Shanker Singham, the Daily Express's dubious 'Brexit guru'

‘Tantric yoga guru arrested in Thailand,’ runs a story on page nine of today’s Times, the tale of British woman Maria Shchetinina, arrested in the south-east Asian country after a violation of her visa.

Shchetinina’s paperwork allowed her to work as a customs relation manager for a residential property company, but attracted the attention of the Thai authorities who noticed her posters advertising “sacred sexuality” lessons (“an invitation to be held by a professional water therapist into loving presence – no nudity”). She is now likely to be heading home rather sooner than anticipated.

And yet, spectacularly, Shchetinina is not the silliest self-styled “guru” in the pages of Britain’s newspapers today. That honour goes to somebody called Shanker Singham, who appears in the Daily Express under the headline “Brexit guru warns getting closer to EU will kill growth’. In it, Singham warns that “Britain’s economic stagnation should not be blamed on the historic decision to break free from the European Union” and says the UK “has the chance to boost GDP per capita by nearly 8% if it diverges from the EU rule book and embraces ‘pro-competitive regulations’.”

One could be forgiven for wondering how somebody who is apparently a “guru” in an area of public policy which dominated political discourse for well over half a decade could be someone so obscure as to not warrant their own Wikipedia page, but happily the Express was able to lay out his credentials. Singham is “the chairman of the Growth Commission – whose international advisory board includes former UK prime minister Liz Truss” it reported breathlessly, the equivalent of boasting someone is the chairman of the Smiles and Cleanliness Commission, whose international advisory board includes Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street.

Singham’s view is that “closer alignment with the EU result could see GDP per capita fall by almost 4%”, an eccentric view, given that just two weeks ago government sources told the Financial Times that the Office for Budget Responsibility’s long-standing prediction of a 4% hit to GDP from leaving the EU might have been a bit generous. The UK’s economy has underperformed relative to countries in the euro since 2016: GDP per capita growth of 3.9% compared with 10.5%.

Suggested Reading

This is Rachel Reeves’s only rational choice

Paul Mason

To be fair to Singham, he does very generously concede that that leaving the EU has resulted in “some additional trade friction between the UK and the EU post-Brexit” but argues that the “cost of that can be eradicated numerous times over by taking advantage of the freedom to make the UK’s regulatory system more pro-competitive than the EU’s and enjoying the economic dividends that will flow as a result”. In plain English: a Dominic Cummings-style, race-to-the-bottom slashing of regulations.

Singham is a generally eccentric guy. The joint UK-US citizen has been a loud cheerleader of Donald Trump’s policy of imposing arbitrary tariffs on everyone and everything, tying himself in knots to explain how, actually, it is “important to see the tariff policy as a tool to lower barriers”.

And his guru status has been questioned before. When, during the torturous Brexit negotiations the former director of economic policy at the hard right Legatum Institute was advising Tory hardliners as to how to pursue the hardest version imaginable, his expertise and experience was questioned.

He told Buzzfeed News at the time: “Either I’m a deluded Walter Mitty fantasist or I’m meaningfully influencing the government’s thinking at the very highest levels. Pick one.”

Fair enough. If we have to get economic advice from any self-styled guru, we’ll settle for the one with an invitation to be held by a professional water therapist into loving presence over the one proven consistently wrong on every metric imaginable. No nudity, obviously.