Ross Clark

It is the decimal point which really gets me. If we have a ‘no deal’ Brexit, according to Treasury forecasters, the economy will be 7.6 per cent lower in 15 years’ time than it would be if we didn’t leave the EU. What, not 7.7 per cent? It is an age-old trick: express your guesswork with a decimal point or two on the end and hope that it sounds a bit more convincing, as if a bit more science has gone into it. But sorry, the Treasury should not be fooling anyone this time.

With the leak of a 26-page political declaration this morning – an enhanced version of last week’s briefer document – we now know the shape of the future EU-UK relationship which May and the EU negotiators want to achieve in the long run – if, and this could turn out to be a big if – the UK ever manages to escape from the purgatory of the backstop. It is not a bad document in itself. Neither does it bear much of a resemblance to Chequers. The big difference is that it envisages a future trade deal which encompasses services as well as goods – Chequers envisaged Britain pretty well staying in the single market for goods while diverging on services.

Anyone trying to get about London over the past few days may have come across the activities of a group called Extinction Rebellion, which blocked Westminster and several other bridges on Saturday, blocked Lambeth Bridge today and plans to repeat the exercise later this week. Its tactics are simple – it gathers raggle-headed eco warriors, together with some terribly nice middle class students, buses them up to London and then disgorges them to sit in the middle of the road, where they then get arrested for blocking the traffic. But no matter the illegal tactics. The world is in the middle of ecological crisis, and so, of course, the normal rules of political protest do not apply.

Big UK business is often guilty of short-termism and the CBI's response to Theresa May’s draft withdrawal proposal is no exception. Large companies are backing May’s appalling deal with the EU because they are preoccupied with ensuring that next year’s results are no worse than the guidance they have given markets. The opportunities which could arise from a proper Brexit, in which Britain is allowed to do its own trade deals, set its own regulations and lower taxes and other barriers in order to suck in overseas investment, are too far over their horizon for them to see. How often have you heard the words drip from well-fed FTSE 100 executives: 'what business needs most is stability'?

Brexit is, as we know, the most important issue facing the government and the country. Except it isn’t. For the Conservatives there is an even more pressing matter: how to prevent a socialist government. Yesterday, the pound plunged after ministerial resignations following Theresa May’s deal with EU negotiators. But were investors spooked by the thought of a ‘no deal’ Brexit or by the possibility of a government collapse, general election and Corbyn in Number 10? Who knows? One thing is for certain: the very worst outcome for markets would be a combination of the two, a Red Brexit. At least the EU would temper Corbyn’s ambition to turn Britain into Venezuela, through its rules on state funding of industry and so on.

The conundrum of economic growth continues. The withdrawal process from the EU is, even by the admission of the most ardent Brexiteers, going pretty badly. We have a rearguard Remain lobby trying to talk down the economy at every opportunity – something which you might think ought to be undermining confidence. And yet still there is no sign of the Brexit-induced recession which the Treasury told us a month before the 2016 referendum would be inevitable within two years of a Leave vote. The GDP figures for the third quarter released by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) this morning, show that the economy grew by 0.6 per cent in the third quarter. It is not dynamite, especially considering that growth was a more modest 0.1 per cent in the first quarter and 0.

The rearguard Remain lobby, which has far from given up on its ambition to reverse the Brexit vote, has put much store in the alleged electoral malpractice of Aaron Banks and his Leave.EU campaign, as well as the actions of the now-defunct Cambridge Analytica. Along the way it has found the Electoral Commission and the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) eager to investigate. There has, however, been a drawback to this strategy: it has invited examination of the Remain campaign’s own spending and use of personal data. Sure enough, a report published by the ICO today offers some possible dynamite.

Labour, as we know, is a party which has fallen into the hands of a dreamy left-wing idealist who is out of touch with the public, and who has managed to push out the party's down-to-Earth moderates - people who, like Tony Blair, understand that if Labour wants to win power it must appeal to broad swathes of Middle England. That, at least, is how it seemed until this week. But it all looks a little different after 20 backbench Labour MPs defied the whips to vote against the Chancellor’s decision to raise income tax thresholds. Jeremy Corbyn had instructed his MPs to abstain. It is astonishing to read the names of the rebels: Yvette Cooper, Liz Kendall, Lucy Powell, Jess Phillips, Margaret Hodge.

Now it is London museums bleating about Brexit. A memo from the V&A released under Freedom of Information laws, warns darkly: 'we will struggle to keep the museum open to the public in the immediate short term'. A no deal Brexit, it is claimed, could affect visitor numbers from the EU, diminish donations and also affect the ability of the museum to stage travelling exhibitions. As with so many Brexit scare stories, it has the whiff of hysteria. But if the V&A and other museums do ever feel the pinch they could, of course, resort to an action they should have taken years ago: start charging an entry fee. It is astonishing that our museums and galleries are prepared to forgo a source of income that virtually all other museums and galleries around the world take for granted.

As Nick Clegg, George HW Bush and many other politicians have proved to their cost, manifesto promises matter. How damaging, then, will Philip Hammond’s brazen abandonment of the 2017 Conservative pledge be, whereby financial discipline was supposed to 'guide us to a balanced budget by the middle of next decade'? Now, Hammond seems to be trying to tell us that running a public deficit doesn’t really matter. While George Osborne delayed and delayed the date he promised to bring the public finances back into balance, Hammond has apparently abandoned any idea of ever doing so. There is now no target for eliminating the deficit at all.

If Britain crashes out of the EU with no deal and the Conservatives plunge to a defeat against Labour in a subsequent general election, Theresa May, not without reason, will take the blame. But the blame will not be all hers. William Hague will deserve a fair slice of it as well.   It has become quite clear that May is not going to achieve a decent deal. The task is beyond her. She does not have the imagination to know where to go next, and she has already painted herself into a corner. She staked her entire authority on her Chequers plan – a solution which, it soon became clear, had virtually no support other than that of May herself.

In two weeks’ time, Philip Hammond is expected to declare an ‘end to austerity’. Today’s figures on wage growth are a reminder of why he needs to tread extremely carefully on this. What he will mean is that austerity is over for the public finances – he is confident enough to start increasing government spending again. Many individuals and families, on the other hand, remain deep in personal austerity. There is very little room for tax rises without making people feel poorer. News that wages are growing at their highest rate – 3.1 per cent – since the economic crash of 2008/09 is, on the face of it, a cause for celebration.

Now that fracking has resumed in Lancashire after a seven year hiatus, the green lobby which sought to frustrate it and delay it at every turn can reflect on what they have achieved: keeping the UK's carbon emissions rather higher than they would have been, had our native fracking industry been allowed to develop more quickly. In the short term at least, the alternative to burning UK-produced shale gas is not, as the green lobby says, using more energy from wind and solar farms. We do not currently have anything close to the electricity storage capacity to cope with a supply which comes exclusively from intermittent sources, and is it not clear at present how this will be resolved. For now, the real alternative to shale gas is either coal or imported gas.