Few people annoy me more than those who voted Brexit in 2016 and who continue to assert that theirs was the right decision and that “Leave” has been vindicated.

In the ensuing years the evidence – in shedloads – has been piling up that Brexit is causing a disaster. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development forecasts the UK will next year be the worst-performing economy of the G20 nations apart from – er – Russia.

Sunday’s Observer reports a piece of analysis that estimated that the UK economy is five per cent smaller than it otherwise would have been if we had not left the EU.

A lot of this cost is impacting the young and the less well-off. Public finances are starved of the tax revenues that might otherwise entered the Exchequer.

In consequence, public services – including education and other activities that might have helped “level up” – have been shorn of funding.

To persist in asserting that Brexit was the right option is to bury one’s head in the sand. It is total failure to engage with the evidence. It lacks intellectual honesty.

It is an obsession that visits serious adverse consequences on the innocent.

UK economy pays prices for Brexit obsession - Yorkshire Post Letters