You will remember the Leave campaign’s Brexit bus, which stated:
We send the EU £350m a week – let’s fund our NHS instead
This was enough to persuade many people of restricted intelligence to vote to leave the EU back in 2016. They genuinely believed that we really did send that amount of money and got nothing in return.
Worryingly, even as recently as October 2018, 42% of the electorate still believed this stupid claim to be true – even though it has been proven false many times over. We have never “sent” £350 million, and whatever we do “send” doesn’t take into account the rebates, grants, funding, and business contracts that EU membership brings.
Even if we did actually send £350 million a week and get absolutely nothing in return, a recent study has concluded that Brexit has cost the UK £550 million a week since the referendum! And that’s on top of the imaginary £350 million. The study also said that there had been no significant boost in exports following the collapse of the GBP. A massive boost in exports is a major tenet in the Brexiters’ unicorns and rainbows vision of the future, remember.
The damaging cost of Brexit in this study is actually the lowest figure out of several other studies into the same issue. Previously, Goldman Sachs has estimated that Brexit has cost us as much as £600 million a week, and the Bank of England put it as high as £800 million a week (both on top of the imaginary £350 million). One thing I am certain of is that studies by Goldman Sachs and the BoE are to be trusted more compared with the warped fantasies of thick prats in Wetherspoons who drive white vans.
Even taking this latest (and lowest) figure, and assuming that the £350 million was real, if Brexit finally happened tomorrow, it would take over two years before we started to be “better off” by not paying that £350 million anymore thanks to the extra it has cost us already. And even that is based on the unicorns and rainbows premise that the £350 million we won’t be sending to the EU isn’t going to be needed trying to claw back what we loose by not being EU members.
Of course, the typical level of Brexiter intelligence dismisses these figures – which are all in the same ball park, and produced by experts – and instead adopts some imaginary and undisclosed number they prefer the look of, and which equates to us somehow being better off.
Brexit is a screw up of Biblical proportions.