Ep 42: The Brexit Blight with Simon Nixon

The Lowdown from Nick Cohen

Nick Cohen chats with Simon Nixon, one of the UK's foremost and finest economics writers about the UK'S deep economic hole and what if anything can be done to get the country out of it. Simon spoke from Riga in Latvia where he was attending a business conference.

Sir Keir Starmer has been in Brussels recently as part of a charm offensive to reset the relationship with the European Union, so recklessly upended by successive Conservative governments. But Simon explains that far from improving, our trading and cultural relations with the EU looks set to worsen thanks to Boris Johnson's badly botched "over-ready" Brexit deal.

Simon - whose columns in The Times and The Wall Street Journal have meticulously charted the last 8 years of UK national self-harm - tells Nick that Brexit was never a single event but a process that continues to damage businesses, trade and investment. He likens it to trying to cap off an out of control oil leak or a broken sewage pipe. The reality of Brexit has also shattered the Conservatives' delusion that somehow the power and prestige of the City of London would enable it to continue being the financial and banking centre of Europe - even outside the EU Single Market. But it too has suffered hugely as a result of the the UK's schism with the EU.

As his Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves prepares her budget for October 30th, Sir Keir Starmer's hands seem pretty much tied over Brexit despite all the talk of his EU "reset". Labour is anxious not to provoke a nationalist back lash over a supposed "betrayal" of Brexit, and so the new government seems willing only to tinker with comparatively minor issues at the edges. Reform of the planning system may be one of the few tools left to Labour as a way of creating growth in a moribund economy.

Simon Nixon's Substack column Wealth of Nations is one of the best and most insightful reads on economics and finance. His latest column - Europe's Crippling Risk Aversion - is here.

Nick Cohen's regular Substack column Writing from London on politics and culture from the UK and beyond is another must-read.

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