Is Europe really faring better than Britain?

Five years ago this week, Boris Johnson was celebrating the achievement of leaving the European Union and wondering how he might take advantage of Britain’s newfound freedoms. A virus had other ideas. Covid-19 didn’t just turn our lives upside down and cost many lives; it robbed the then government of the chance to seize the initiative and prove that Brexit was worth the pain and inevitable disruption. For frustrated anti-Brexit campaigners, the pandemic provided them with ammunition to claim that their worst predictions had been realised. Falling economic growth, rising inflation, empty supermarket shelves – all these came to be blamed on Brexit, ignoring the rather large spanner which had been thrown into the works of the global economy.

Half a decade on, the anti-Brexit lobby is still trying to claim that our departure from the EU has been a disaster, comparing Britain’s stagnant economy with a counterfactual in which we had never left.However, this argument only works if you don’t look in too much detail at what is happening across the Channel. Germany is undergoing the kind of industrial contraction which Britain experienced half a century ago, accelerated by a foolish energy policy which built reliance on Russian gas and closed down perfectly functioning nuclear power stations even when Vladimir Putin’s troops were amassing on Ukraine’s borders at the start of 2022.

We are in the middle of a government bonds crisis, caused not by Brexit but by the failure of any UK government, Tory or Labour, to balance the books in 22 years. But take a look at France and it is pretty much the same story – and there is worse to come now that the National Rally and the Socialists have conspired to defeat Macron’s plan to rein in public expenditure.