Simon Wren-Lewis

Two pieces of recent Brexit news are that a majority of the ‘war cabinet’ outvoted May on the choice between two unworkable, and therefore unacceptable to the EU, proposals to keep the Irish border infrastructure free, and Labour plans not to support a Lords amendment to keep the UK in the Single Market (SM). I […]

The Brexit project is already a complete failure. That statement may seem odd, as we are less than one year away from leaving the EU. But what happens in March 2019 if all goes to plan? We leave the EU, but remain in the Single Market (SM) and Customs Union (CU). It is not Brexit […]

This post is inspired by another, by Jan-Werner Müller. I have talked about Müller’s ideas on populism before. This particular post is a plea to focus less on the voters who elect populist politicians, and more on the politicians themselves. He writes: In 2010, Viktor Orbán did not campaign on a promise to draft a […]

Paul Krugman quite rightly often complains about people he calls professional centrists, who always suggest there is a middle road between the ‘extreme’ views of Democrats or Republicans. He noted that such centrists always have to blame both sides, and would typically fail to note that although the Democrats have stayed pretty much in the […]

The snake-oil salesmen There are many similarities between Brexit and Trump. They are both authoritarian movements, where authority either lies with a single individual or a single vote: the vote that binds them all. This authority expresses the movement’s identity. They are irrational movements, by which I mean that they cast aside expertise where that […]

This discussion by Roger Scully about why people in the Welsh Valleys voted Leave is depressing although not surprising. In essence it is immigration, bolstered by local stories of Polish people coming into communities and reducing wages. I doubt if quoting econometric studies about how little immigration influences wages would make much difference to these attitudes (although […]

This might seem easy. The depreciation immediately after Brexit, plus subsequent declines in the number of Euros you can buy with a £, are pushing up import prices which feed into consumer prices (with a lag) which reduce real wages. But real wages depend on nominal wages as well as prices. So why are nominal […]

A constant refrain from politicians and others is that we have to leave the EU because we have to respect democracy, where by democracy they mean that 52% voted to do so. Arguments that the vote was based on lies by the Leave side are met with dismissive remarks like both sides were the same, […]

I often find that arguments for Lexit have many structural similarities to right wing arguments for Brexit. Take Larry Elliott’s latest piece for example. This includes: Sweeping exaggerations that seem designed to trigger nationalist sentiments. We are told that “under Tony Blair, the feeling was that globalisation had made the nation state redundant.” Confusing the […]

An interesting disagreement occurred this week between Martin Sandbu and the Economist, which prompted a subsequent letter from Philippe Legrain (see also Martin again here). The key issue is whether the German current account surplus, which has steadily risen from a small deficit in 2000 to a large surplus of over 8% of GDP, is […]

A week or so ago, anticipating Macron’s victory and following defeats of the far right in Holland and Austria, I asked on Twitter why the US and UK seem to be more susceptible to right wing populism than elsewhere. It is a question that requires much more than a post to answer, but I thought […]