Brexit Britain's economy has outpaced Germany since the EU referendum

With the 0.3pc expansion reported on Monday, Britain has now had 13 quarters of economic growth since the Brexit referendum. The evidence is irrefutable: the UK economy has grown faster than Germany, France and the eurozone as a whole for most of the last two years. It is has outgrown several west European states even since the vote.

Totting up the exact numbers, it is no longer excusable for the Remainer establishment, the Liberal Democrats, and allied think tanks, to keep claiming that the UK economy is 3pc smaller than it would have been without Brexit, or that we are “3pc poorer” in Westminster parlance.

The total accumulated growth for the UK is 4.9pc. This compares with Belgium (4.7pc), or Germany (4.7pc) if we generously assume that there is no German contraction in the third quarter when the final result comes out later this week, not to mention Italy (3.2pc).

France (5.8pc) has been the outperformer, in part because Emmanuel Macron has abandoned key reforms and lavished fiscal stimulus on the gilets jaunes, but even so France has not outstripped the UK by much. The figures I am using are static rather than dynamic, but the cross-country comparison still holds.

So unless the anti-Brexit number-crunchers are saying that Belgium is a basket case (clearly absurd), or that Germany’s trend growth rate is a full percent lower than ours (equally absurd), they test our patience with persistent overstatements of lost output.

I do not wish to pick on the National Institute for Social and Economic Research - a superb institution - but it published a chart last week seeming to show that UK growth had slumped 3pc below its trend line on account of Brexit.

This was achieved by taking its pre-referendum forecast (over-optimistic in the first place), and then failing to adjust for the China slowdown, the world trade slump, and the powerful effects of US monetary over-tightening that have occured since. Had they done the same exercise for Germany the chart would have looked similar.

The overall picture of the last three years is taking clear shape. The UK had a relatively bad year in 2017 when it was still carrying out fiscal tightening. The eurozone had a stellar year because the stars were briefly aligned: the end of austerity, the delayed effects of QE, and a Chinese mini-boom that lifted Germany, all at a time when there was still a large output gap and therefore plenty of low-hanging fruit.

That one year of 2017 distorted perceptions and allowed anti-Brexit agitators - including at times the Bank of England and the International Monetary Fund, and above all lobby groups funded by EU vested interests - to foster a narrative of lost growth, which has since become an article of faith in the European and global media.

That narrative has been invalidated by the last seven quarters. The UK has grown faster (2.2pc) than the eurozone as a whole (2pc) over that period, yet there has been no acknowledgement of this levelling effect.

There may be big problems for Britain on the horizon. Foreign direct investment has crashed. It is a concern that the UK did not get more lift from the macro-economic stimulus of a weak sterling. The current account deficit is still 4.7pc of GDP. Consumption has been sustained by an unhealthy fall in the savings rate.

We may well run into trouble in the future when the full trade effects of Brexit actually hit, but that is a different matter from claiming that we have suffered the hit already. The story is simply untrue.

My guess is that the accumulated slippage in GDP growth since the referendum that can legitimately be attributed to Brexit is about 1pc. The rest is the result of global forces beyond our control and the crisis in the international car industry.

Exaggerated claims by the anti-Brexit movement are part of an ideological battle within the UK and across the European political landscape. They are intended to shape opinion and change policy. They matter. They must therefore be confronted and debunked.