How the Brexiters have controlled the narrative around Brexit

“Senior allies of Boris Johnson have warned that Britain will face civil unrest on the scale of the gilets jaunes protests in France or the riots in Los Angeles if Brexit is frustrated.” So reports the Times. A well known far right activist says on TV that he is amazed that there have not been riots yet, and also says there should be. In truth the absence of riots is not amazing at all.

Let us leave aside the implication that when Leavers protest it will be a riot rather than a peaceful protest. If you are talking about people protesting or worse on the streets you are not talking about Vox Pops where people tell an interviewer that they are angry parliament has failed to get on with it. You are not talking about responses to opinion polls. Instead we are talking about evidence that people are prepared to protest on the streets.

We have evidence here. When we failed to leave in March, despite repeated promises we would, you might have expect a very angry reaction. Farage addressed a demonstration in which he called the Houses of Parliament ‘enemy territory’. The demonstration was news because anything Farage does seems to be news and also some right wing thugs got aggressive. But in terms of people, we are talking about a few thousand people. A petition for a No Deal Brexit gained a bit more than 600,000 signatures.

If those numbers seem large, compare it to around 6 million signatures for a petition to revoke Article 50 and stay in the EU. Or regular large marches all around the country for a People’s Vote, with the biggest in London involving hundreds of thousands of people, all entirely peaceful. It terms of anger and passion, it seems Remainers outnumber Leavers by between 10 and 100 to 1.

If you think about it, this is hardly surprising. If we are honest Leavers have little or nothing to gain after Brexit, and probably a lot to lose. In contrast Remainers have a great deal to lose. Everyone will lose the right to work in the EU. Brexit takes away a European identity. EU citizens in the UK, and UK citizens in the EU, have a great deal to lose.

Will the media ever talk about this asymmetry between gains and losses. Of course most of it won’t, because in truth the number of people who are passionate about delivering Brexit are heavily concentrated in the press, and our media is too dominated by that press. The number of people passionate about Brexit is limited to a few thousand people who have convinced themselves it matters to them, politicians in the ERG and Brexit party, the Brexit press, right wing thugs, and those frightened of no longer being able to avoid tax in the EU.

Despite all the evidence, the idea of riots if we fail to Brexit is firmly implanted in the media. But this is just one aspect of how the Brexiters have dominated the narrative around Brexit. It started of course with the referendum. Cameron no doubt talked about the economics of Brexit during the referendum because he thought the talk of rights would not cut through to those who didn’t feel it. But with two words the Brexiters managed to throw all the expertise involved in Cameron’s warnings into question. The broadcast media obliged by repeating the question ‘isn’t this just Project Fear’ endlessly, and the BBC balanced the expertise of every single academic whose subject was international trade and institution with knowledge of international trade with Patrick Minford.

After the referendum, talking about the emerging impact on the economy of the result to Leave became impossible. The recession predicted by the Treasury did not happen because consumers dipped into their savings, and this forecasting failure became the reason why few talked about the expected depreciation reducing real wages, or the steady divergence between UK GDP and its comparators, and the collapse in investment. If they did try, Leavers would just start talking about the Treasury forecast.

The myth of the need to threaten No Deal as part of the negotiations soon became another piece of the entrenched narrative. I am sure some Brexiters believed it, because they never bothered to understand how the Single Market worked. It was forced upon other Brexiters when the cavalry in the form of the German auto-manufacturers who were going to force the German government into concessions never turned up. But it soon began to have a much more sinister purpose. It was not long before many in the ERG realised the only form of Brexit they would be happy with was No Deal, and from then on their aim was to try and achieve No Deal by default. What better ruse was there for this group than to spread the idea that we could not rule out No Deal for negotiation reasons.

I will end with two narratives at the moment that are the opposite of the truth. The first is that we must leave by October 31st because parliament has already had three years to get Brexit done and has failed. The reality is that the reason a deal has not been done is because of the actions of our current Prime Minister, his predecessor, and those in the ERG who are pushing this narrative. May made getting a deal through parliament difficult by choosing a form of hard Brexit the opposition could not sign up to. However the people who ensured it could not get a majority were the ERG, whose aim was No Deal. The current Prime Minister voted against May’s deal twice. Parliament has failed to agree a deal because the ERG do not want a deal.

