There is much more to Brexit than economics. I respect those people who support continued EU membership for reasons of European identity, solidarity, peace and security – even though I think they are misguided.
And there is a respectable economic case for remaining in the EU – although I do not find it at all persuasive.
But can all those placard-waving protesters in the streets who are wedded to continuing membership of the single market and the customs union, not to mention their representatives in Parliament, really care about such abstruse things?
Do they even understand them? They need a dose of economic reality.
The most important economic fact that they typically fail to appreciate is that the EU is a zone of comparative economic failure.
Since 2000, its average GDP growth has been 1.6pc. This compares with 2.1pc for the United States and Canada, and 1.9pc for the UK.
Meanwhile, excluding the UK, the EU’s average unemployment rate is 6.7pc, 3pc higher than the UK’s.
The EU’s most ambitious economic endeavour has been the formation of the euro. Scarcely anyone now thinks that this has been a success.
Supposedly, euro members must simply put up with it because it’s there and “breaking up would be hard to do”, or it can be radically improved through moves towards financial, fiscal and political union. Good luck with that.
If Europe falls into outright recession, the eurozone is going to face another existential crisis with heaven knows what consequences. Yet this group of countries makes up the core of the entity which, according to the Remainers, the UK cannot afford to leave.
Times have changed
It is critical to understand what things were like when we joined the European Community in 1973.
Although by its own standards the UK had grown rapidly in the years since the war, it had been substantially outgrown by the countries of continental Europe.
In the previous decade, compared with the UK’s 43pc, Germany had grown by 54pc, France by 71pc and even Italy by 60pc.
And in 1973 the EU was an emerging colossus. Its share of world GDP was then 32pc. At its peak in 1980, its share was 34pc.
Ironically, by the eighties, thanks largely to the Thatcher reforms, the UK was regularly outgrowing the rest of the EU, and this pattern has continued since then. Meanwhile, the EU’s share of world GDP is now down to 22pc, and is still falling.
Over recent years the EU’s economic under-performance is mainly due to the malfunctioning of the euro, but, over and above this, there has been an insidious drip-drip over-regulation of business.
This is of key relevance to the question, currently being discussed between the UK and the EU, of the UK’s regulatory regime after Brexit.
The EU is ultra-keen that the UK should not diverge from its regulatory regime with regard to the labour market, social and product standards. I wonder why?
Admittedly, part of the Remainers’ anxiety about Brexit derives not so much from their concern about regulatory divergence, nor their love of the single market and the customs union, as from a fear of “crashing out” without a deal.
Yet the very words “no deal” distort the discussion.
The no-deal disconnect
What leaving without a deal means is simply leaving without an overarching agreement as laid down in Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. It does not mean a breakdown of relations, nor a cessation of trade. Nor does it necessarily mean the absence of a trade agreement in due course.
Incredibly, Mrs May’s withdrawal agreement did not include a trade deal. That remained to be negotiated – just as it would if we leave the EU “without a deal”.
Moreover, the words “no deal” belie the fact that there have already been many side deals done over a wide variety of issues and there is the scope to do many more over coming months.
And it is still possible that the UK and EU could continue to trade without tariffs by mutually agreeing to do so under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade’s Article 24, pending the conclusion of a Free Trade Agreement.
Discussions about the single market and the customs union can easily descend into endless diatribes about trade data and econometric models which tend to baffle ordinary members of the public.
But you don’t need to get into such arcane details. If the single market and customs union were so essential to economic wellbeing, why is it that the EU has done comparatively badly over the last 20 years?
Why is it that the exports of so many countries outside the EU into the single market have grown faster than the exports of single market members to each other?
And why is it that other groups of countries around the world aren’t seeking to ape the “success” of the EU by forming their own single markets?
Diversionary tactics
Surely much of the Remainers’ concern about leaving the single market and the customs union, and their worries about a no-deal Brexit are really a form of intellectual cover.
They just don’t want to leave for mainly non-economic reasons but they latch on to, distort and exaggerate economic arguments in order to promote their objective.
Since we joined what subsequently became the EU in 1973, we have changed, the EU has changed and the world has changed. The acid test is whether, once we have left the EU, we would want to rejoin it.
Evidently some Remainers believe we would, or at least should. They are prepared to campaign for it.
My (only partly tongue-in-cheek) suggestion is that they should be granted a referendum two years after we leave – just as we had a referendum in 1975 on staying in what we had joined two years previously in 1973. I am sure that once we were out, rejoining the EU would be a lost cause.
Roger Bootle is chairman of Capital Economics. [email protected]