Jo Swinson
Jo Swinson claimed that as a result of leaving the EU “we are going to be poorer, people are going to lose their jobs, there will be less money for our NHS.”
None of these statements is flatly incorrect, but they all need some clarification.
On the question of being poorer, it’s important to understand that expert forecasts don’t expect the UK to be poorer than we are now. Rather, they estimate that the UK economy would grow by less in a Brexit deal scenario, compared to a scenario where we remain in the EU. These are only modelled estimates though, so they contain quite a lot of uncertainty.
Whether Brexit means “less money for the NHS” really depends on how the government of the day chooses to manage its accounts. For example, while the Lib Dems expect the government to have £50 billion more to spend over five years in a remain scenario, they don’t plan to spend most of that “bonus” on the NHS.
As for the questions of job losses, none of the recent forecasts of Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal have addressed the issue in detail. It seems likely that some companies would pull out of the UK—at least in part—in a Brexit scenario, leading to job losses, but we don’t have a clear picture of what would happen to employment overall.
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