My point is that, as Chancellor of a government which accepts Brexit as a done deal, it is interesting for him to do anything other than shower Brexit with praise. Criticism from within the ranks of the Tory government is significant and a sign of shifting tides. This is the sense in which he 'conceded'. Until recently this was omerta.
As I say, believe what you want, I genuinely want to be wrong as I feel ever-growing despair at what has happened to my country, not least under recent Tory governments. We are a country in decline. I'm now pretty certain of it.
"Criticism from within the ranks of the Tory government is significant and a sign of shifting tides"
Well, the Conservatives officially campaigned to remain and Boris had to kick out dozens of MPs at the last election to even be able to implement the vote at all. Whether someone is a truly reformed Remainer or not has been a question at every leadership contest since. So there's nothing significant or new about Tories disagreeing with Brexit, it's a pretty standard position within the party.
"We are a country in decline. I'm now pretty certain of it."
I am too! We don't actually disagree on that. The GDP/capita trends are pretty clear there, especially when compared to the USA. It's not relevant to food price inflation which has different causes, however.
The difference between us is I think the issues long pre-date 2016, are mostly to do with entrenched social attitudes, were made worse/locked in place by EU membership and therefore that Brexit is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for reversing the decline. Whereas you see a decline as a recent thing and Brexit/the ruling party as the cause.
That's a book sized topic and I'm probably posting to this thread too much already. Still, go big or go home, right?
The EU enforces a very specific economic and social model which prioritizes geopolitical unification over wealth creation. External tariffs are high, there are many other less obvious protectionist policies in place, regulation is vast/constantly growing, there's a lot of grant dependency and internal subsidies, the EU theoretically doesn't control tax but in practice has taken control of it anyway and now prevents tax competition (see Ireland), and the ex-Soviet states have provided a legal pool of very cheap labor which has systematically discouraged investments in productivity for decades. The Euro creates a whole other set of problems but fortunately the UK avoided that. Because the EU's scope constantly expands this results in the slow strangulation and homogenization of local politics: huge swathes of policy that people care about are effectively off limits and politicians from all parties simply refuse to discuss them at all, knowing that there's nothing they can do or say because the EU will simply overrule them. It was often very unclear to voters why these "black holes" existed or even what they were exactly, because the middle class consensus was that the EU should be beyond criticism and is at any rate an immovable object, the ever-increasing dominance of which was an unavoidable fact of political life best left undiscussed.
The UK's divergence from the USA in wealth terms isn't directly caused by the EU. That's why I say the EU locked in social problems, rather than causing them. The divergence really kicked into gear after WW2. [1]
Post 1945 the USA continued its more explicitly capitalist and libertarian approach, wheres the UK became wedded to the European social model. Compare employment law between Europe and California, recall all the usual HN discussions about why Europe doesn't create tech startups at the same rates, etc. It's all a part of the same package of attitudes that creates those outcomes. Inside the EU divergence from this model towards something more explicitly pro-business is simply not possible, as the Irish have discovered. They were picking up US tech firms and investments like candy due to their low tax model, but the EU preferred to forcibly align everyone on French levels of corporation tax to avoid "harmful tax competition" [2]. It doesn't even control such taxes by treaty, but treaties are largely irrelevant in Europe - the subservience of the political class and fear of EU retaliation means there are no real checks on its power, and thus they were able to bring Ireland to heel anyway.
Outside of the EU the UK can in theory diverge from this approach and pursue a more US style model, eventually perhaps even catching up with US levels of wealth. Certainly that was a big part of the appeal to a lot of the Brexit campaigners. However it isn't on track to do so currently. The social attitudes described above have been a feature of British society for many decades and the Conservatives are effectively a centre-left party dominated by the need for wealth transfers towards the the pensioner demographic that reliably turns out to vote for them. Even if alternative parties appear, alternative social models start to be discussed and attitudes change, it will take a long time to even re-match the USA in terms of growth, let alone close the gap. That's why I think the impact of Brexit will have to assessed by historians over a span of a century or more, in the same way people still debate the impact of the events of the 1920s today.
So - it creates new options. People haven't even been thinking about those options for nearly 100 years, so nothing is going to happen overnight and it may never happen. But at least it will mostly depend on what voters want.
