Politics is depressing at the moment, which is one of the reason for all of the new recipes. When in doubt, cook.

Life is depressing because it seems increasingly clear that the divisions within the government and within the country as a whole, identified and exacerbated by the EU referendum, are wider than ever. And no matter what the outcome, that means half of the electorate is left seriously angry and upset about the outcome.

Immediately after the referendum it was possible for the government to take a deep breath, pause and hold some open house meetings up and down the country to try and work out the answers to some really basic questions.

Why did people vote “leave” in such large numbers?

What exactly did they believe they were voting for, out of the EU, out of the single market and out of the customs union? All of these or just one or two?

And how much are they willing to pay for the privilege?

I might want lots of things, but if it starts to cost me more money than I’ve got, I start to temper my request. People did not vote to become even poorer. They did not vote to lose their jobs.

Anyway of course this is all water under the bridge because in the shock and panic immediately after the referendum result, the one striking absence in our political life was leadership.

Most of the people responsible just ran away from the responsibility of making it work. the PM resigned. The Chancellor followed shortly thereafter. After a shocked press conference, the main leaders of the “leave” campaign very publicly stabbed each other in the back making them unelectable to the leadership they both wanted.

So we ended up with a “safe pair of hands” otherwise known as Theresa May, who I have some sympathy for still.

I can believe that she is a woman with ambitions. No woman gets to succeed in such a bear pit without ambition and a sizeable amount of competence. So she probably wanted the job at first. As did her carefully balance first cabinet. The brexit campaigning ministers David Davis and Liam Fox seemed positively cock-a-hoop with their success, as did the less than convinced by brexit Chancellor, Hammond.

But as time goes by, and in particular as the reality of a very mis-judged election have hit home, any successful outcome for brexit has retreated further and further away from achievable. The PM was not poorly advised to call an election necessarily, since her lead in the polls was convincing.

But the campaign was poorly coordinated and risked alienating anyone who had voted “remain” with its harder than hard brexit stance. We may all be parroting the “will of the people” when describing the mandate to leave the EU, but they also needed to remember the 48% of the electorate who voted remain and who either stayed home or voted with the opposition party, wiping out the government’s majority and forcing them to form an alliance with the N Ireland DUP.

The latter make any compromise agreement on the Irish border with the EU almost unachievable. The one gaping big hole in the brexit “leave” campaign “what about Ireland” suddenly comes front forward into focus. The DUP will not tolerate the idea of “special status” where N ireland becomes more closely tied to the Republic of Ireland and less tied to the Union. At the same time it cannot abide a hard border between the two Irish halves.

The N Irish electorate voted “remain” and their economy, already weak and relatively poor in UK terms is inextricably tied to it’s southern neighbour. so the UK is forced into agreeing with the EU that there will be no hard border and that we will remain in “regulatory alignment” going forward and that looks and sounds very like a customs union.

Yes, say the government A customs union but not THE customs union, and one is left wondering how thin they can slice that hair. If it looks like a duck, if it quacks like a duck etc. Because if the UK is unable to make independent trade deals with third party countries, then what on earth is the point of leaving? And a fundamental part of any customs union is centralised negotiations of trade deals with third party countries.

It’s a difficult circle to square. & with a minority government, all legislation requires the positive consent of the DUP, a party to whom this trickiest of problems is fundamental. Suggestions and hints from David Davis that the government commitments were in some way just a “fudge” were immediately knocked back by the EU who threatened to write them into the contract prior to trade negotiations.

So now here we are with a UK government about to start trade negotiations having unilaterally decided to leave the single market and the customs union, looking for a trade deal of some sort, yet unable to define that trade deal because of the conflicting requirements within it’s own party. The loudest voices on the topic are noticeably from outside the government itself, from party members who have yet to come to terms with the reality of minority rule. The loudest voices seem entirely unconcerned with what can be practically delivered.

& you have the EU basically asking the UK to simply define what they want coherently so that negotiations can begin whilst refusing to schedule time for meetings, until such clarity can be provided.

So I’m coming to the view that we will bomb out of the EU onto WTO rules, which will lead to a hard border in Ireland, not because either the UK or EU want a border, but because basic WTO rules require the EU to have a border with third party countries absent a customs union or comprehensive trade deal.

And as well as leaving the EU, we are leaving the 970 bilateral treaties the EU has with third party countries such as the US and China. It might be hoped that these would be simple agreements to transfer to a newly independent UK but at least some of the countries involved (SKorea, Chile etc) have indicated that they would want to look again at the terms. there is no guarantee that the deals will be so favourable for the UK standing outside of the EU.

