Who’s afraid of a ‘hard’ Brexit?

Pull yourselves together, you wusses. It’s a minor readjustment of our tariff arrangements we’re talking about, not an epidemic or a foreign invasion or an asteroid strike. Not that anyone would guess it from the apocalyptic vocabulary you’re using.

‘A hard Brexit,’ says Keir Starmer for Labour, ‘would be catastrophic for our economy, living standards, jobs and future prosperity’. Tim Farron, the Lib Dem leader, agrees it would be ‘economically disastrous’. The CBI calls it ‘very negative’.

Sound familiar? We became accustomed to such over-the-top language during the referendum campaign. The very act of voting Leave, we were told, would cause an immediate recession. Unemployment would surge and the stock exchange would collapse, destroying the value of our pensions.

In the event, of course, things worked out differently. Britain appears to have grown more strongly in the six months following the vote than in the six months before it, and finished 2016 as the world’s most successful major economy.