In a recent Jacobin article, Thomas Fazi and Bill Mitchell argue that the Left should embrace Brexit. “The Left’s anti-Brexit hysteria is based on a mixture of bad economics, flawed understanding of the European Union, and lack of political imagination,” they write. Although they characterize the Left as suffering from groupthink on Brexit, this is not entirely accurate. “Lexit” has attracted the support of a significant minority on the Left. Nonetheless, it’s fair to say that the majority of progressives in the UK took the Remain side during the referendum.

The authors make two main points to support their position. The first is that many of the UK’s current economic problems have domestic causes and are not the result of the Brexit referendum. The second is that the benefits of EU membership have been overstated. We are sympathetic to both points. But it takes a major leap of faith to get from here to the conclusion that a hard Brexit provides a clear opportunity for implementation of progressive policy. The authors provide no real evidence to support their claim and fail to address any of the major obstacles.

The authors start by noting the inaccuracy of predictions that the UK economy would immediately enter recession in the wake of the Brexit vote. It is true that both sides of the argument have been too willing to make unfounded claims about the economic costs and benefits of leaving. Predictions of immediate recession following the referendum are in a case in point: these were clearly overstated to make political gains. But these short-run projections all originated with politicians or banks; academics confined their attention to the long-run effects.