脱欧十年：英国经济代价几何？

There were certain days that changed the world. Brexit was one of those days. British people will have the final say, in an in/out referendum. Watch out. Here we go. One story dominates the news today, and it is Brexit. Brexit, Brexit, Brexit, Brexit. What has been one of the most divisive votes. It was staggering. History unfolding before our very eyes. The population at large doesn't trust the establishment. The pasty of independence.

Brexit changed the way that politics is done, not only in the UK but beyond that too. People want to take their country back. Passions that are not unique to Britain. It was a real once in a lifetime moment. But also sort of manifestly an act of economic self-harm. Thing is, not everyone and their dog arrived at the polling station with an economics textbook in hand or paw. It's not even the main thing that mattered to a lot of people who voted to leave.

A cosmopolitan elite had been trying to redefine Britain as a multicultural, multiracial, multi-ethnic society and the Brexiteers said 'no'. We are a particular people, a product of a particular history with a particular set of roots. We need our country back. And so on the 23rd of June 2016, more than 33 million people cast ballots on a relationship that had shaped Britain's laws, trade and politics for almost half a century.

'Yes' is now showing 67%. The British people have spoken and the answer is 'we're out'. By margin of 52 to 48, they said Britain should exit the European Union This is our Independence Day. It might have felt shocking, but it wasn't quite as surprising as I think a lot of people look back and say that it was. But it was a political earthquake whose aftershocks were felt around the globe. It shifted the world from a world which seemed to be getting ever closer in which globalization was the dominant theme into a world that was becoming ever more fragmented.

Brexit has ushered in a decade which has left Britain Europe, the West, in a worse shape than it started it. The issue is, would it have done much better without it? And it is possible to work that out. To understand what happened, we can compare it with a model of what didn't. This is that story, why Brexit emerged, what it cost and what might come next. I remember the day when we voted on Brexit. I took my dogs for a walk to the local voting booth.

The dogs I think were pro-Brexit. Dogs tend to be pro- Brexit. I was anti-Brexit. Do you want me to say that I voted leave? Because I did. The main thing I remember from the actual day was being woken up by my husband very early and him saying, you've got to go to work because the result isn't quite what we expected. Phenomenal events taking place here. No one expected this result. Everyone is stunned. I'd written an essay called The 20% World, which pointed out that if the odds on Trump being elected on Brexit, on Corbyn being elected and Le Pen being elected in France, they were all around 20%.

What was staggering was that two of them were going to happen in one year. Brexit was not just a British upset, it was an early warning light on the dashboard of globalization. When the results came in, there was shock. People were not expecting this, the markets weren't expecting this. The smart money thought that it was Remain. I was sat at my desk, watching the pound plummet as the results rolled in. The pound has taken a thumping.

Every single industry group is trading in the red. I realized that we were at the beginning of a very profound historical change. I do not think it would be right for me to try to be the captain that steers our country to its next destination. There were some in the European Union who looked at a result like that and thought, surely this is gonna have to be rerun. It's such a narrow margin of victory. I quote, 'damn a bad day for Europe'.

The UK is no more part of the club. I regret that very much. People said that the money was smart, the money wasn't smart. Virtually every economic expert told the British people that this would be a very painful thing to do, and yet people still voted for that. The campaigns and the run up to the vote were were unexpectedly aggressive. I really remember when the MP Jo Cox was murdered in her constituency. It felt symptomatic of the febrile state of UK politics.

May we and the generations of members that follow us in this house honor Jo's memory. The fury seemed out of all proportion to what our relationship with the EU actually was. And it was not a fiscal union, it was not a military union. At the heart of the Brexit debate was a disconnect between the winners and the losers of the global economy. The winners didn't understand how much the losers had lost and they didn't get any sense of what you lose when you lose a stable manufacturing job.

We all come to work to be better off for your family, don't you? Now, I'm not sure if I've got that stability anymore. A few days before the vote, there was a big broadcast audience event on the BBC. I was part of the presenting team, surrounded by people who I didn't know which way they were going to vote, and there was a moment when Boris Johnson said, I believe that this Thursday can be our country's Independence Day.

And I saw and felt half of the room erupt around me, and it was really then that I realised how strong the sentiment to leave the EU was. But there was a snag. We voted to leave, but we didn't know what voting to leave meant. It was a sort of blind Brexit. People voted saying they didn't like the status quo of the Europe. They wanted to go out, but they never got a vote on what the alternative was. The leave groups were disparate, not connected, and in many cases looking for different things.

One vision of the future was a sort of little England vision. We'd retreat to a sort of hobbit world. We had a group of people who thought this would be a chance to pump more money into the NHS, put up walls to immigrants and so on and so on. Another view of Brexit was that we would be a global power. 10 years later, we can begin to assess what actually happened and compare it to what didn't. Don't worry, that'll make sense in a minute.

The economy immediately after the Brexit vote was much more resilient than people expected. We were told that the housing market would collapse, that there would be apocalyptic consequences for the economy, But actually consumers who are the biggest parts of the UK economy, continue to spend. You can argue about the economic effects relentlessly. Well, that is a relief since we're about to. But it's complicated. And the reason for that is that you've had a lot of economic shocks hit the UK since then.

The pandemic, the energy crisis... Various government policies that have also been very bad for the economy in particular are energy policy. It's impossible to say that having the most expensive energy in the developed world hasn't made a significant difference. So disentangling the Brexit effects from all those other effects is really, really difficult, But perhaps not impossible. And here's how. What we've done is bring together a sample of 23 OECD countries and pick out the economies most similar historically to the UK, and use those countries as a guide for how the UK might have been expected to perform- Had it remained in the EU that is.

And that's what you're seeing here, the red line being the UK's actual GDP, the white one, what our model initially suggests it could have been. And what we see is a 10% hit to the economy. Which for the UK's three trillion pound economy means 300 billion pounds. So clearly that's pretty massive. But if you look beneath the hood, it shows that most of it is driven by the performance of the US and Irish economies. Now the latter's GDP is heavily impacted by the activity of multinational companies, so there's a case for removing it.

So if we exclude Ireland, we reduce the hit to 6%. And then there's the question about the US economy. It accounts for about four percentage points

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