Ever since the first days of the EU referendum campaign in 2016, the Remain side has been warning us that economic disaster is on the horizon. Time and again, they have reminded us of the near-total ‘expert’ consensus that leaving the EU would shatter the UK economy. Since we formally left the EU in 2020, elite Remainers have developed a kind of Brexit Tourette’s syndrome. Seemingly every economic challenge, from pandemic-induced supply-chain snarl-ups to post-Ukraine energy-price hikes, is now blamed squarely on Brexit.

Britain’s GDP figures, in particular, have long been weaponised to the end of undermining Brexit. Mainstream media outlets have relished reporting the UK’s relatively slow recovery from the Covid pandemic, compared with other advanced economies. BBC News analysis from January this year claimed that ‘The UK is the only major rich economy that remains smaller – poorer – than prior to the pandemic and Brexit may be a factor’. In December 2022, the Financial Times sneered that ‘Britain is the only G7 economy that remains smaller than it was before the pandemic’, which apparently suggested that the ‘damage inflicted to the economy’s supply side by Covid and Brexit is even larger than previously thought’.