EC Meeting Papers January 2018

Brexit: why the UK economy hasn't led to buyer's remorse

Larry Elliott Article

The recession meant to make leave voters regret decision has failed to materialise – with majority of people having moved on

A Brexit vote poster.

We’ve all been there: that moment when you get home and realise you didn’t want that new jumper and couldn’t really afford it either. It is known as buyer’s remorse, and it was a concept that gave the remain camp comfort as it reeled from the shock of defeat in the EU referendum vote in June 2016.

In the context of Brexit, buyer’s remorse meant that people who had voted to leave would quickly regret what they had done because the economy would plunge instantly into the stonking recession predicted by the Treasury in the run-up to the plebiscite. Project Fear was actually Project Reality, it was said, and before too long Brexit voters would be clamouring for the chance to think again.

No question there were those in the remain camp who, despite the obvious flaws in the European project, genuinely thought nothing good could ever come of Brexit and it would be the poor and the vulnerable who had voted leave who would suffer most from what they saw as its inevitable baleful consequences. There was, though, a snobbish and nasty subtext to the buyer’s remorse theory, which was that the plebs were too dumb to know what they were voting for.

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Yet it was always a long shot that a second referendum would come about by these means and so it has proved. Eighteen months on and there has been little sign of buyer’s remorse.

In part, that is because people voted remain or leave in the referendum for complex reasons. The referendum was never just about economics, and in retrospect it was a strategic blunder on the part of the remain camp to fight only on what the vote would mean for GDP per head and house prices.

Another reason why buyer’s remorse has not set in is that the country – or rather the part of the country (by far the bigger part) that is not obsessed with Brexit – has moved on. There are Brexit fanatics, there are remain fanatics, and in between there are millions of people who were asked for a decision in June 2016, made it and now expect democracy to take its course. They have switched off from Brexit in just the same way that they switch off from politics between general elections.

The absence of economic Armageddon has simply reinforced the lack of trust in expert forecasters