The Bank of England has come up witha scary figure as the "cost" of Brexit, £500M a week.
Of course it turns out that this is the difference between the size of the economy now and where the BoE thinks the economy would be if we hadn't voted to leave the EU. Since no-one, not even the BoE, knows what might have been to any degree of accuracy, the "where we would be" figure could be anything they like to produce. There's no build up to this figure, just a wish list of what it could have been (and, judging by recent history, wouldn't have been) spent on. It would have been more convincing if they'd said how many Trident missiles or jets for the new aircraft carriers we could have bought for the £60Bn.
It's also a bit of a puzzle where all this extra economic activity would be coming from, given that we are now at pretty well full employment.
Debate Magazine
