Chris Grey

They will not, you know, they're not going to kind of go back into producing their artisanal side that they used to ship in small quantities to France or somewhere.

But they stopped because of all of the paperwork, the bureaucracy, the checks and so on.

Fine.

So even supposing you were to get rid of those, those businesses are not going to come back.

Okay, you might argue, as economists are prone to do, that perhaps they would come back in 50 years or 60 years in the long run and so on.

Yeah, but that's, I'm not sure that's true, but anyway.

So I do think that there have been structural changes to the British economy, which will not easily heal.

It's many years since I studied economics, Chris, so I make no claims to know anything about that.

So we'd have Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, Starmer will be the sixth, yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Actually, very much I would include the trust budget in that.

Because don't forget that when the trust budget was announced, firstly, that its advisers came absolutely from that group of Brexit-supporting economists.

And secondly, many people, including, by the way, Nigel Farage, hailed it as being, this is the Brexit budget.

So I would say they are directly.

I do think that the basic answer to that is to do with the way that Brexit has destabilised politics in all kinds of ways.

But obviously, a bit as with the constant kind of line of defence, if you like, from the kind of pro-Brexit economists, sort of, well, how can you separate Brexit from Covid and from Ukraine and from this, that and the other?

And of course, it's the same thing, and in some ways, even more so with politics, you know, it's difficult to separate out the different things.

And I do think that if we think about the fact that the real basis of Starmer's election victory, I think, was the idea that it would be a return to kind of competence and sort of, you know, some degree of sort of

You know, kind of quiet authority.

And I think some of the criticisms of Starmer are unfair.