The British establishment says Brexit is failing but they only offer zombie statistics

“Be wary or there’ll be woe

Know your friend from your foe.”

It is a slightly gloomy time for supporters of Britain’s exit from the EU and for believers in our ability to prosper outside that benighted institution.

The air war is slowly going against us. To take just one example, we are led to believe that the upcoming UK budget, due next Wednesday, November 26, will be based on newly downgraded estimates of past and future productivity, and that Brexit will be blamed for it.

The productivity numbers are themselves no surprise.  Successive governments and the public sector economist blob have argued repeatedly since 2008 that British productivity is about to pick up again, and repeatedly been proved wrong.  Now it seems that they will finally acknowledge reality – and justify it with the convenient excuse of Britain’s exit from the EU.

A whole lot of zombie predictions and analyses will be rolled out.  Some date from as far back as the time of the referendum; a few are more recent.  Some use gravity modelling; some CGE models; and some use the so-called “doppelganger” method, comparing Britain to a set of economies which supposedly track it in economic performance, like the US (hollow laughter).  All purport to show that Britain has suffered or will suffer a productivity or growth shock (it depends who you read) of 4-6 per cent compared to an alternative future in which we had stayed in the EU.

But, like so many clever analyses by clever people who can’t see the wood for their particular group of trees, all these suffer from a fundamental plausibility defect.  If they were correct, without Brexit, Britain would have been the star performer among the big EU member states, leaping ahead of France and Germany, and not far off keeping pace with the US.  But is there anything in Britain’s pre-2016 performance since the financial crash that would lead you to think this was in any way likely?

The truth is that, instead of doing what we should have, and what the European Commission feared we would do, that is, deregulate and cut spending dramatically, and exit from the worst aspects of EU regulation and policy-making, we have done the opposite.  We have continued most aspects of EU policy, with a few limited exceptions, so we are continuing to perform just as we would have if we’d stayed in the EU – a bit slower than France, a bit faster than Germany.

But still, the fantasy numbers, repeated ad nauseam by the Government, and never effectively criticised by the Conservative or Reform parties, are sinking in.  The general belief among voters appears to be that Brexit is failing and has been damaging.  It will take a major effort to overcome this – one which so far is not being made.

There is another problem too, and one which is all too familiar to existing EU members: Establishment collusion.  We now have a government that fundamentally believes the same thing as the EU about Brexit: That it was a mistake, that it was damaging, that anything that can be done to repair the bonds and readmit Britain to the comity of civilised European nations, must now be done.

Consider two recent illustrations.  First, the House of Lords European Affairs Committee, of which I was at the time a member, put out last week a report on the UK/EU “reset” negotiations.  The whole thing is written on the assumption that closer UK-EU relations are necessarily a good thing, and that the minor problems left by the trade agreement are significant national interest issues which must be solved by new formal agreements, if necessary subordinating the UK to EU law.  No space is given to sovereignty or democracy concerns or the possible benefits of diverging from EU arrangements.  Of course I voted against the report, but it remains on the record, and its Chair presents it in public without noting that there was any dissent.

Second comes the latest meeting of a thing called the UK/EU Parliamentary Assembly – a talking shop of members of the European Parliament and British MPs and Lords.  I had the dubious pleasure of attending this week. It is of course entirely unrepresentative of wider opinion, and as a result we spent our time listening to all but a tiny minority denounce Brexit and encourage the “reset”.  Familiar UK-EU dynamics have been re-established:  The EU Ambassador, speaking for Commissioner Šefčovič, lays down the law sternly, even imperiously, about the terms upon which the EU will accept fealty from its renegade province, but the UK Minister Nick Thomas-Symonds can only talk warmly of his wish to be friends again with Brussels.

What we are seeing is a convergence of interests between Britain’s rulers and those of the EU, a convergence which is not in the interests of Britain’s people.  It makes the UK/EU reset not a genuine negotiation, but a performance, for there is no fundamental disagreement between the two parties.  The public disputes are for show.  There is no real doubt as to whether agreement will be reached – that’s a given, because the British government will accept more or less anything.

The real point is different. It’s on the one hand to engage in collusion, in concealment from British voters of what is actually going on, and on the other to establish terms of discourse in which anyone who questions the fundamentals, speaks of the merits of divergence in regulation and policy-making, or worst of all talks of sovereignty and democracy, is seen as eccentric or irrelevant.  This was the pre-2016 situation and it is gradually being re-established.

This can, of course, only happen if the British establishment is willing to go along with it, and in particular to continue to persuade itself and their voters of the essential correctness of their fantasy view of the EU as some kind of pre-lapsarian paradise rather than an entity which is struggling with the same problems as everyone else. So far they are happy to do so.  And once they have succeeded in selling out Britain’s interests, they will of course seek to persuade us that the new reality is immeasurably superior to what we have now.

British voters should not trust them.  I quoted at the start of this article the words of John Ball, one of the leaders of that earlier great English rebellion against our rulers, the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt. They come from his letter to the “commons of the county of Essex”, not coincidentally a stronghold of the later rebellion against King Charles I, and one of the strongest Brexit-voting areas of England too. In the 14th-century original: “Be war or ye be wo; Knoweth your freend fro your foo.”  In context: be wary of those who govern you, or else regret it; so know your friend from your foe.

True then, and true now.  British voters must watch for their own interests – and take nothing on trust.

The Rt Hon Lord Frost of Allenton CMG was Britain’s chief negotiator for exiting the European Union