Opinion: Whisper it quietly, but Brexit really isn’t working, is it?

Looks like I, along with a lot of other people, am going to be hit by significantly higher energy prices coupled with the ‘fiscal drag’ of personal tax allowances not going up.

Then we can add in higher council tax bills after the rules were relaxed on how much councils can charge. Oh, and let’s not forget a potential 12p a litre petrol tax hike next year.

I’m pretty confident I won’t be destitute but it’s clear my disposable income is going to take a significant hit.

First up, it has to be said that the pandemic was a major contributing factor. Whole swathes of business and industry had to be shut down as a succession of lockdowns kept us all at home. Added to that was the furlough scheme which saw the government paying up to 80 per cent of people’s wages. Obviously, the combination of those two factors had a significant impact on the public purse, as did the cost of ‘managing’ the pandemic – think £37billion spent of the failed Test and Trace programme and all the money that went missing from Covid business loans that will never be repaid.

More recently, of course, we have the war in Ukraine which has had a pretty startling effect on oil and gas prices and a supply chain effect on food prices, contributing to the highest level of inflation in more than a generation.

And let’s not forget the ill-conceived, ill-fated Kwasi Kwarteng-Liz Truss mini-budget that sent interest rates soaring as the markets considered the implications of billions of pounds of unfunded tax cuts.

While that had a significant and damaging effect on many people’s personal finances, the government is also still feeling the pain, having to fork out much, much more to service its debts as the interest is has to pay on government bonds increased.

Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.

But of course we still have the elephant in the room, the cause of fiscal damage that dare not speak its name – Brexit.

Not once did this month’s Chancellor Jeremy Hunt mention the effects (for good or ill) of Brexit in his Autumn Statement last week. This is hardly surprising as there aren’t any ‘good’ effects and plenty of ‘ill’.

There is a code of silence with regards to the damage Brexit has caused, certainly as far as Tory and Labour politicians are concerned. It doesn’t matter that the Office for National Statistics figures show Brexit has depressed the UK economy. It doesn’t matter that this is backed up by research from the highly regarded Institute for Fiscal Studies. We just don’t talk about Brexit, do we?

But I’m starting to get the feeling that may be starting to change.

The BBC has steadfastly adopted a pro-Brexit stance as evidenced a couple of weeks ago when an audience member raised the problems of Brexit on BBC political show Question Time and was immediately shut down by panel chair Fiona Bruce. She simply wouldn’t allow further discussion.

Fast forward to last week’s show and the issues around Brexit and the damage it had caused – and is still causing – was again raised by an audience member. I was fully expecting Bruce to shut down the discussion again but I was wrong, with almost all the audience members who spoke pointing out just how bad Brexit had turned out.

And then at the weekend, heavyweight political journalist Andrew Neil penned a column in that bastion of Brexit-supporting propaganda The Daily Mail.

Here’s just some of what he had to say: “If too much migration worries you, there’s been no Brexit benefit to soothe your concerns.

“Nor has there been an economic benefit for most folk. Instead of rising post-Brexit prosperity, Middle Britain is about to experience the worst two-year squeeze in living standards ever recorded, with the prospect of only a slow recovery after that. Living standards are going back to where they were in 2013, and our first decade out of the EU looks like being a lost decade.

“Brexit is increasingly a busted flush.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself, Mr Neil. Bravo.