There's nothing fantastical about it. The UK had similar growth rates to the US in the 1980s, it had equal wealth at the start of the 20th century before the wars. Brits and Americans aren't so different. Arguing for being more like the US is therefore the opposite of fantasy economics - the existence proof is right there, sitting across the Atlantic, being very much real and not a fantasy.
This type of shallow, unintellectual dismissal of any thinking outside the EU box is exactly why Remain lost in the end. Describing everyone who pointed out the problems as fantasists, racists etc made the pro-EU side look unclever, unthinking. The "fantasy economics" line was tried over and over, it didn't work because enough people saw through it. The claims of an instant recession were tested and found to be false. Who cares what economists think about Brexit or the EU nowadays? The UK is out and people can see the claims of immediate/total economic devastation weren't true, so there's now potentially a reason to argue for more growth/wealth oriented ways of doing things. Before there wasn't because the EU would stop it anyway, so back then a model more like the US or parts of Asia really was fantasy economics.
It's a fantasy because there is no democratic consensus for a US model as you have admitted. The UK isn't the US at all by any number of key measures - market size, resources, dollar. The Tories ejected Truss when she tried the 'growth' low tax thing because they knew they were heading for electoral (and financial) disaster.
The UK is in a no-mans land outside of a huge market on our own continent and all you can offer is 'we can try new stuff now'.
I can accept the vote as long as there is an honest discussion about the consequences. What I can't accept is lines like 'Who cares what economists think about Brexit or the EU nowadays?'. Going back to my original point, Brexit has poisoned economic discourse.
That's not what fantasy means. If it were, then just 7 years ago you could have said there was no democratic consensus for leaving the EU and that it was a fantasy to suggest it. But that wouldn't have been correct.
My point is that in order to build democratic support for a policy you have to be willing to put in a lot of effort and campaign for it. In the EU there was no point in doing that, because even if you won a democratic victory (an election, referendum, etc) then it didn't matter, the EU would overrule you and the voters, the end.
Yes, Liz Truss tried to do the easy bits of pro-growth policies without the hard bits of actually cutting spending. That doesn't work and she was quickly replaced. The shadow of lockdowns is a long one and the country will be much poorer as a consequence regardless of what politicians do. Nonetheless, I doubt anyone is trying to claim that the new higher tax levels are going to reverse the UK's economic decline.
The UK is not in a "no mans land", that's the sort of emotional catastrophising that this thread is full of. It's a big country and still sells to the EU just as it did before - see my other comments. Exports haven't actually fallen at all because the much vaunted single market wasn't really a single market for the UK's companies anyway so leaving it didn't make much difference.
We all want honest discussions of the consequences. That's why I'm posting on this thread in the first place. Blaming global lockdown/furlough-inducted inflation on Brexit isn't honest economic discourse. Neither is simply insisting on deference to academic/civil service economists, who have been consistently wrong about it.
Compared to recent years it's a bit of volte face for a Chancellor to say something like this, I'm not really thinking about the pre-Boris purge era where of course, things were different. Anyway, I don't want to get stuck on this point. It was a throwaway observation and hearing Hunt say this in his current role stood out, and I felt it was moderately significant politically. The weather is changing. Give it 5 years and I think you'll hear murmurings about rejoining the single market. I really do. Public opinion will get there, although it's way too soon politically for that right now.
I don't lay the entire blame for our decline at Brexit's door, I too think it has been decades in the making. For me though, Brexit was a singular moment of lunacy, and many of the morbid symptoms our politics have displayed in recent years, the terrible quality of leaders, the hard right wing creep in some sections of the govt, the sheer reality-ignoring stupidity, does seem to have a Brexit link. But no, I don't think everything was great pre-Brexit. The lunatics took over the asylum is probably more how I see it. Now we have 'grownups' in charge, I'll concede that much, but I find this new project a grim re-run of the Cameron era. Another ideologically motivated choice to slash the state to address a mythical fiscal hole. I dread to think where we will end up after this latest round of austerity. It's truly grim.
As I say, believe what you want, I genuinely want to be wrong as I feel ever-growing despair at what has happened to my country, not least under recent Tory governments. We are a country in decline. I'm now pretty certain of it.