The only positive thing about the Leave Campaign, I recall, was the £350 million or billion or whatever we were supposed to be able to spend on the NHS. The need to raise NHI (or, to make an additional levy, to be exact), to do so, must have been in very small print, no doubt.
Rant: The leavers made much of the extra £350M per week for a good cause. Of course it would be welcome if not for the government's own projections showing Brexit would empty the coffers by a much larger amount.
Only after the vote the leavers began to admit this, eg Rees-Mogg famously suggesting as many as 50 years to recover, others saying it was "worth it for freedom" etc.
Rant continues: So GDP is lower than it would have been, and of course there were the massive costs of implementing Brexit itself - projections of £200 billion are often suggested - which I hope are a massive exaggeration.
Years of austerity had already cut services to the bone, including topic of the year: Bobbies on the beat.
The impact of Brexit just adds further pressures and as yet has not brought any tangible benefit.
I will give Brexit more time to show a tangible sustained benefit, but austerity had a decade and is still a disaster, so i'm not optimistic.
Unlucky timing that Covid hit when the country was least prepared for the costs- Or a useful distraction that Boris can blame for the damage inflicted by his government?
Seems that £350M a week was the fairy tale for Nanny to tell to proto-Etonians, a wet dream of a sound bite to the Vote Leave campaign, and widely lapped up by the gullible (who never looked beyond the headline).
Brexit will be a large burden on the UK for years to come, but the leavers can only poke fun or say "it hasnt affected me".
Covid is a massive issue too, but let's not be blind to the problems and pressures of Brexit.
