UK economic growth. I distinctly remember a BBC Question Time programme just before the Brexit vote in which it was claimed that Europe did not matter for the UK economy because it was low growth and the UK needed to open itself up to high growth countries elsewhere in the world. This claim always struck me as odd. For a start, what matters is the volume of trade with between two economies not their overall relative growth rates. Geography matters when it comes to trade. Secondly what matters again is the solvency of the country one is trading with - can it pay its bills? And finally, no evidence has been produced to demonstrate that the UK's membership of the EU was hindering its trade with non EU countries. In fact, most high growth economies would rather deal with the EU than a UK outside the EU; after all, the EU is much the bigger market. The next thing that has puzzled me is that if the claim was true, namely the UK economy would boom once freed of its EU shackles, one would have expected sterling to have risen post the vote to leave the EU. Instead it has fallen, by 15% on a trade weighted basis, to August last year but it has recovered 1/3rd of that fall since then partly reflecting dollar weakness. Brexiteers have made much of the Remainers claim that the UK economy would crash if the UK voted to leave the EU. That of course did not happen; what happened instead was the fall in sterling. It was the currency that took the strain of the vote, not the economy. Finally much has been made of the UK's better than expected economic growth since the Brexit vote. This, however, is not because of Brexit but because world economic growth has improved and most particularly EU growth has recovered substantially. The lie of the Brexiteers' position can be seen by comparing the UK's growth rate relative to that of Europe. In 2015 it exceeded that of Europe by 20% (2.4% v 2.0%), in 2017 it was 62% of Europe (1.5% v 2.4%) with a similar outcome forecast for 2018. It seems to me self evident that the UK economy has suffered because of the Brexit vote and the uncertainties over the UK's position vis-a-vis the European Single Market. Whatever the potential merits of Brexit (and there will be some), there will be substantial short run costs. These will be alleviated to a certain extent by the cheapness of the currency and a booming global economy. In conclusion, it is the short run costs that matter and are visible; any potential merits of Brexit are simply pie in the sky.