Denis MacShane / Dec 2025
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Ryan Bourne is one of a long list of right-wing anti-European economists who filled the sails of the isolationist ships launched at the beginning of the century crewed by Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, English nationalist Labour politicians, with backing from the off-shore owned press plus the Daily Mailreverting to its 1930s support for the far-right Blackshirts of Oswald Mosley.
Bourne wrote in 2021: “It will take decades to know if Brexit failed. Maybe I'll write a mea culpa in 30 years.” In fact it has taken him just four years to come out in public in The Times to confess that he was wrong. “We cannot pretend things have gone well so far” he writes with typical English understatement.
He now works at the right-wing Cato Institute in Washington. Team Trump dislikes the EU, for sure, but liberated from the pro-Brexit orthodoxy of London elites American economists are permitted to look at evidence.
The US National Bureau of Economic Research has now published a paper arguing that UK GDP per person is 6 to 8 per cent lower today than if Britain had kept trading normally with Europe. Business investment is down 15 per cent; employment and productivity by 3 to 4 per cent each.
Bourne comes up with the bizarre reason Brexit damaged Britain was that “Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership spooked business from 2015 to 2019”. Come on Ryan. Jeremy was, is and will be completely irrelevant to Brexit.
The actual Brexit deal was not that promised by Boris Johnson in 2016 when he said the UK would stay in the Single Market and Customs Union and Brits could work, study, retire in Europe.
Instead with his ex FCO factotum David Frost on whom Johnson bestowed a peerage, Johnson negotiated an exit treaty in 2020 which has done continuing damage to the British economy and society.
It culminated in Rishi Sunak importing 945,000 immigrant workers with no cultural or social affinity with Britain from Nigeria, Pakistan, Ghana and other Asian and African workers to replace the European workers constantly denigrated in the Europhobe tabloids.
Bourne writes, “The Bank of England’s decision-maker panel — about 7,000 firms surveyed — show that the more EU-exposed a company was, the more likely it cut investment and slowed hiring after the referendum. By 2023, average business investment was 12 per cent lower than otherwise. Productivity within firms was 3 to 4 per cent weaker.
“Roughly half of firms listed Brexit as a top source of uncertainty for years after the vote. Managers devoted hours each week to planning for new post-Brexit customs arrangements, regulation and precautionary stockpiles. This displacement activity weakened innovation, delayed investment and distracted managers from core business. Such evidence cannot be dismissed as Project Fear.
“Brexit did not cause Britain’s growth malaise, but it undoubtedly deepened it. Nor did it create our fiscal woes, although it worsened them too. Denial about this helps no one. Indeed, a successful sovereign economic policy demands taking responsibility and facing the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.”
Ryan Bourne’s mea culpa in The Times, an anti-EU paper, was followed by the even more strident anti-EU Daily Telegraph printing the headline: “Time to admit the truth: Brexit has been a failure.” The paper’s economic writer, Jeremy Warner, who to be fair avoided the extravagant boasts of a “Nike style whoosh” of inward investment when the UK left Europe from anti-EU economists like Patrick Minford, Roger Bootle, Gerard Lyons or Liam Halligan, writes that the Brexit coalition of ‘Small-state, low-tax, free-trade libertarians” and their bedfellows of “anti-immigrant, nationalistic protectionists” has been let down by Brexit.
“Instead, we’ve ended with the worst of both worlds. Substantially higher public spendings and taxes hand-in-hand with a regulatory system and almost unbelievably makes business leaders long for the comparative freedoms once enjoyed within the European Union.”
“If by contrast, Brexit was meant to tame immigration, in practice it has done the very reverse. This is what freedom to set our own border controls has delivered.”
Bourne and Warner, in The Times and Daily Telegraph, have decisively broken through the Tory-Reform Brexit omertà that since 2020 has refused to acknowledge the truth that economic isolation from the giant European single market has been bad for Britain.
But where are Labour ministers? Canvassing recently for Labour local council candidates with one of the most senior cabinet ministers, he told me “We remain f….d” until we rejoin the Single Market.” His boss, the Prime Minister, who had no experience of working in Europe in his career as an English lawyer, still prefers not to admit the Bourne-Warner truth Brexit is hurting Britain.
In 2022, Sir Keir Starmer laid out his policy on Europe at a gathering of the Labour Movement for Europe organised by the Centre for European Reform at the Irish Embassy in London.
Sir Keir said his policy in government “was to make Brexit work.” Alas his speechwriters seemed to be unaware that Theresa May had used exactly the same metaphor about “making Brexit work” when she was the second of the five unhappy Brexit era Tory prime ministers.
Anyone who patrols EU capitals and Brussels knows that there is little interest in some kind of ‘pick ‘n choose’ UK reset with Europe. French radio regularly reports on meetings of what French media call “la coaltion des volontaires” (“Coalition of the Willing”) on Ukraine. One is being hosted this week between Macron and Zelensky in Paris. President Macron first proposed that European peacekeepers might deploy to Ukraine once a peace deal was agreed with Russia early in 2024.
In London, No 10 spinners have oversold these meetings as showing the British prime minister playing the leading role in Europe on helping Ukraine. For Kyiv, the only leader who matters is Trump and London’s appeasement of Trump and failure to challenge any of his attacks on British jobs and prosperity through his trade protectionist policies, as well as his refusal to put any pressure on the Israeli far-right over their slaughter-house policy in Gaza, means that Downing Street has little leverage over wider European policy on Ukraine.
So for the time being Labour’s avoidance of telling robustly the truth that Brexit has done and is doing great damage to Britain’s economy and the right of its businesses and citizens to reconnect fully with Europe remains No 10 policy.
But after the Bourne-Warner honesty in telling the truth on Brexit, how long can the Labour government remain in denial?
