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The farce of the Brexit “impact assessments” tells voters everything they need to know

The government has mishandled things so badly that the content of the papers is now secondary to the chaos around their release

by Jonathan Lis / December 1, 2017 / Leave a comment
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Brexit Secretary David Davis leaves No 10. Photo: NurPhoto/SIPA USA/PA Images

As the satire which occasionally passes for the Brexit negotiations builds up to the fevered will-they-won’t-they climax of the December European Council summit, it is worth paying some attention to its no less farcical but somewhat more legalistic subplot: the long-running saga of the government’s sectoral “impact assessments.”

These papers supposedly examine the impact of European Union withdrawal across the British economy—from aviation to textiles, architecture to road haulage. Millions of livelihoods stand to be affected by Brexit. But the government’s entire approach to these reports, if we can call them that, invites only ridicule.

David Davis first drew attention to the reports in December 2016, when he informed the Brexit Select Committee that the department was carrying out “about 57 sets of analyses” with implications for “individual parts of 85 per cent of the economy.” In June 2017 he declared that “nearly 60” were “already done,” and in October protested that their “excruciating detail” made it unlikely that the prime minister had read them from cover to cover. There might, of course, have been a more banal reason for our famously hard-working premier not to have studied them in detail, which Davis helpfully confirmed in a letter to committee chair Hilary Benn last month. As ministerial statements go, the sentence “it is not the case that 58 sectoral impact assessments exist” was admirably direct.

But while full assessments seem not to have been initially conducted, Labour seized the initiative and forced the government, through an obscure parliamentary proc…

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Comments

  1. Christopher N.
    December 7, 2017 at 09:31
    Surely, given the changing world any impact assessment will be subjective. All the possibilities are like a bag of marbles. Squeeze the bag and relationships change but the marbles remain. Only when the bag is opened will the contents become clear. The whole business is about the unknown. Today's assessment will be yesterdays history to be used or interpreted to suit political positions. At present the knots in the bag strings are being untied or not. 'Voters must discover exactly what ministers have in store for us,'. Really, given the circumstances this is an impossible task! There will be possibilities and probabilities but "exactly" what is in store is not possible. Scenarios perhaps?

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Jonathan Lis
Jonathan Lis is Deputy Director of the Think Tank British Influence
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