Briefings for Britain, March 5, Catherine McBride
I would have expected the Financial Times (FT) to have given up on its Anti Brexit Propaganda by now, but they just can’t get over Brexit. This time they are telling some half-truths and using some extremely misleading graphs to disparage UK trade.
Before I go through their claims, the chart below shows the reality of UK trade as reported by the ONS. The ONS chained volume measure (CVM records starts in 1997, so when the FT article exclaims this is the steepest trade fall on record, I assume they are talking about the last 27 years.
The FT headline declares: UK trade volumes suffer record five-year decline. Looking at the graph above I find that hard to believe. Although in the text of the article, they do a quick bait and switch from the article’s headline and change trade into goods trade, ignoring the UK’s booming service trade.
The FT has decided to use a chart of 5-year rolling percentage changes to declare the five-year percentage change between 2018 to 2023 as the worst since records began, and therefore proof that Brexit has been bad for trade. They are using total goods trade, exports plus imports, to all destinations EU and non-EU, excluding precious metals, measured in chained volume measures (CVM). And, of course their most recent five-year period covers the Covid pandemic and the Ukraine war.
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