Six wasted years

Six years ago today, the UK voted to leave the EU.

That ended with the Johnson Government enforced just about the hardest form of Brexit on the nation.

That was a political choice.

His ready made deal was somewhat undercooked, and now despite promising in the 2019 Election manifesto that there would be no more Brexit negotiations, the past two and a half years have been full of negotiations and demands for yet more negotiations.

This is not the Brexit that was promised the electorate, it was the one some of us predicted.

And here we are.

Five and a haf years after the referendum, Johnson created the post of Brexit Oportunities Minister for JRM. So far he has asked readers of the Daily Express and has now published a dashboard on a Government website stating the number of EU laws in each department of Government.

My day job is as a management systems auditor, and ket to making decisions is the "plan, do, check, act cycle". And part of that is management review where top or senior management looks back at the data from the previous year before making strategic decisions for the next year. But also the expected outcome of those decisions is clearly stated, and if the outcomes are not as expected then as part of the cycle further changes and decisions can be made.

The point is that five and a half years after the referendum, creating a post to discover how best to make the most of the vote to leave is cack-handed to say the least. And on top fo that, JRM's plain refusal to publish any economic impacts Brexit has had.

You and I know that if the data was positive, he's not shut up about it.

And here we are.

Brexit has happened, there is no going back. But there is normalising relations with the EU, sharing standards in all aspects of trade, but to do that the reality of the disaster that Brexit has brought on the country and economy must be faced. While Brexit is not to blame for a lot of our ills, its made most of them worse, and will continue to do so.

Unfilled jobs are economic activity not undertaken and wealth created either for the individual, business or national economy. Multiply that by the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of unfilled job vacancies, then you will come to realise that the UK is adrift on a sea of stagnation, and that will bring further inflation, reduction in living standards and increase in living costs.

The spiral is ever downwards.

The time and energy the UK and the EU spent on Brexit could have been spent on something that actually made both sides richer, not poorer, but that was a choice the UK forced on the EU and itself.