Why didn’t the experts warn us about the Remain Recession?

The economy would tank. Trade would collapse. Unemployment would soar, and house prices would sink. In the run-up to the referendum, and in the three years of tortured negotiations about leaving since then, we heard lots of dire warnings about what would happen to the economy if we left the EU. And yet we heard very little from the same experts – the Bank of England, the CBI and so on – about what would happen if we didn’t leave at the end of March. And yet it turns out that the British economy has contracted sharply, not because we left the EU, but because we didn’t leave. We are heading into a Remain Recession, and the only fix for it now is to finally complete our departure.

According to figures out today in April the British economy shrank by 0.4 per cent in April, the worst monthly figure since 2016, led downwards by construction and manufacturing output.