It was reported this weekend that the great trans-Pacific trade deal (CPTPP), the one that Lord Cameron just boasted would ‘put the UK at the heart of a group of some of the world’s most dynamic economies’, will boost our economy by practically nothing at all. The OBR reckons CPTPP will put 0.04 per cent on our GDP over fifteen years.
The bilateral deals with Australia and New Zealand, meanwhile, are predicted to give a 0.1 per cent uplift. This is better, but still, hardly the piratical free trade bonanza we were encouraged to expect. A gold-plated special-friends deal with the USA shows no signs of materialising.
To what extent has pro-Brexit feeling shifted from being a political phenomenon to being a psychological one?
The same OBR continues to predict that we’re all going to be 4 per cent worse off than we would have been had we stayed in the EU.
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