'...it is a good time to take stock of the Gibraltar strand of Brexit and how that intertwines with the Brexit saga and, ultimately, to the extent that it does represent a certain kind of completion, a good time to take stock of Brexit itself.'

The vision of post-Brexit Britain was one of international trade deals that would propel the country into a new era of prosperity. That vision of “Global Britain” is now dead. Thomas Sampson argues that the only viable alternative is a closer trade relationship with the EU.

'...my self-imposed task of documenting the Brexit impact has become a challenge not so much because of the difficultly of weighing up the positives and the negatives, but rather due to the sheer amount of damage Brexit is doing up and down the country, left, right and centre, and across sectors.'

I have started reading the Brexit literature again. A recent paper – ‘What impact is Brexit having on the UK economy?’ by Graham Gudgin, Julian Jessop and Harry Western (GJW) from October 2022 argues there is no hard evidence of harm and that studies that claim to find harm are biased and/or incompetent! In this blog, I consider a few of their points in four areas.

'The Brexiters have no more idea in private than they do in public about what they are doing. Predictions based upon their concealed intent project on to them a competence they simply don’t possess.'