It’s all a bit depressing really, just a little bit rubbishy.

The real price of Brexit begins to emerge as FT research shows that the weekly hit to the British economy could be the same £350m that Leave campaigners promised to claw back

The big red bus emblazoned with the words “we send the EU £350m a week, let’s fund our NHS instead” is credited as being decisive in Britain’s vote to leave the EU last year. It promised — in absolute terms — financial gains for the British public if they voted to leave, a stark counterweight to a majority of economists who warned that a departure would hurt Britain.

The pre-referendum estimates of the long-term pain ranged from a hit to the economy of 1 to 9% of national income — an annual loss of gross domestic product of between £20bn and £180bn compared with remaining in the EU yet the Leave campaign won the battle of the slogans, and the referendum.

But who is winning the economic argument?

Almost 18 months on from the Brexit vote and with 15 months of detailed UK data, it is now possible to begin to answer that important question.

Economists for Brexit, a forecasting group, predicted that after a leave vote growth in GDP would expand 2.7% in 2017. The Treasury expected a mild recession. Neither was right. The 2017 growth rate appears likely to slow to 1.5% at a time when the global economy is strengthening.

A more pressing question is to assess the impact compared with what would have happened had the vote gone the other way.

This work has started, and includes a range of estimates calculated by the Financial Times suggesting that the value of Britain’s output is now around 0.9% lower than was possible if the country had voted to stay in the EU.

That equates to almost exactly £350m a week lost to the British economy — an irony that will not be lost on those who may have backed Leave because of the claim made on the side of the bus.

Jonathan Portes, professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London and one of the academics leading publicly funded research into the effects of Brexit, says: “The conclusion that, very roughly, Brexit has already reduced UK growth by 1% or slightly less seems clear.”

Companies are becoming more vocal over the economic hit, blaming the government’s slow handling of the Brexit negotiations for a weaker business climate. In October, the International Monetary Fund highlighted Britain as a “notable exception” to an improving global economic outlook, while the OECD, the Paris-based club of mostly rich nations, has raised concerns about “the ongoing slowdown in the economy induced by Brexit”.

Thomas Sampson and colleagues at the London School of Economics have examined the direct effect of sterling’s depreciation since the EU referendum on prices and living standards. With the pound falling about 10% following the June 2016 result, inflation has risen more in Britain than in other advanced economies.

It started with petrol prices and spread to food and other goods, pushing overall inflation up from 0.4% at the time of the referendum to 3.1% last month. When looking at prices, depending on the level of import exposure of different goods and services, the LSE study estimates that the Brexit vote directly increased inflation by 1.7% of the 2.7 percentage-point rise in the 12 months after the referendum.

And with wage inflation stuck at just over 2%, “the increase in inflation caused by the Leave vote has already hurt UK households”, Mr Sampson says. He calculates that “the Brexit vote has cost the average worker almost one week’s wages”, but adds the figure could be higher or lower if a complete evaluation of the economic impact was applied rather than just the initial squeeze on incomes from leaving the EU.

Other effects are more apparent.

Business investment grew at an annual rate of 1.3% in the third quarter, compared with a March 2016 official forecast for annual growth of 6.1% for the whole of 2017.

Exports, boosted by sterling’s depreciation, have proved more resilient. The OBR now expects a 5.2% rise in the volume of goods and services sold abroad in 2017 compared with a pre-referendum prediction of 2.7%.

Net migration to the UK from the EU fell by 40% in the first 12 months after the vote. Professor Portes last year predicted an ultimate decline of between 50 and 85% on net migration levels before the referendum. “Arithmetically, this reduction [of 40%] of net EU migration translates into a reduction in growth of 0.1 to 0.2%,” he says.

Economists working to estimate the overall Brexit impact on the economy need to build a counterfactual scenario — an imagined world in which Britain had voted to remain in the EU — to compare that with Britain’s economic performance since the vote. The counterfactual cannot be known for certain but it is possible to take a number of approaches, in three broad categories.

The first is to compare recent UK economic performance with its past. A worse performance than the UK has achieved over long historical periods or in recent years would support the view that the vote has hurt economic performance. But a shortcoming of this approach is that if the past year was always likely to be rather weak, this method could suggest a Brexit hit when there was none.