It is therefore ludicrous that the people who prevented May getting a deal should pretend they represent the frustrated public against a prevaricating parliament, when they themselves did the prevaricating. Yet this nonsense is repeated time and again and is largely unchallenged. Also ludicrous is the idea that a No Deal Brexit fulfills the wishes of the 52% who voted in the referendum, when those campaigning to leave in the referendum said a deal was certain to be done. Only the Brexiters can get away with using the warnings of the side that lost as proof voters in 2016 knew that No Deal was a possibility, a possibility Brexiters called Project Fear at the time.

The second incredible narrative is that we need to end Brexit with a clean break, and then we can get back to doing other things. A clean break Brexit inevitably leads to 10 years at least of negotiation with the EU, negotiations in which the UK side will eventually be forced to accept the terms the ERG now despise. The longer our government holds out in those negotiations the longer it takes. In reality the so called clean break Brexit is a promise to continue Brexit negotiations but from an even weaker position.

Why have the Brexiters dominated the Brexit narrative over the last three years? One reason I have talked about before is while Remainers tend to focus on facts, most Brexiters are largely uninterested in the details of Brexit and instead concern themselves with generating spin. But the more fundamental reason is that most of the press (by readership) are deeply involved in pushing the Brexit project, and the BBC is too timid to question the narrative pushed by the Brexiters. .

The economic cost of the Brexit decision that Leaver voters do not get to see

Those promoting Brexit are fond of saying that it’s not about economics. Gary Younge in the Guardian tells us that there is nothing wrong with poorer people voting to be worse off, and of course he is right if that is what they knowingly do. But polling evidence suggests that only a small proportion of Leavers think the economy will be worse because of Brexit. Here are the results from three consecutive ORB polls (via here) where the respondents are only Leave voters.

As a result of leaving the EU, the UK’s economy will be
Date of poll	Better	Same	Worse
May 2018	42%	41%	16%
Nov 2018	39%	43%	18%
Jan 2019	26%	47%	27%

In May of last year, only 16% of Leave voters thought the economy would be worse off after Brexit, and incredibly 42% thought it would be better. As the table shows this view has only begun to shift in the last few months, and as John Curtice points out this has coincided for the first time with more Leavers than Remainers changing their minds about Brexit.

This tells us two important things. First, the Project Fear mantra worked. The Leave campaign, with the essential help of the Brexit press, managed to convince people that all this talk that the economy would be worse off after Brexit was false. Second, when the small percentage who think Brexit will damage the economy increases, support for Leave falls. Correlation does not prove causation, but this evidence suggests we should be sceptical about claims that Brexit is all about values and not about the economy.

So why are some Leave voters only now realising that Brexit will have a negative impact on the economy, and three quarters still think otherwise? After all, everyone was made worse off as inflation increased following the collapse in sterling immediately after the vote. According to one study, by the third quarter of 2017 the average consumer was worse off by £400 as a direct result of paying higher prices for imported goods following that depreciation.

The problem of course is that those price rises didn’t have a ‘made by Brexit’ tag attached to them. If you read the Financial Times of course you understood the connection, but if you read a Brexit newspaper and watched the 10 o’clock news those connections will not have been made, or if they were they would be muddled by Brexiters claiming the depreciation would be great for exports. It wasn’t great for exports, for straightforward reasons. I suspect some Leavers are only now changing their mind about Project Fear because they are seeing on the news iconic UK companies either cancelling investment projects or threatening to leave because of Brexit.

The problem is that there is no mirror image of the UK economy that didn’t vote for Brexit that voters can easily look at and see how much they are currently worse off. People cannot easily see that they are already paying a price for Brexit because firms and markets are anticipating what will happen after we leave. But it is possible to do the next best thing, and try to create a synthetic UK economy that didn’t vote for Brexit by looking at how other similar economies are doing. We know the UK has moved from around the top to around the bottom of the international growth league, but what does that actually mean for individual households?

That is the exercise that John Springfield at the Centre for European Reform is regularly doing, and he calculates that GDP was 2.3% lower in September 2018 as a result of the Brexit vote. That roughly translates into the average household losing almost £2000 worth of resources (mainly lower private consumption, but also lost public spending and investment). This number is broadly consistent with estimates the Governor of the Bank of England gave in May, using a different method.

To get a handle on how much public resources we are currently losing as a result of Brexit, Springfield calculates that GDP loss would amount to taxes being lower by £17 billion a year. Given the way this government runs its fiscal policy, that means we could have had tens of thousands more police officers and nurses if Brexit had not happened. This isn’t a forecast, but an estimate of what Brexit has already cost us.

