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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Politics
Richard Partington

The disaster of Brexit is a warning against simple solutions to hard problems

Minister Boris Johnson addresses supporters in front of his Get Brexit Done bus
Boris Johnson, then prime minister, in 2019. Leaving the EU was complicated, messy, and resulted in an outcome with which no one is happy. Photograph: WPA/Getty

Mainstream politicians are rarely direct. It is part of the reason why their populist counterparts thrive: they say it like it is. No nonsense. Let’s get things done. But last week Alan Milburn had a frank rebuttal: “Everybody goes for the bloody easy solution, don’t they? You can’t just go for the easy solution, OK? There are no easy solutions, guys. None. They’re all hard.”

Speaking at the launch of his review into Britain’s youth worklessness crisis, the former Labour cabinet minister was arguing that one tax U-turn could not fix a problem decades in the making.

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