Former Tory chancellor admits ‘we’ve got poorer because of Brexit’

“The truth is we’ve got poorer. We’ve got poorer because of Brexit"

Phil Hammond

Former Tory chancellor Philip Hammond has admitted that the country has got poorer as a result of the decision to leave the EU.

While other Tories have repeatedly refused to acknowledge the obvious, preferring to bury their heads in the sand, Hammond told Bloomberg that the decision to leave the EU had an adverse impact on the economy.

He said: “The truth is we’ve got poorer. We’ve got poorer because of Brexit, we’ve got poorer because of Covid, we’ve got poorer because of the changed energy economy in the world, the higher price of the energy we consume.

“And that has to be reflected in reduced living standards and the transmission mechanism for those external shocks into the domestic economy is inflation.”

His comments came after the IMF predicted that the UK economy will be the only economy out of the G7 to shrink in 2023.

The international body predicted that it expected the UK economy to contract by 0.6% this year – 0.9 percentage points worse than it had pencilled in just three months ago and slower even than sanctions-hit Russia.

Meanwhile, the prospects for every other member of the G7 group of leading developed nations had improved or remained unchanged.

Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward

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