Why has Brexit slowed the economy by enough to lose the average household resources worth almost £2,000 before we have even left? The answer is down to anticipation and uncertainty over what Brexit will mean. The foreign exchange markets had to anticipate the impact Brexit would have on future UK trade, and that was a major reason why there was an immediate collapse in sterling after the vote. Uncertainty about which kind of Brexit the UK would choose has mainly affected investment. In the chart below the Bank of England show how business investment has flatlined since the referendum, when the evidence from previous recoveries suggest it should have shown strong growth.

In addition the number of foreign direct investment projects coming to the UK, which was on a rising trend until 2015, has been falling since the 2015 election when it became clear there would be a referendum.

Will investment bounce back once Brexit uncertainty has been resolved? Certainly not if we leave with no deal, because industry's worst fears will have been realised. Even if we leave on the terms of the current Withdrawal Agreement there are two reasons to think the investment bounce back will be small. First uncertainty does not disappear. Will the government manage to agree a new trade relationship before the transition period runs out, or will we go over another No Deal cliff edge? Second, the decline in investment involves some anticipation as well as uncertainty, with a lot of service sector investment diverted towards investment in the remaining EU economies. All the time investment in the UK remains depressed this eats away at our ability to produce, at our productivity and therefore future living standards. As austerity showed, prolonged periods where the economy is depressed will have permanent negative effects.

Imagine if someone came to every Leavers door demanding nearly £2,000 for their household’s current contribution to Brexit. The evidence suggests that Brexit would quite quickly become about the economics. One of the reasons Brexit can happen is that its economic costs are not immediately visible. It is experienced but not isolated as a Brexit effect. It can be estimated to a reasonable degree of accuracy by experts, but the Brexit press keeps going on about the pre-referendum Treasury forecast and the broadcast media prefers a quiet life to routinely quoting these expert assessments. Brexit is not about the economy only because Leave voters are being kept in the dark about the impact Brexit is already having.

Business Brexit Blues

Project Fear was the device that allowed those arguing for independence for Scotland to ignore the short term fiscal realities [1], and it was the device used by Leave to discount the countless warnings that Brexit could make the UK significantly poorer. The device was indulged by the broadcast media, who now duly quote it back at businesses who warn that jobs are at stake with any kind of hard Brexit.

There are good reasons why so many businesses have finally decided to make their concerns public. They have lost all faith that the government knows what it is doing, and they have recently lost faith in parliament restoring any kind of sanity. Hence the warnings from Airbus, BMW, and the society of Motor Manufacturers. This is no posturing, as figures for car industry investment show. These numbers will only jump back up once Brexit uncertainty ends if the final deal is a positive one as far as car makers are concerned. A UBS survey suggests that car makers are not unusual in this respect. 

So why are firms not excited by the opportunities a Tory Brexit will bring in terms of less regulation and ‘global Britain’? They know global Britain is a myth: they can export perfectly well outside the EU as it is, and they are more likely to get a good trade deal with third countries by being in the EU than outside it. Those who say that a post-Brexit UK could do trade deals tailor made to UK business misunderstand what trade deals are mainly about nowadays. They are about harmonisation of regulations. And if a country is going to harmonise its regulations, it will do this with the EU rather than the UK because the EU is a much larger market.

Which is why the prospect of a regulation free post-Brexit UK has little appeal to businesses that trade. What business wants is harmonised regulations, giving them less costs and a large market. The EU is really all about harmonisation of regulations. These include regulation on working hours or the environment because all these things are required to get a level playing field for business and therefore a true single and very large market.

As Anthony Barnett in a very interesting essay argues, the sovereignty argument for Brexit involves a huge misconception. What the EU does (human rights aside) is harmonise regulations. Most people, including Leavers, have little problem with that. What Brexiters did was relabel this as giving away sovereignty, which sounds bad. I often ask Leavers if they can name any EU law ‘imposed’ on the UK that they do not like, and I have yet to get anyone to respond with one. It is the principle, one said. But their inability to quote an example of loss of sovereignty reveals an underlying truth. The EU is about harmonisation of regulations, regulations that most people have no problem with.

