felt unevenly. The further away you are from London and the South East, the deeper the effects.
This week, leaders of some of our major Core Cities met Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, to explain our worries. Our cities are potential engines of growth and vital players as we insulate the country from Brexit-related shocks. We are trying to play a constructive role – whether or not we agree with Brexit – because we are on the ground and left dealing with the fallout.
So far, ministers have refused to meet us. We are apparently frozen out of the conversation because our reality-based concerns do not fit with the government’s celestial belief that things will be all right on the night.
As a local government leader, I deal in pragmatic solutions. (Having lost two-thirds of our Government funding since 2010, I have no choice.) But ministers need to come out of their bunker and talk to us about the support we need and the part we can play in preventing a recession when we leave the EU.
There is only one way to interpret their reluctance to do so. They know that we are on course to take an economic shellacking, and are preparing to leave us to it. They have done nothing to reassure us that a dystopian nightmare does not await – with Britain reduced a low-tax, low regulation fiefdom, with neo-liberal hardliners taking a red pen to the social and environmental protections currently guaranteed by EU law.
This is not acceptable. It is a total betrayal of those parts of the country already struggling with a decade of austerity and all the uncertainty generated by the Brexit process. But ministers should care because if we suffer, then Brexit will have demonstrably failed.
It will come as little surprise to Scousers. Liverpool voted 58 per cent to Remain back in June 2016. That’s because we felt the practical benefits of being in the EU. Europe was there for us – especially in the 1980s – when our own government wasn’t.
Objective One and other regional funding streams helped bring Liverpool back from the dark days when ministers in the Thatcher Government were seriously contemplating writing us off entirely. ‘Managed decline’ they called it. We were to be left to fend for ourselves.
But Europe allowed us to begin a ‘managed renaissance,’ becoming the modern, optimistic and dynamic city we are today. EU funding helped us to bounce back and catalysed many of the dramatic changes we’ve seen over the past few years.
If leaving the EU now results in a harsh economic winter, then the pendulum of public opinion will swing back the other way. So it’s actually in the interests of Brexiteers to have a second vote on the terms of our departure. Asking the public if they approve of the deal ministers will have negotiated, is entirely justified. Call it a confirmatory ballot, or a cooling-off vote.
This is not about keeping asking the same question until the political elite get the answer they want. It is about giving the British people sign-off on how the country will be governed after 2019 and the effects that will have on their lives.
It’s ridiculous that we have more opportunity when it comes to cancelling our car insurance than have when it comes to reflecting on the biggest change to Britain’s economic and political fortunes in any of our lifetimes.
If – after knowing the full facts of what we face on the outside – the British public still voted to leave, then I would accept their decision with no further protest – and so should everyone else.
But it is right to ask them.
What is not acceptable – or credible – is to ignore reality and refuse to deal with the very people who will be left to pick up the pieces.
Joe Anderson is the Labour mayor of Liverpool.