Comparing the UK performance with that of other countries is another option. Using its normal position in the G7 league table of leading economies is one possible technique, as is contrasting UK performance with the average of similar economies. A more sophisticated approach is to use a statistical algorithm to devise a historically accurate set of comparator countries, a method recently performed by a group of academics from the universities of Bonn, Tübingen and Oxford. These geographical techniques often smooth out concerns that the recent period might be unusual, but they are vulnerable to variations in other countries, such as a sudden boom in the eurozone that Britain was never likely to match.

A third tactic is to look at forecasts made for Britain’s economy before the referendum on the basis of staying in the EU and compare the actual outcome with these prior forecasts. Its weakness is that there was a wide range of pre-referendum forecasts, while its strength is that the figures reflect the best knowledge available at the time.

Jagjit Chadha, director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, says each of the methods are reasonable for generating an estimate of the impact of Brexit so far. “We can’t know how the [UK] economy would have responded to the news over the past 18 months, but there have not been any large shocks and the rest of the world has done slightly better than we thought likely a year ago.”

The results vary according to the comparisons made, but all show the UK economy has been damaged even before it formally leaves the EU on March 29 2019.

When the past five quarters are judged against the UK’s historical average growth rate, the 1.9% expansion in GDP achieved between the second quarter of 2016 and the third quarter of 2017 is lower than history would suggest is normal for the UK economy.

Depending on the period of comparison chosen, the UK economy would normally have been expected to expand by between 2.5% and 3.2% over the same period. The lower end of the range comes from more recent history, such as the average since a Conservative-led government came to office in 2010, while the upper boundary reflects Britain’s long-term performance in the 30 years before the financial crisis. The hit to the economy on this comparison is between 0.6 and 1.2% of national income.

Geographical comparisons produce a similar conclusion. Britain’s year-on-year growth rate tended to be close to the G7 upper range of outcomes over the past 25 years. Had that performance continued, British GDP would have grown 2.9% since the referendum. The statistical algorithm produces a significantly larger estimate of what would have been possible, suggesting Brexit has already removed 1.3% from GDP since the vote. This equates British performance to a weighted average of other countries, with the US, Canada, Japan and Hungary having the largest weights.

Asked whether it was reasonable to judge the UK’s performance against that of Hungary, Professor Moritz Schularick of Bonn University says, “like the UK, Hungary is a European economy and integrated into the production chains, but remained outside the eurozone with a floating exchange rate and therefore could use monetary policy more aggressively after the crisis”. Estimates using pre-referendum forecasts provide a range within almost the exact same boundaries — between 0.6% of GDP and 1.1%. The larger figure is based on analysis from Economists for Brexit, which initially predicted strong growth after the vote. Professor Patrick Minford, who carried out the forecasts for the group, blames “Office for National Statistics productivity estimates, [which] are not convincing because they have made no real attempt to estimate the growth in quality of services, such as in education and healthcare”.

But all of this was known before the referendum. Companies have been critical of Theresa May’s government saying that delays in talks with the EU have hit business

Overall, 14 different counterfactuals estimated by the FT and others give a range of a hit between 0.6% of national income and 1.3%, with an average of 0.9%.

With national income of £2tn in the year ending in the third quarter of 2017, it means the UK is likely to be producing £18bn less a year than would have been reasonable to expect and this is directly attributable to Britain’s decision to leave the EU. That is just short of £350m a week.

Brexit-supporting economists say the figures are reasonable.

Julian Jessop, head of the Brexit unit at the Institute of Economic Affairs, says: “Lots of sensible Brexiters accept there will be a short-term hit and it is unarguable that the economy is weaker than it would have been, I would say between 0.5 and 1% weaker.

As for the longer term, it’s all to play for. Brexit creates lots of opportunities, it is for the government to make the most of them.” Recommended Britain has more illusions to shed on Brexit

The UK economy since the Brexit vote — in 5 charts Brexit and the Budget: Hammond pressed to go ‘big and bold’ In the referendum campaign the big red bus was making a different comparison, an incorrect one, about the budgetary costs of the EU to Britain. It suggested Britain contributes almost £18bn a year to the budget, when the net cost in 2016 was calculated by the Treasury to be £8.6bn. And this leaves one last comparison that it is possible to make. Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, says that “for every 1 per cent of GDP you lose, that’s getting on for £10bn a year of foregone tax revenues”. If 0.9 per cent of GDP has been lost over the five quarters for which data exists, there has already been a £9bn hit to the public finances.

So even before the UK has left the EU, the referendum result is costing the UK government more than can possibly be recovered by ending net contributions to Brussels.