The £90 billion hit job

As the two contenders for the leadership of the Tory party slog it out in a lie to the death contest, it was left to the Chancellor this morning to point out that the Treasury's own forecast was that a no deal would result in £90 billion being lost from the Exchequer per annum, and that is if immigration were unchanged. If immigration were to drop, the losses would be larger.

Both Hunt and Johnson like to say they are doing the people's bidding, but no one was saying Brexit would make us, as a nation or personally, poorer. It was all sunlit uplands, the same benefits as we have now with none of the responsibilities, no downsides, just considerable upsides.

And yet we should channel the wartime ethic, the Dunkirk spirit. But the thing about Dunkirk was that 300,000 British and Commonwealth didn't vote to have themselves marooned on a beach in Normandy on the offchance a flotilla of small boats would come and save them.

But Brexit is, carrying on despite all the evidence that it is going to be a disaster, and apparently carrying on as it would be too embarrassing to admit we got it wrong three years ago.

Hunt has been talking about the Swiss border with France, which he things is pretty frictionless. It is for cars, but not for freight. And as previously stated, decades of alignment have made it pretty smooth, bun at peak times there are miles of truck waiting for clearance and most companies need a representative to ease the paperwork through. Its not 1 in 50 trucks that are stopped, its all of them, and including those that are carrying good that are in transit to another country. Nice try, but wrong.

Meanwhile Johnson has been in NI, and seems to have got his Britain and UK mixed up, and talking in terms of Britain and British problems, especially the lack of housing in England. Which is not in NI at all.

Meanwhile a Freedom of Information (FoI) has been successful in forcing the ERG to actually release for research it has done. Could be a bit like DD's impact assessments.....