Disaster of Brexit is a warning against simple solutions to hard problems | Richard Partington

M ainstream politicians are rarely direct. It is part of the reason why their populist counterparts thrive: they say it like it is. No nonsense. Let’s get things done. But last week Alan Milburn had a frank rebuttal:“Everybody goes for the bloody easy solution, don’t they? You can’t just go for the easy solution, OK? There are no easy solutions, guys. None. They’re all hard.” Speaking at the launch of his review into Britain’s youth worklessness crisis , the former Labour cabinet minister was arguing that one tax U-turn could not fix a problem decades in the making. But his comment could have easily applied elsewhere across the political landscape. It also comes with impeccable timing, just before the 10th anniversary of the ultimate populist silver-bullet solution: Brexit . Ten years ago this month, Britain faced a binary question obscuring a deeply complicated issue. Far from being the easy solution to the country’s ills the leave campaign promised, Brexit opened a Pandora’s box and imposed permanent negative costs on the economy. According the Stanford economist Nick Bloom and others in a paper for the US National Bureau of Economic Research, UK GDP per head is as much as 8% lower than it would have been under a Remain scenario. The reasons why Brexit has been such a disaster speak to Milburn’s argument: there are no easy solutions. Leaving the EU was no panacea. …