So Mark Carney no longer believes that a no-deal Brexit will lop 8 per cent off our national wealth. Now he thinks the GDP hit will be a more modest 5.5 per cent. One can only guess what his prediction will be next month. He should have listened to movie mogul’s Sam Goldwyn’s advice: ‘Never make predictions, especially about the future.’
Cheap jibe? Maybe. But all this focus on whether we are going to run out of medicine or fresh lettuce in Sainsbury’s is a massive exercise in collective displacement activity.
It is avoiding the real issue. Surely what matters isn’t what is going to happen in the next three to six months but what is going to happen in the five or ten years after Brexit. If we are to take as monumental a step as breaking with our closest trading partners for the past 40 years, surely isn’t that what the debate should be about?
Introducing friction however small into frictionless trade will mean less of it.
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