"But this basically boils down to “it’s impossible to prove anything conclusively therefore Brexit can’t be blamed”, which isn’t really how economics works. We can’t rerun history with a control UK that stayed in the EU, so economists use comparative modelling and counterfactuals all the time, including for Covid, inflation, tax policy etc."
I think the discussion on whether predictive economics is worthwhile is a long one. It certainly isn't very successful, at least where the big events are concerned. Bank of England inflation forecasting, prediction of the GFC, I could on.
"The broad consensus from bodies like the OBR, IMF, LSE, NIESR and pretty much most mainstream economists is that Brexit has had a negative impact on trade, investment and productivity. The fact the UK economy didn’t literally collapse doesn’t mean Brexit succeeded, it just means the UK absorbed the damage alongside a load of other global shocks. And people keep shifting the goalposts here because Brexit wasn’t sold as “things will broadly muddle along”. We were repeatedly told things would be better."
I'm not really interested in what the main economic orthodoxy thinks. They have their own agenda, and will perform their analysis to fit their agenda and no doubt form a very convincing case to back up their analysis.
I'm not really interested in fortune telling. I'm only really interested in the data. The data doesn't show that much in my opinion, neither success nor failure (I don't believe I ever claimed Brexit was a success, although many people might claim the political benefits far outweigh the apparently negligible economic changes that have taken place).
So for me neither the prophecies of doom, nor the promise of sunlit uplands has been fulfilled. That doesn't necessarily make Brexit a success, but doesn't make it the certain failure a lot of people seem to believe either in an economic sense.
What I do believe is that there is clear historical evidence that when a country goes through a period of economic re-organisation, there is usually a period of pain (and to be clear I don't believe there is significant evidence of this in the data as a result of Brexit) followed by a period of benefit when the possibilities of the new re-organisation are exploited.
We should now be coming out of the re-organisation, so I think we would be stupid to not see whether or not benefits actually start to occur.
Of course if our GDP does begin to shoot up, it can always be attributed to something other than Brexit. This is the wonder of economics. There is always some other reason to blame that fits in with your political agenda.