John Springford
@johnspringford
Economist and occasional politics dabbler. Working on a project to improve labour markets. Associate fellow, Centre for European Reform. Visiting fellow, Institute for Policy Research, Bath University.
Definitely medical. I'd go with the covid vaccination programme. ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccin...
France is sending 184 police officers to the border with Spain, which is quite a long way from Ceuta.
"We would preserve our countryside, encourage biodiversity, invest in flood defences, and ensure that Britain is resilient". Emissions cuts unmentioned.
Badenoch says the UK's net zero policies have raised emissions. Obviously this is false.
Most of the turnaround came via a crushing internal devaluation, with high unemployment reducing wages relative to the rest of the EU and making Greece more price competitive.
That pattern ended in 2016. The US can't Brexit, so not sure what the lesson is.
Interesting piece by @econromesh.bsky.social. I always thought the right frame was the trade-off between (formal) sovereignty and living standards, and we emphasised that from the start. But the Leave campaign was effective with 'wrong then, wrong now' and so forth 1/ blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci...
There has been some erosion of concern/support for climate action, but it's been slow, despite the end of the political consensus. I wonder if this is more ideological than tactical. www.gov.uk/government/s...
It's not though. You might disagree with the North Sea policy, but it doesn't make much difference to jobs, energy prices or the public finances either way.
@faisalislam.bsky.social rounds up the Brexit research and adds some interesting points of his own. A sizeable chunk of the reduction in services trade we found in our paper was in transport. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
I think they'd be slower to arise than exit. Might take a decade. Businesses have adjusted; it would take time for competitive pressures to reorder supply chains. You're right that more immediate effect would be to raise investment and sterling, so raising the international value of UK assets.
"If you're explaining, you're losing" consoc.org.uk/publications...
This is a fairly common view in business, but individual companies' bottom lines are not social welfare. There are gains from the competition from imports, and future exporting companies would grow faster with a larger market.
@tommctague.bsky.social on the EU not being "the principal source of our ills", membership or not. Perhaps, but the counterfactuals point to a hit that's equivalent to about a quarter of the post-financial crisis gap. (Please excuse the MS Paint.) www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/...
My street has been having a party today and it's been extreme wholesome fun. Buffet table, musical bingo, live music. Lots of kids loving the transgression of playing on the road and beating the crap out of this pinata.
While it's true that it's hard to model, it's also true that the estimates could be too low as well as too high. That's how uncertainty works. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
It was pretty rapid in Poland's case. And the UK's when it joined the EEC.
Our model was built from the bottom up, using trade data for different sectors of the economy. Most sectors showed Brexit losses, in both goods and services.
Here are the headline figures – UK imports from the EU down around 16%, with customs union exit responsible for 1%, exports down 12%, customs union responsible for 2%.
The number of non-EU workers in the UK rose very rapidly from 2021, when the new migration system was put in place, and far outpaced the control. In 2025, there were about 1.15 million more than the control. 4
There are about 800,000 fewer EU workers than a control group of richer EU countries, whose trends have been weighted into a single control that most closely matches the UK trend before the referendum. 2