When you factor in Brexit, Philip Hammond’s Budget wasn’t gloomy enough

It is difficult to comprehend the scale of the economic disaster that will soon engulf the nation

Mr Hammond has been bullied mercilessly by elements of the eurosceptic press into adopting a bogus sunny demeanour (AP)

Despite the honest and expert forecasting provided by the independent Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), and its universally respected chairman, Robert Chote, the nation still turns to the older Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) for the “Day Two” analysis of economic trends. Usually the IFS offers a sort of “director’s cut” of the Budget, adding in extra background, more detail, and adding in “deleted scenes” judged too challenging for voters to have been in the official version. This time round the IFS have excelled themselves in producing the fiscal equivalent of a video nasty. Evidently, Philip Hammond – and more importantly the rest of the nation – is about to experience a Nightmare on Brexit Street.

The graphic scenes are indeed terrifying. The IFS’s horrifying histograms chart how levels of UK government debt are unlikely to return to the pre-crisis levels of 2008 until the 2060s, by which time many of those attending the IFS’s press conference will have long-since been departed to the great economists’ common room in the sky. We will have to wait another 10 years or so to witness any real growth in earnings – the second “lost decade” for wages and living standards, perhaps the longest since the Industrial Revolution.

While the UK’s economy is growing at the slowest level among its advanced peers, in Germany they have been enjoying real growth in their national income per head of about double the UK rate, a positive economic miracle given the demands being placed by the euro crisis on Germany’s own economy and public finances. They may not have a government in Berlin, but they are certainly enjoying an enviable phase of export-led prosperity and growth. This, it has to be emphasised, within the supposedly constraining and sclerotic European Union and eurozone.

Brexit cannot be blamed for much of this; after all, the UK is still inside the EU. Poor productivity and an overzealous policy of austerity bear more responsibility. Yet at a time when the country faces such formidable challenges we are about to add in the most difficult of all – Brexit, entirely gratuitously. Indeed the toxic effects of Brexit, still unknowable in their precise detail, are largely discounted by the IFS and the OBR; it is perfectly possible that even the most miserable projections for the British economy that are being made by these and other independent economists may actually prove over-optimistic. It is difficult to comprehend the scale of the economic disaster that will soon engulf the nation. Abolishing stamp duty on residential property for first-time buyers – the centrepiece of Mr Hammond’s Budget – is not going to help that.

Exasperated at times during his post-Budget interview on the BBC’s Today programme, Mr Hammond, plainly still an enthusiastic, if secret, Remainer, tried to explain to John Humphrys that, as a practical politician, his job was to take the world as it is, not as he might wish it to be. That is a fair point. Yet what Mr Hammond can be more definitively faulted for is his failure to be gloomier than he was, which is to say more candid and to reflect the coming realities.

Mr Hammond has been bullied mercilessly by elements of the eurosceptic press into adopting a bogus sunny demeanour, mouthing platitudes about the exciting opportunities for a “Global Britain” after Brexit. He did this to save his job. He made quite a good job of it, but no one doubts that, back home with his feet up, a gin and tonic in hand and in the company of trusted friends Mr Hammond doesn’t disguise his opinion that Brexit is anything other than a self-inflicted disaster (with Theresa May’s botched election campaign in a similar category).

It is his duty, and that of every minister in the Government, whatever their instincts, to tell the British people that, exciting opportunities or not, adjusting to the new economic realities post-Brexit will require sacrifices and economic change that will cost jobs and livelihoods. Not since the 1980s, or beyond, will such traumatic change be experienced. The economy will need to adjust.

No one can be sure exactly how, how far sterling will fall, for example, or how quickly the car factories, aerospace plants, farms and banks will scale back their operations or shut down, but it will surely come. New industries and new jobs will indeed sprout up, but it will take time, and there will be an inevitably painful period as resources migrate from industries losing markets to those that will be expanding (perhaps in the high-tech activities Mr Hammond spends so much time extolling).

If the UK is to leave the European Union – and an approval via a final referendum remains a national necessity – then the least our rulers can do is to warn us about the horrors that lie ahead. Mr Hammond has chosen precisely the wrong moment to cheer us up and cut out the gory details.