Why does Brexit make so many people so cross? The more you think about it, the odder it is. Leaving the EU is not Iraq or Vietnam. Nobody will be killed by Brexit, except perhaps those who are bored to death by it.
For all the adjectives you could use to describe Brexit — confounding, frustrating, momentous and historic — it is, above all, desperately boring. I’m talking not just about the endless soap opera of negotiations, though that’s up there with the collected works of Thomas Hardy in the boredom stakes. Brexit is boring because it turns out the European Union itself is mostly boring.
Consider the powers that will be returned to Westminster after we finally leave: to negotiate trade deals with other countries; to impose tariffs; to introduce new regulations on employment and product standards; to set quotas for migration and visas. For the past four decades the EU has functioned in large part as a legislative black hole into which we have outsourced some of the more tedious levers of the state.
Yes this stuff matters, in much the same boring but worthy way that it matters what diameter of sewage pipes we use. In some sectors, such as agriculture, Brexit has the potential for exciting innovations. But consider the most important powers at the government’s disposal: defence of the realm, fixing levels of tax and public spending, managing the welfare state and deciding interest rate policy. Set against this it is hard not to find the powers returned from Brussels rather piffling.
True: you can make the case that big constitutional decisions should be taken at home. You can argue that throwing sand into the wheels of trade between Britain and Europe will only make both of us poorer. You can point to the possibility that Britain leaves without a deal, something that would not be boring in the slightest, at least for a few months. Except that the likelihood of it happening is far smaller than you might assume. It suits everyone concerned, for all sorts of reasons, to ramp up the drama.
The most likely outcome is no big deal, rather than no deal at all. Whatever the nature of our transition period, the long-term impact of Brexit will probably be smaller than you think. The degree of extra sovereignty Britain gains on leaving will be minimal. The degree of economic damage directly attributable to leaving will be similar: a couple of percentage points off gross domestic product over the long run. Ten years hence we may look back and realise that this was the moment we became moderately poorer, but there will be no big bang.
These are unfashionable views, especially given that every ounce of energy in Whitehall and much reporting in the media is being expended on Brexit. How tragic to think we might have wasted nearly three years tearing the country apart, ruining the careers of some of our ablest politicians and consigning several pressing economic problems to the backburner for something which will make little difference to Britain’s productive potential.
Of course, this is slightly to miss the point. Brexit is all-consuming not because of what it is but because of what it stands for: a break with the past and a controversy magnet that attracts and repels those who value cosmopolitanism and those who think national identity has been eroded. But in some respects it has also been very good for us.
For the past decade, economists have moaned about three problems in particular: a productivity crisis, austerity and the dominance of London over the rest of the country. Guess what: since the referendum in 2016, huge strides have been made to address each of these challenges.
Productivity is rising again, though it is too early to say whether this will be sustained, let alone whether it has anything to do with Brexit. And much as economists might dislike the end of free movement of people, depriving Britain of limitless cheap labour from the Continent might finally force our notoriously parsimonious businesses into investing more in robots and programmes to increase their staff’s productivity. Then again, free movement has not prevented the Germans from investing, so we shall have to see.
Then there’s the government’s spending plans. For all the fanfare when Theresa May announced the end of austerity last month, in reality it has been on its way out since just after the Brexit vote. Our departure from the EU was the excuse Philip Hammond needed to postpone George Osborne’s plan to eliminate the deficit, perhaps indefinitely. It is hard to conceive of any other event which could have given the Tories the political cover to make such a dramatic shift while remaining in government.
And having dominated the property market and the GDP figures for years, London is now the country’s great laggard. House prices are falling faster in the capital than anywhere else in Britain. The financial sector has shrunk. True: banks have been beleaguered for a decade and the property market is suffering partly because of higher stamp duty and more stringent capital gains tax for high-end properties. But Brexit has probably exacerbated these trends.
Few economists seem to have noticed. Consumed with fury about Brexit, they have failed to recognise that it has unleashed all sorts of genies which are changing the economy. Brexit may be boring, but the journey it is taking us on is not.
Ed Conway is economics editor of Sky News