While political upheavals in the UK have animated the political scene in recent days, the reality is that Liz Truss’s too-short government is a sad little chapter in a long season that began with Brexit.
Markets disliked Liz Truss’s plan because it permanently raised spending and cut taxes. But what is structurally more worrying for the UK is that with each passing day, Brexit looks like a self-inflicted policy mistake. No British Conservative prime minister has been able to demonstrate that leaving the European Union was a good decision, and it will continue to fuel policy mistakes in a less credible attempt to justify their rightness.
Brexit supporters base their position on two basic arguments: The first is that leaving the EU would allow for more economically liberal policies. Second, the UK would be free to enter into trade and investment deals with the rest of the world to strengthen ties with the Commonwealth without relying on EU trade policy.
The first argument is the service. The United Kingdom is actually one of the most economically liberal countries in the European Union. The construction of Europe itself was marked by this little mutual distrust between the highly interventionist continent and the United Kingdom, which avoided excesses on either side. But this is an exaggerated argument, as countries like the Netherlands and Ireland, which are economically more liberal, thrive fully within the EU.
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