The list of Brexit victories is in. It is short and weak | Observer editorial

In the run-up to the 2016 referendum, Conservative campaigners sold Brexit as the answer to all the country’s problems. Leaving the EU would change Britain’s economic prospects and make us all richer. It would free up money to spend on the country’s public services, especially the NHS. It would restore control over the country’s immigration system and help reduce migration levels.

Four years after Britain left the EU, this Brexit manna has yet to materialize. No surprise: the campaign for Brexit remains perhaps the most dishonest political move this country has ever seen. It is true that the referendum result did not in itself cause Britain to enter a recession as Chancellor George Osborne predicted it. But none of the false promises came true. Brexit has made Britain poorer in the long term, and the deal negotiated by Boris Johnson has left Northern Ireland in a damaging political standstill. Of course, that hasn’t stopped the government from claiming it has been an unprecedented success. Last week the Ministry of Trade and Industry published what can only be described as: political propagandaconsisting of carefully selected statistics to create the illusion that Brexit has only brought benefits four years later.

This document reflects the depressing reality that the current Conservative party is very much the political successor to the official Vote Leave campaign, which lied to voters that Brexit would not involve painful trade-offs, and engaged in a “clear misuse of official statistics” to deploy the false claim that leaving the EU would free it £350 million a week for the NHS and who implausibly suggested that would mean staying in the EU share a border with Syria and Iraq. We are to believe that the British economy has been reshaped for the better thanks to a collection of free trade agreements, the vast majority of which simply replace the agreements that Britain had. still have access via the EU: Britain’s entry into the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which the government estimates at just 0.06% of GDP by 2040; and a handful of ‘global trade gains’, including greater access to the Mexican market for pork producers, and improved access to the Chinese beauty market, which the British Beauty Council says has nothing to do with Brexit and is more than offset by the the beauty industry has lost £850m as a result of leaving the EU.

By painting such an incomplete picture, this official government document is very misleading. It is the most fundamental of economics that you cannot assess the impact of a policy like Brexit on a country’s economy without looking at both the costs and the benefits; to list only one side of the balance sheet is worse than useless. The overall impact of Brexit on the economy has made us much poorer. Analysis from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research shows that GDP at the end of last year was between 2% and 3% lower than it would have been if Britain had not left the EU; the equivalent of a loss of £850 per person in national income, rising to £2,300 per capita by 2035. Erecting trade barriers with our largest and closest trading partner to pursue free trade agreements with smaller economies on the other side of the world would never pay off. In addition, the level of business investment have fallen by 30% compared to the pre-referendum trend.

This is an impoverishment that Britain cannot afford. While ministers trumpet partial statistics over the airwaves in praise of Britain’s economic success, the reality of people’s wages and household incomes tells a different story. Analysis by the Resolution Foundation shows that real wages in 2024 will be no higher than in 2006, a terrible story of stagnation. External factors such as the war in Ukraine have contributed to rising energy bills and food prices, but Brexit has not only made household incomes less resilient to these shocks, but has also driven up inflation through its impact on the levels of the pound itself .

This is completely separate from the impact that Brexit has had on governance in Northern Ireland. Brexit is not the only destabilizing influence, but it has undoubtedly contributed to the tensions that led to the collapse of the Northern Ireland government between 2017 and 2020, and again from 2020 until last week. The latest rethink of border controls in the Irish Sea, made necessary by Brexit, has led to the restoration of power sharing which was sealed yesterday. But with some issues still unresolved, there’s no guarantee this deal will hold up in the long run. Meanwhile, net migration has continued to rise since Brexit as a matter of economic necessity, not least to fill pressing staff shortages in the NHS and health system.

The Tories’ Brexit populism would never bring them long-term success at the ballot box because their promises were built on sand. A poll last week found that 57% of people think Brexit has been a failure before; only 13% think it has been a greater success. But whether or not the public blames Brexit for the state of the economy, the polls suggest voters are willing to hold the government responsible for the cost of living and the state of the NHS. It is unlikely that the ministers will escape their complicity in misleading the public and inflicting economic pain on the country; but not before causing untold damage to Britain’s long-term interests.