While Vote Leave look set to face prosecution over the EU referendum campaign, a new report shows Brexit will hit the whole country. For richer and poorer...

Rather than a valiant effort to tear down some amorphous metropolitan elite, it’s looking increasingly clear that Brexit was an act of astonishing collective masochism. 

Hard or soft Brexit, champagne-swiller or kitchen porter, white, black, male, female: no one comes out of this well.

A new report on the distributional impact of Brexit – on the UK’s different sectors, regions and demographics – reveals a pretty bleak picture for those hoping to ‘take back control’.

In wrestling back never-named powers, it seems the Leavers have brought the whole edifice down with them.

‘An equal exit? The distributional consequences of leaving the EU’ by the Institute for Public Policy Research think tank, shows today that:

“All income groups – including the poorest – will face negative impacts. At the same time, there is little evidence that post-Brexit trade deals will benefit the worst-off overall; any reductions in import tariffs would be unlikely to compensate for the increase in prices due to Brexit-induced trade barriers between the UK and the EU.”

And far from spitting in Westminster’s face,

“London is least affected because a greater proportion of households’ expenditure goes on housing costs, which are not expected to be significantly impacted by Brexit…

“It is areas outside London and the South East that are most likely to suffer
from a downturn. This is because London and the South East are more resilient
to economic shocks than the rest of the country.”

While the finance sector will be badly hit in London, the capital is resilient – as we saw after the financial crash.

And while the posters proclaimed we would ‘take our country back’ – from Brussels, London and the establishment:

“Exporting businesses are particularly exposed [outside of London]…for instance, in Northern Ireland, where 90 per cent of food and live animal exports are sent to the EU, or in east Wales, where 84 per cent of machinery and transport equipment exports are sent to the EU…

“Regions and nations outside of London are also more likely to be hit by an increase in prices due to new trade barriers (as well as by the post-referendum rise in inflation due to the depreciation of sterling).”

Meanwhile, hard or soft Brexit, no matter the region, prices are going up:

But it is this paragraph which sums up the chaos that Brexit will cause:

“Many partisan supporters of Remain or Leave have sought to portray the distributional effects of Brexit as straightforwardly positive or negative. In fact, our analysis suggests that the potential effects of Brexit on inequality are complex and multifaceted.

“We find that higher paid sectors are somewhat more likely to face more negative GVA [the value of goods/services] impacts. But many low-paid sectors are also expected to be hit, especially under a hard Brexit.”

Rather than ‘getting our country back’, we’re engaging in self-immolation. And the whole world is watching.

There are some small solaces though – Vote Leave looks set to face prosecution over its referendum campaign, two years after that fateful vote…

Read the full report here.

Josiah Mortimer is Editor of Left Foot Forward. Follow him on Twitter.

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