by Rab Bruce’s Spider

According to an article in the Financial Times, the Office for National Statistics has revealed enormous discrepancies between what the UK thinks it exports in services and what the importing countries believe they receive. We’re not talking small variances here, but many billions of pounds. There are lots of reasons provided for this, most notably that it is extremely difficult to monitor the level of service provision. However, with the UK’s Brexit strategy (such as it is) being predicated on the assumption that London’s financial services market is the UK’s principal bargaining tool, this news rather undermines what little bargaining power the UK Government has.

Hot on the heels of this news, we had the leak of the Brexit impact assessment which claimed that the UK will be considerably worse off no matter what sort of Brexit we end up with. This report has been dismissed by many leading Brexiteers on the basis that, essentially, you can’t believe any reports which claim to know what is going to happen in the future.

So, what we take from all this is that we shouldn’t believe any Government forecasts and we can’t even rely on UK Government statistics about past or current events.

Isn’t that interesting? Let’s make sure we remember that when the next GERS report comes out and when IndyRef2 comes along.