Chris Grey

And it is because of the fact that the immigration has become so toxic and the Labour have really done very little, if anything, to actually challenge that toxicity because they've more or less kind of accepted, you know, well, you know, if we're going to win seats in the Red Wall, then we have to, you know, we can't, you know, can't rock the boat and stuff.

And so that is the, you know, that I think is a big part of the explanation for it.

Of course, that wouldn't apply to customs union, which wouldn't imply freedom of movement.

But then even if a customs union, which is what it would be, have to be a particular treaty between the UK and the EU, it wouldn't make very much difference, as you say, in GDP terms.

And by the way,

Whether we're talking about customs union or whether we're talking about single market, personally, I am not convinced by the modeling of what benefit it would bring to rejoin or to join those things.

And I'll tell you why.

I think the big thing which has been missed, not by all, but I think by many economists, is the nature of the structural changes that Brexit brought to British trade and to British businesses.

And what I mean by that is that the businesses which have actually, in many cases, just simply given up are small businesses, perhaps very often family businesses, businesses which produced small, often quite kind of niche product lines, maybe artisanal products, if we're talking about food and drink and so on and so forth.

We talk about this sort of GDP thing having gone down, or many of us talk about it in terms of a sort of slow puncture to the British economy.

And that, I think, is a view that has been borne out.

The balloon shrinks.

But I think the assumption, which probably particularly macroeconomists might be prone to make, is that if you go back into single market, you kind of reflate the balloon, right?

But I think the problem with that is that the stuff that has been wiped out is stuff that only very slowly, if at all, comes back into the economy.

Right.

Because because because whereas big, big international firms, they have been able to accommodate reasonably well, you know, because of the fact that that's if you're an international business, you're kind of adept at that.

doing that working in different jurisdictions, you know, it's, it's relatively trivial matter to kind of get a brass plate in Luxembourg or whatever it is in order.

Yeah.

But if you're a small family business, but I often think, you know, they think kind of conventional economics, because people think so much in terms of kind of factors of production that are well, these firms will come back, but no, you know, family businesses are

are not straightforwardly capitalist enterprises.