Brexit’s biggest crime? The £40bn wasted on lies

It’s not the constitutional damage of Brexit that really bothers me, says Femi Oluwole. It’s the endless lies and broken promises about the financial gains for Britain which, in the end, amounted to little more than a chaotic and bankrupt Tory vanity project

The great lie was that we were paying for EU membership without any financial gain (PA Archive)

You shouldn’t be reading this article. This is an article about the broken promises of Brexit and the problems it creates for people in the UK every single day. If everything had gone as they told us it would, I wouldn’t be writing like this seven years on.

Yet a busload of broken promises have stolen our future and devastated a generation.

The anger of Generation Z and millennials like me has only increased over time. But I am most angry about every lie our country was forced to swallow.

This month is the tipping point. There were three and a half years of chaos between the referendum and the December 2019 election. In that election, Boris Johnson promised to “Get Brexit Done”, “end the chaos” and “move on” from Brexit.

As of this month, even more time has passed and the chaos is still going on. So instead of ending the chaos, they’ve now more than doubled it.

Rishi Sunak just renegotiated the Northern Ireland part of the Brexit deal, and the DUP still won’t accept it. So Northern Ireland currently has no government because of Brexit. The government has delayed the start of checks on imports from the EU four times. They won’t start until next year. And two weeks ago, Boris Johnson blamed his departure on a Brexit rebellion among the same Tory MPs who made Brexit happen. The chaos of Brexit is far from done.

They said we’d be £350m a week richer. But forget the number for a minute. Forget whether the money goes to the NHS. The simplest point of this promise was that, by no longer paying for EU membership, we would be richer as a country. It was a promise to millions of people who had just been financially suffocated by austerity for six years, that Brexit was the answer to their suffering.

The great lie was that we were paying for EU membership without any financial gain from it. But the trade barriers created by leaving the single market have left one in five small businesses unable to trade with the EU, costing the UK roughly 4 per cent of our economy. That’s equivalent to £40 billion a year in tax revenue. That’s £40bn less for the government to spend on doctors, nurses, teachers, police, and it’s left the average household £1,000 poorer.

They said Brexit would help the NHS. Yet the Nuffield Trust, the top medical charity in the UK, says Brexit is damaging the NHS by making medicines more expensive due to the trade barriers, and by slowing the recruitment of EU medical staff. A rapid intake of staff from the rest of the world has helped, but has still left gaping holes in specialist areas. For example, cardiothoracic surgeons had doubled in the five years leading to the referendum, but have seen almost no growth since. Doing this to our NHS during a pandemic is simply unforgivable.

They said we’d take back control of immigration. Recent immigration levels are at their highest on record, and yet our economy is still crying out for more foreign workers. You’re wondering how that makes sense? Under the EU system of free movement, migration was largely about coming or going to countries to work. But the age profile and reduced number of work visas among new arrivals suggests that is no longer the case. According to the government’s official experts, the Office for Budget Responsibility, “the participation rate of migrants under the post-Brexit regime will be lower than in the past”.

That doesn’t even address the huge damage done to the thousands of young Brits who would be working across Europe as hotel staff or touring musicians; those opportunities have simply disappeared since Brexit.

They said we’d take back control of our laws. The government recently went back on its promise to scrap thousands of EU laws, after businesses warned that it would only increase the trade barriers that are already crippling them. Furthermore, the deal Boris Johnson signed in 2019 ties us to a level playing field with the EU on several issues of law. The deal lets the EU put tariffs on UK products if we don’t follow those rules, and thanks to Brexit, we no longer have a say in how those rules are implemented.

They said we’d get cheaper food. Yet the Bank of England says Brexit has increased food prices by 6 per cent, during an international price crisis.

And that really is the point. Leave the politicians to fight their ideological wars about sovereignty and European solidarity. But is Brexit helping the 49 per cent of low-income families that are skipping meals to feed their kids? Or is it making things worse?

Seven years on, it’s not the damage of Brexit that really bothers me. It’s what could have been done for struggling families, if all of this time and money hadn’t gone towards a Tory vanity project.