Six years on, still some straws to clutch...

 The Graun reports the views of Lord Frost that Brexit has worked. Oddly, it does not agree:

 

...it may be too early to tell whether his statement could be supported by evidence... Frost was asked by Anand Menon, professor of European politics and foreign affairs at King’s College London and director of UK in a Changing Europe, to examine it a different way – what evidence in future would convince him Brexit had failed.

“An interesting question,” was his response. And the answer was not in trade figures but in gut politics. Would Britain’s divisions have healed?

“One piece of evidence of failure would be if we are still debating this in five or six years’ time in the same way. I think it is to succeed it needs to settle in the British polity.”

He said the predictions of a 4% contraction in Britain’s gross domestic product used by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) were not fact but “zombie figures” based on a government economic services report in 2018 that relied on academic studies of the impact of opening up “badly run ex-communist and ex-authoritarian autarchic economies”....He also argued that the precise impact of Brexit may never be known as trade figures were clouded by disruption caused by the pandemic, the supply chain crisis and the war in Ukraine.

 

But, for el Gru:

Four years on, the OBR maintains its predictions. Its latest, March 2022, forecast said that the trade deal Frost sealed would “reduce long-run productivity by 4% relative to remaining in the EU”....It said that reflected its view “that the increase in non-tariff barriers” such as red tape, standards compliance, was an “impediment to the exploitation of comparative advantage”.

OECD figures [also] showed the UK was ahead of France, Italy, Germany and Japan in the percentage change in its GDP between the final quarter of 2019 and the first quarter of 2022, but behind the EU as a whole, and substantially behind the US, Australia and the G20 as a whole....Menon said: “Early evidence suggests there is a Brexit impact and recent Resolution Foundation analysis suggests that, over the medium term, this will be significant.”

On the Protocol: 

“The delicately balanced compromise that we put in place in 2019, recognising that we were running high levels of risk in doing so, has come apart much more quickly than most of us thought,” Frost said....He blamed the EU, which he said was refusing to look at compromises despite the sensitivities.

For the grundia:

This is entirely consistent with government policy, which has been met with a chorus of disapproval by many parties and support within the Brexit backbench community and conditional support with the Northern Ireland unionist community.,,,unscripted remarks suggest there was not a meeting of minds. He expressed surprise that article 16 mechanism had not been triggered, arguing it would have bee [sic] a “quicker” way to resolve the dispute with the EU.

This could reinforce the view that government’s plan all along was to bring forward legislation as a blunt negotiation tool.

On balance, pretty weak stuff from the Guardian, remembering all that stuff about shortages, poverty, riots in the streets and all (charted in early posts in this blog).