The British finance minister has presented a growth plan. However, he does not want to talk about the negative consequences of Brexit.
(Photo: AP)
How do you formulate a growth plan without releasing the biggest brake on growth? With his “Budget for Growth” this week, British Finance Minister Jeremy Hunt managed the feat of describing his country’s economic misery while only mentioning Brexit in one place: he sold the lower beer tax as a “Brexit Pubs Guarantee”.
Since the vote to leave the EU in 2016, economic policy discourse in Great Britain has been suffering from the “three monkeys” taboo: see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing. “The Tories don’t want to talk about it, Labor doesn’t want it, the unions and the CBI don’t want it, and the national television stations also avoid the topic,” said former British Treasury Secretary George Osborne recently of the national suppression effort.