I do not think this was just a deliberate bit of Leave deceit, although there was plenty of that. I suspect this was also a genuine lack of understanding among our out of touch, privileged elite. Partly as a result, when businesses ask for harmonised regulations in the form of the single market they are nonplused. Hence the response of the government to these warnings. They include the “fuck business” of Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt saying the warnings were “completely inappropriate” because it could undermine the prospects for a good deal! These replies reflect the bewildered fumbling of an elite that thought they were pro-business and suddenly finding that they are doing it considerable harm.

The irony is that any deal that is done will involve the UK still being subject to EU regulations, only without the UK having any effective say in how those regulations evolve. For the leavers who equated regulations with sovereignty, we will be less sovereign as a result of Brexit than we were before. Brexit as a project has failed. We continue with it simply because of a flawed referendum and because politicians cannot admit the truth to save their own reputations and for fear of the reaction of the Brexiter press.. 

It should also be the end of Project Fear, for those at least who still have an open mind and who do not believe everything they read in the Brexit press (which I admit may rule out around a third of the UK population). Project Fear, in the two main contexts that it has been used, is equivalent to the claim that we don’t need experts. Just as Faisal Islam reacted to Gove when he first talked about having enough of experts, so other journalists should react when Project Fear is used to bat away major expected costs based on expert analysis. Otherwise we just normalise a kind of Republican anti-science attitude that is now official US policy.

[1] although, to save a lot of comments, the term itself was invented by those arguing against independence.

Cherry picking economic statistics and Project Fear

It is often said that the left-right description of politics is not a straight line but a circle, with left and right becoming more similar as they get more extreme. It is mostly nonsense, but one thing that can make it appear so is ideology. If you start to let your view of the world be dominated too much by a particular ideology or conviction (whether of the left or right), you tend to exhibit the same characteristic denial of both reality and the wisdom of expertise.

One of the symptoms of this denial is the cherry picking of statistics. The example that quickly comes to mind is output, employment and productivity. Since the GFC, UK output growth has been insipid but employment growth has been strong. The counterargument to the claim that the UK’s recovery from recession was the weakest for more than a century has been to applaud employment growth. But of course the combination of weak output growth and strong employment growth is awful labour productivity growth, which is a major factor behind slow wage growth. Those that applaud strong employment growth as a counter to [1] weak output growth are in effect saying what a great thing the productivity standstill is. (I made fun of this in one of my better posts.)

One of the little homilies I used to trot out when I taught first year undergraduates was that economics is not about making lists. In any economic situation you can make a list of what is good and bad about the economy, and then make some kind of judgement based on comparing the lists. For example you might observe that output is strong, unemployment is low but inflation is rising, and judge that the first two outweigh the third. But to do this avoids any understanding of what is going on. Once you try to relate the data to some kind of framework or model (e.g. of the business cycle) you realise you are describing a boom which needs to be moderated.

We have seen this in spades with Brexit. When the economy initially appeared unaffected by the Brexit vote, those promoting Leave said this was the ultimate proof of Project Fear. They did not bother to look at the composition of growth: consumption led, supported by falling savings and higher debt. This was not sustainable, and sure enough growth in output per head in the first half of 2017 has been minuscule. Consumers, by borrowing, had simply delayed the short term Brexit slowdown. But I have been told that this means nothing: growth has been low in the odd quarter since the recession, so this is just two of those quarters together and to suggest otherwise is Project Fear.

I’ve been told exports are booming, unemployment is still falling (and low by EU standards), falls in real wages are nothing new and much else. Yet ask almost any economist what they think is currently going on, and they will tell you it is a downturn caused by a decline in incomes (and flat investment) following the Brexit depreciation that has - as yet - not been offset by strong growth in net exports. I looked at why Brexit could be the reason for the absence of a net trade boost here. I may not be right, in so far as any commentary of this kind based on limited data as things are happening could prove wrong. This of course gives ample scope to those who want to see a particular result to poke holes and stress uncertainties.

In the grand scheme of things, the short term effect of the Brexit vote are minor compared to the potential long term impact of Brexit, and of course a great deal depends on the form of Brexit when it happens. The short term matters because of what it shows. Those who promoted Brexit used the Project Fear label to discount economic expertise: the overwhelming view of academic economists that Brexit would reduce long term GDP, and cause a short term slowdown before it was implemented. They did this not because they came to a different view based on the economic evidence, but because they wanted to believe Brexit would be painless (or, more cynically, because the pain would be felt by others). Brexit is a classic example of an ideology driven project that discounted evidence.

