$170 billion and counting
Oh yeah - and
That means by the end of this year the economic cost of Brexit will be equal to the total of our entire historic contributions to the EU.
I think some famous fella once said that there are “Lies, damned lies, and statistics!”
One also notes that the figures are based on estimates of what could have been rather than would be, and that the figures quoted are not an actual loss but rather a reduction of possible future profit.
Personally I think it is unfortunate that there are so many people who only seem to view Brexit from the viewpoint of financial profit.
Anyway, surely it is this concentration on maximising short term financial gain that has resulted in seriously aggravating the climate change problem.
The whole ethos of the only important thing being to make more and more money simply has to stop.
Brexit will for years if not decades be blamed for all manner of economic failings, it also wouldn’t surprise me if it started to to get a mention in divorce cases. 
Or murders!
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Shouldn’t that be assassinations? 
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It is not just profit, the real problems that people were told was all the fault of the EU - housing, schools, the NHS, lack of opportunities in the North will not be solved by Brexit - not least because our membership of the EU was not the cause but also because they require resources and the contraction of the economy will make then harder to find.
We were told Brexit would bring untold economic bounty - even the Brexiteers have stopped trying to sell that one. We were told that it would mean more employment - but major employers are pulling out of the country and Johnson clearly does not want to improve employee protections. We were told we could take back control - which has then been given to a serial womaniser who can’t or won’t say how many children he has and an unelected SPAD.
The only benefit will be reduction in immigration- because, face it, no one will want to come here. The irony is, however, that the bigots who voted leave for this reason will probably end up seeing more brown faces as EU workers are replaced by those from Asia.
It’s a shite idea, always was.
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Sorry to contradict, but the figures do not estimate an actual contraction of the economy, merely an expansion at a slower rate than they think might otherwise have been the case.
So what is a SPAD ? I’m afraid you have lost me with that one.
That “slower rate” has been negative for the last two quarters
Special Adviser, in this case Cummings
I also wasn’t sure - I did wonder if it was Single Parent Absent Dad! for this part:
Whitehall slang, apparently; has a derogatory ring to it which might well be deliberate.
Here’s a more recent report, although the bbc has been rather quiet about figures for Q4 2019
Actually, the Office for National Statistics reports that UK GDP grew by 0.4% in Quarter 3 of 2019.
Is the Iran situation and the trump impeachment fiasco and the megxit saga all just a distraction…???
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I sort of suspected too that Megxit was a smoke screen for something bigger, you can usually smell that sort of tactic, like a stale fart.
Very Gentlemen’s Club sort of blow-off, following a lunch of liver and bacon, with sultana sponge and custard for afters. 
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Probably. Trump is a master of the distraction technique after all.
For Jesus sake don’t let Trump get near a lunch of liver and bacon, the toxic plume would wipe out all of the far East.
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It did - though that report also said
As has been observed previously figures tell part of the story but can often be picked to favour either side of a particular argument.
It is, for example similar to France (0.3% in Q3 2019) and better than Germany (only 0.2% in the same period).
However it palls into insignificance next to China’s 6% (though that might not be as good as it sounds - it is the lowest quarterly rise for 27 years) or even the USA (2.1%).
We are seeing trading groups coalescing around large regional powers, purely from the economic angle neither the EU, nor the UK are going to benefit from Brexit.
The problem is that Brexit is based on outdated ideas regarding trade & tariffs which barely apply to the modern world - many of the Eurosceptics have been grumbling since Maastricht and ideas about how Britain does trade, or could do trade outside the EU which were valid in 1991 simply aren’t any longer (we didn’t rely nearly as much on services for instance).
Disassociating ourselves violently from our closest trading partner is a mind bendingly stupid idea, whichever way you look at it.
And in the midst of all this Andrea Leadsom has decided she doesn’t even wish to listen to UK businesses. Presumably because they don’t unanimously think that Brexit will mean free unicorns for everyone.
So much for “the party of business”.
Is it just possible that part of the reason for the UK’s economic slowdown is the fallback in the global economy or shall we just blame it all on Brexit cause it’s easy?
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Not if it is within families!