Robert Paston

And I want to talk to you about those in a minute.

But I think it is important to acknowledge that economists, particularly those economists who supported Brexit, some of them have said some quite unkind things about you, but there has been some criticism.

And I suppose there's one bit of criticism that seems to me to...

From the point of view of, how can I put it, sort of common sense, to use that phrase again, I think it's important to examine, which is, there was a bloke called Julian Jessop who said this.

He said, basically, if we had grown 8% faster than we actually did,

That would have meant that we would have been, along with the US, the top performing rich economy in the entire world.

And he takes the view that, although I'm sure he's a great patriot, that it is completely inconceivable that Britain could have been an economy performing as well as, let's say, the US over that period.

What do you say to those who, in a sense, say, you know, whether we'd stayed in the EU or left, this idea that staying in could have turned us into this sort of unbelievably dynamic place.

What's your response?

But then let's look at the other thing that he says.

And I think you have acknowledged because you looked actually, you did all sorts of different methodologies top down.

You looked at also and you did, I think, in the end, acknowledge that the thing that he also got upset about was you had a so-called synthetic basket and then you had various other baskets that you were comparing with.

And I think you have acknowledged the synthetic basket.

You're quite happy to ditch because the other ones still prove your point.

So tell me, is that right?

In just a minute, because people will want to know this, let's talk about why in practice...

leaving the EU, you know, would have, did lead to Britain becoming poorer than it would otherwise have been.

But I must just talk to you a little bit about the politics, because

As I understand it, this was a bit of work that you couldn't necessarily publish.

Was it because some of the people that you were collaborating with worked at the Bank of England?