Going on to deny that Brexit has caused an economic slowdown is simply the next step in denial: denial of past evidence extends to denial of current evidence. It is just like Trump and climate change (or Trump and much else), which is why I and others have related Brexit and Trump. But the reality of Brexit is now being felt by the UK negotiators. Back in March I said that the obvious outcome for the immediate negotiations was to stay in the Single Market and Customs Union for a transition period, but the UK team would try and dress this up as something else to save face. What the UK negotiators are doing only makes sense once you understand that Brexit can cause huge economic damage, but those that said otherwise must cling on to the pretense of Project Fear.

The use of the term Project Fear was an attempt to shut out expertise and evidence from the Brexit debate, just as it was used in the same way during the Scottish Referendum. [2] Hopefully we will never know what the costs of a Hard Brexit will be, because we will get a Labour government which will keep us in the Single Market and Customs Union (or better still, Brexit somehow collapses before then). But the concept of Project Fear deserves to be exposed and degraded nevertheless. So, following on from the spirit of my last post, here is a definition:

Project Fear: a term once used by those who wish to discredit economic evidence and expertise as just the exaggerations of one side in a debate.

Background. Initially used by Scottish Nationalists in an attempt to hide the short term fiscal costs of independence, and then in the European referendum to hide the economic costs of leaving the EU. Fell out of use after Sterling’s depreciation following the Brexit vote, and the subsequent decline in real incomes and economic slowdown.

[1] Given weak output growth, strong employment growth and a decline in real wages may be preferable to stronger productivity growth and high unemployment. But that is to talk about the characteristic of a weak economy. I am talking here about employment growth being used to counter the claim that the recovery is weak.

[2] Please, no more comments about how the SNP did not invent the term. The desperation to show (correctly) that ‘they used it first’ indicates a recognition that the term was used in that referendum to hide reality from the voters.

Project Fear = We have had it with experts

Normally reading the Financial Times you are safe from ‘I cannot believe he said that’ moments. But occasionally you come across something like this, in this case from the normally reliable Wolfgang Münchau:

“Those who campaigned for the UK to stay in the EU are shaping up to be two-time losers. They lost the referendum vote on June 23; now they are losing the battle to keep the UK inside the single market. Both defeats are based on repeated misjudgments.

Their original mistake was to exaggerate the economic effects of Brexit. The long-run consequences are hard to gauge. What we do know, so far, is that the result did not cause an immediate crisis — and this is what matters politically. This is why the consensus within the Conservative party has been shifting towards a harder version of Brexit.”

Forget all the conflicting and unreliable monthly data and surveys, and focus on the two clear impacts that the Brexit vote has already had. The first is a large depreciation in sterling, which makes almost everyone poorer. [1] The second is a cut in interest rates plus a reactivation of unconventional monetary expansion. To imply that these events strengthen the Leave case is just completely and utterly bizarre. It is just another version of the ‘they predicted Armageddon’ trick which I complained about here. Any objective referee would judge the score so far to be

Economists 2 Leavers 0

As for ‘the long-run consequences are hard to gauge’, this homily implies that making trade harder with our immediate neighbours might make us better or worse off. This is wrong. Common sense, along with all the economic models, suggest the uncertainty is all one-sided. Estimates are for a reduction in UK living standards of between 3% and 8%.

Michael Gove was widely derided for saying the UK has had enough of experts. But using the label ‘Project Fear’ is exactly the same. It has been used in the Scottish referendum and Brexit as a way of discounting expert advice. Yet in the political world calling warnings about the impact of either Scottish independence or Brexit ‘Project Fear’ is seen as a successful tactic. If you believe this report, it is why the Labour leadership chose not to endorse (and in fact rubbished) the government’s warnings about the economic dangers of Brexit (although as I note here the suggested involvement of the Economic Advisory Council in that is incorrect). It is true that Project Fear is applied to government warnings about the economic impact of independence/Brexit, but when those warnings are backed by nearly all experts it amounts to an attack on expert advice.

So in the Orwellian world that we are now living in, the tactic of calling something Project Fear is newspeak for saying we have had enough of experts.

[1] If you own a large amount of assets denominated in overseas currency then you could be better off, at least for a time. However even here a permanent terms of trade loss will eat away at any wealth gain when real interest rates are negative. On average the UK is a net debtor, not a net creditor.  

