This is the way that Brexit ends: not with a bang but with a whimpering submission to EU standards on everything, billions in contributions to the EU purse – but with the pretence that we are not really rejoining the single market or customs union, honest. That was the position laid out by the Chancellor in her Mais lecture on Tuesday. She said the government would pursue a bespoke deal with the EU where divergence would be the ‘exception, not the rule’. What does that mean in practice? The EU has made it perfectly clear that it is not going to accept an à la carte menu on the single market; if you want to be in the club you are going to have to accept all its rules and pay all its dues. That will mean free movement, and accepting all social directives; although the current government seems determined to outdo the EU on employment rights anyway, so maybe that won’t mean much.

 The government’s position on Brexit is now illogical. Reeves describes leaving the EU as a ‘chaotic wrong turn’, and yet maintains there will be no going back to the single market and customs union. Why not, if you think it was a chaotic wrong turn to leave them? I say it is illogical but it does make some kind of sense. Reeves’s approach is exactly what you do if you want to reverse Brexit without the bother, or risk, of having to seek the approval of the British people. Even so, full membership is where we would no doubt end up, once it could be sold as a mere tidying up exercise which restores our freedom to travel to the EU without a £20 visa waiver but has little other practical implications because we are tied to EU rules anyway. 

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There are a few other things in Reeves’s speech which cannot be left unchallenged. She quoted yet another fantasy figure claiming that Brexit had cost Britain 8 per cent of GDP. Given that Britain has mirrored France in GDP growth since Brexit and has outgrown Germany, this seems unlikely. It establishes a counterfactual that Britain would have boomed without Brexit. Reeves also repeated the age old fib that ‘austerity’ damaged growth in the 2010s because it robbed the economy of investment . To believe this you have to believe that only the public sector is capable of providing economy-growing investment, when public investment has a poor record. Had the coalition not cut spending it would have required higher borrowing or sharp tax rises. The latter would have killed off investment far more, while the former would have added dangerously to government borrowing costs – right in the midst of a sovereign debt crisis which was consuming Greece, Spain and other European countries. 

Reeves is beginning to look really quite desperate in her efforts to palm off Britain’s lousy economic performance on anyone except herself. The answer to why the economy is flatlining now lies not with Brexit but with employers’ National Insurance, which has killed off job creation, and the Employment Rights Act (ditto). To put that right we don’t need to rejoin the EU; we need a more competent occupant of Number 11.

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