Quote Originally Posted by JamesWales View Post
I saw this interview, as I watch Newsnight most night unless I'm out boozing with Dorcus, going to gigs with Sludge or walking the Quantocks at dark with TBG.

Farage wasn't saying Brexit has failed. He was saying the Tories implementation of it has. And that's viewed from his perspective that a hard Brexit is a good idea, that the shock of that was worth it in the long term and that we should be making more use of Brexit freedoms etc rather than pragmatic alignments with the EU.

I think he's wrong on that, and most people would, but the desire of the headline proved to strong I guess!

Not withstanding the fact that Brexit is never 'finished' so it can't fail or succeed any more than we can say Wales has failed or Cardiff City have failed.

Again; our GDP growth outperformed our European peers in 2002. Our unemployment rate is lower. Our main stock market outperformed the major European ones. Our wage growth is higher, and inflation rate peaked at about the same level.

Whenever anyone points to 'the disaster" they tend to use predictions, guesswork, memes and short take outs from interviews.

Is Britain thriving? No Is anywhere thriving? No.

I said at the start of this year that 2023 is the year when we will finally have some data that is post brexit that isn't totally distorted by Ukraine and COVID.

I will eat my hat if our full year GDP growth this year is much different from Germany, France etc. Our unemployment will almost certainly be lower and our wage growth will be better.

That's my prediction!

There are so many metrics that matter alongside GDP but so far in terms of 2023 Q1 GDP growth it's as follows. Full list in the link below.

Spain 0.5%
Italy 0.5%
Belgium 0.4%
France 0.2%
Euro area 0.1%
UK 0.1%
Germany 0%
Austria -0.3%
Netherlands -0.7%
Ireland -2.7%

https://tradingeconomics.com/country...ntinent=europe
I think we can safely say Cardiff City has failed (hic)