For economists Project Fear is Brexit

Ironically we have the Union’s side in the Scottish referendum debate for inventing the idea of Project Fear. Alex Salmond, who knows a bit about spin, immediately saw its potential, and the economic case against Scottish independence was branded Project Fear by the SNP. The implication of that label is that those using Project Fear are hugely overplaying their hand to frighten voters.

In the Scottish referendum the UK government’s case was that people would be significantly worse off in the short to medium term in an independent Scotland. It may have been met with the jibe that it was Project Fear, but in reality it was a pretty reasonable assessment of what independence might mean, parts of which were backed up by independent analysis from the IFS and the OBR. But together with some wishful thinking of their own, the SNP were able to dismiss all this economics analysis as just scaremongering.

Yet in reality things turned out to be even worse than the Treasury and independent analysis had suggested. That analysis assumed that the high oil price at the time would stay high. What actually happened was a sharp fall in the oil price, which would have been a disaster for an independent Scotland. So in the end the UK government’s case against Scottish Independence was understated. But Nicola Sturgeon keeps calling it Project Fear and journalists hardly ever challenge her on that. So by the rules of the politicisation of truth, any reasonable but negative assessment of the economic consequences of change is now seen as potentially politically counterproductive because can be called Project Fear.

It was therefore inevitable that the Leave side would pick up on this trick. They too knew that the economic facts were stacked against them. So they called the analysis produced by the Remain side Project Fear, and political commentators in the broadcast media - being balanced and all - found it easier to repeat the label than try and go through the arguments.

Yet the arguments are not rocket science. Countries find it easier to trade with others that are close by. If you make that trade more difficult by leaving the single market, some of that trade will go elsewhere, but not all of it for sure. The end result will be less trade. It is common sense, which happens to be backed up by lots of empirical evidence. There is also strong evidence that less trade leads to lower productivity growth, which means incomes grow more slowly. What is a key reason why China been growing so rapidly since the 1980s? Because it opened up to trade.

It is also common sense that if we leave the EU, foreign investment into the UK will fall. Invest now and you get easy access to the huge market that is the EU, so after Brexit many firms will go elsewhere to gain that access. This is why 9 out of 10 economists think we will be poorer after Brexit, with only 4 in every 100 thinking we will be better off. [1] As the IFS’s Director Paul Johnson wrote: “That degree of unanimity on any poll of any group of people about just about anything is almost without precedent.”

Faced with this level of unanimity, some in the leave campaign have tried to suggest that economists generally get it wrong. Yet ironically, one of the examples they choose shows completely the opposite, as Paul Johnson notes and I had also pointed out earlier. The UK’s decision in 2003 on the Euro was similar to the Scottish and EU referenda in the following way. Some politicians, for essentially political reasons, liked the idea of doing something they saw as bold: in 2003 it was adopting the Euro. The Treasury did an incredibly thorough job of looking at all the pros and cons, taking extensive academic advice, and convinced first Gordon Brown and then Tony Blair that the risks were too big. And just as in the case of Scottish independence, that analysis underestimated the problems the Euro would face. Luckily neither Brown or Blair thought this analysis was Project Fear.

The 2003 Euro work, and the Scottish independence work, were both headed up by the same man: Dave Ramsden, now Chief Economic Advisor at the Treasury. Having got two big calls right, he is just the guy you would want to be in charge of the Treasury’s analysis of Brexit. That Treasury analysis is once again pretty reasonable, and - just as with the Scottish referendum - has been shown to be reasonable by other studies [2]. The idea that you shouldn’t trust economists now because they always get it wrong has it completely backwards in this particular case.

But as Paul Johnson, myself and others have noted, the message from economists is either being ignored or has not got through. I do not think it is being ignored, for reasons outlined here and here. Which is why journalists in the broadcast media must stop this nonsense of obscuring the truth by being too literal about political balance. The problem, as I noted here, is that one point in the overall debate is obvious: you cannot control immigration from the EU within the EU. So if the media insist on obscuring the economic costs of Brexit by putting up nonsense analysis against the consensus among economists, or continuing to dismiss that consensus as Project Fear, they are effectively taking sides. Let’s hear less from political journalists about Project Fear, and more about the economic consensus that after Brexit wages will be lower and there would be less money for the NHS.

[1] There is this strange idea among Leave supporters that we cannot say people will be ‘poorer’ under Brexit, because being poorer can only mean less well off than you were in the past. I guess if the Brexit side are going to misuse numbers (£350 million a week), they are going to try and misuse language at the same time.

[2] Martin Sandu has a brief summary