MADAM,

Now that the well-respected Institute for Fiscal Studies have worked out that even a ‘good’ Brexit deal will result in something of the order of £15bn a year (£350m a week) being lost to the British economy, is it not time to get angry? Boris Johnson, who during the Brexit referendum was photographed standing in front of the infamous red bus handing out leaflets indicating that Brexit would actually save money and indicating that it would then be spent on the NHS, now publicly denies doing so. Even Nigel Farage is preparing the ground for being called to account by telling Sky News that there will be no Brexit dividend to spend on the NHS. We all know that we were duped so why does Theresa May take us for fools by pretending that there really is a dividend when we know that she knows that we know that any extra money for the NHS will have to come from a mixture of tax rises, borrowing and cuts elsewhere?

I wonder how many people realise that the Office for Budget Responsibility, the UK’s independent watchdog, has examined the current state of negotiations and downgraded its growth expectations and warned that the slow down in growth will hit the government’s revenues as businesses and workers pay less tax because of the anticipated fall in trade and living standards. It is not clear whether or not this extra cost was factored into the government’s own cost-benefit calculations for Brexit, as the cost-benefit report has been suppressed.

David Garnett

(Monmouth)