Former British chancellor George Osborne has said the UK’s economy has “fallen off a cliff” since Brexit and that rejoining the EU customs union would be the fastest route to recovery.<\/p>\n
Mr Osborne, who resigned as chancellor after being part of David Cameron’s cabinet at the time of the referendum, said it was important to rebuild links with the EU.<\/p>\n
“Brexit has been a mess,” he said in an interview with The Independent.<\/p>\n
“Britain has basically gone off a cliff.<\/p>\n
“It has had a huge impact on the British economy. It is clearly poorer than it would otherwise be,” he said.<\/p>\n
Acknowledging that rejoining the EU would be difficult a decade on from the Brexit referendum, Mr Osborne said closer ties with Europe can boost the economy.<\/p>\n
“I would rejoin the customs union,” he said. “It’s a quite simple thing to do. That was never part of the Brexit debate. No one knew we were leaving it and it has had a devastating impact on trade.<\/p>\n
“The reason we weren’t supposed to be in the customs union – according to the Brexiteers – was these great trade deals we were going to strike with America. That all looks pretty fanciful now.<\/p>\n
“People now realise you can’t look at Britain’s growth problem without beginning to think, ‘how can we revive trade with the continent, how can we get investment?’.<\/p>\n
“If I was Andy Burnham, I don’t see why you wouldn’t rejoin the customs union.<\/p>\n
“It’s a pretty straightforward decision because unlike (rejoining) the single market it does not require you to accept the free movement of people – which is a pretty complicated issue to sell to people in Britain at the moment.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former British chancellor George Osborne has said the UK’s economy has “fallen off a cliff” since Brexit and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":623294,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-623293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=623293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623293\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/623294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=623293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=623293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=623293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}