> There was so far no measurable negative impact of Brexit
Uh... Disagree.
> On January 11, 2024, the London Mayor's Office released the "Mayor highlights Brexit damage to London economy". The release cites the independent report by Cambridge Econometrics that London has almost 300,000 fewer jobs, and nationwide two million fewer jobs as a direct consequence of Brexit. Brexit is recognized as a key contributor to the 2023 cost-of-living crisis with the average citizen being nearly £2,000 worse off, and the average Londoner nearly £3,400 worse off, in 2023 as a result of Brexit. In addition, UK real Gross Value Added was approximately £140bn less in 2023 than it would have been had the UK remained in the Single Market.[0]
The whole page paints a picture which is far from "no measurable negative impact". While it's contrasted with some areas suffering and others benefiting, it's hard to have an overall picture that looks either good or bad, but it's far from being overly positive. And this is just on the economic topic, there's another whole hoist of topics which have negative outlooks such as security, politics (i.e. with the Ireland controversy and how difficult this situation is), etc.
This reply is a perfect demonstration of my complaint:
"[Remainers] conflate predictions with reality, by assuming that because the NGO-academic class predicted economic doom it must have actually happened"
The report you cite it isn't showing a measurable negative impact of Brexit, although you brought it up as a rebuttal to that point. It's a modeling exercise in which the authors imagine a hypothetical world up to 2035, and then pick a long series of unvalidated assumptions which causes the UK's performance to diverge massively from that of the wider EU and prior trends. None of these assumptions are plausible:
• They admit that they did a similar exercise in 2018 which was wrong.
• On page 14 they even admit that they are being deliberately pessimistic.
• They assume an annual GDP growth rate of 4.3% suddenly starting in 2026. That's US levels of growth. Both the UK and the EU only grew at 1.4% last year.
Arguments of the form "I told Excel it will be bad and therefore it's bad" are invalid, but were exactly the strategy the Remain campaign used during the referendum. In the years that followed their predictions were all falsified. Anyone can pay some consultants to write a Word document about the future that imagines whatever the customer wants. Go ahead and imagine 4.3% GDP growth appearing out of nowhere, why not? Such reports aren't independent by any stretch of the imagination, and certainly don't show that anything bad has already happened.
Unfortunately, Sadiq Khan is a manipulator who understands the psychological weaknesses of his supporters very well. So this set of imaginings about the future gets presented in the present tense, with sentences like "London’s economy alone has shrunk by more than £30 billion". It hasn't. Go look at the actual data. It has "shrunk" vs the imaginary numbers in his report, which means nothing.
Predictions are not reality. Reality is reality. And in reality, there has been no measurable negative impact of Brexit, which is why people like Sadiq Khan are forced to make numbers up.
Uh... Disagree.
> On January 11, 2024, the London Mayor's Office released the "Mayor highlights Brexit damage to London economy". The release cites the independent report by Cambridge Econometrics that London has almost 300,000 fewer jobs, and nationwide two million fewer jobs as a direct consequence of Brexit. Brexit is recognized as a key contributor to the 2023 cost-of-living crisis with the average citizen being nearly £2,000 worse off, and the average Londoner nearly £3,400 worse off, in 2023 as a result of Brexit. In addition, UK real Gross Value Added was approximately £140bn less in 2023 than it would have been had the UK remained in the Single Market.[0]
The whole page paints a picture which is far from "no measurable negative impact". While it's contrasted with some areas suffering and others benefiting, it's hard to have an overall picture that looks either good or bad, but it's far from being overly positive. And this is just on the economic topic, there's another whole hoist of topics which have negative outlooks such as security, politics (i.e. with the Ireland controversy and how difficult this situation is), etc.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_effects_of_Brexit#Imm...