Brexit barriers should be lifted.

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt acknowledged that Brexit has thrown up trade barriers between Britain and its biggest trading partner but claimed it will be possible to remove “the vast majority” over time.

On Thursday, the Office for Budget Responsibility, the independent fiscal watchdog, said the latest evidence showed that Brexit had had “a significant adverse effect on UK trade”, cutting trade volumes and relationships between British and EU companies.

Meanwhile, Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies think-tank, yesterday said: “Very clearly Brexit was an own economic goal. But, economically speaking, that has been very bad news indeed.”

The economic impact of Brexit has become a subject of increasing debate in business and among members of the public, but it remains taboo for the main political parties.

A YouGov poll this week found public support for Brexit had fallen to a record low of 32 per cent, compared with 56 per cent who thought it was wrong.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who backed Leave in the 2016 referendum, has played down the role of Brexit in Britain’s poor economic performance. However, at the G20 summit in Bali this week, he said that all countries had their “idiosyncrasies”.

Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves said a Labour government would not rejoin the EU’s single market or customs union, let alone the wider bloc, although it would try to soften the impact of Brexit.

Reopening the toxic Brexit debate is seen as a sure-vote loser for both parties.

Even the pro-European Liberal Democrats accept there is no immediate prospect of a reversal.

Hunt told the BBC yesterday that he had “great confidence that over the years ahead, we will find outside the single market we can remove the vast majority of the trade barriers that exist between us and the EU. It will take time.”

www.sba.tax from financial times

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