Speeches  on the economy in recent weeks from Humza Yousaf and Rishi Sunak grabbed the attention for, as you might expect, quite different reasons.

Mr Sunak’s address to the Business Connect conference in Coventry was striking for a perhaps unusual lack of big claims from the leader of a Government whose senior ministers have not been shy about insisting the Conservatives have been doing a great job on the economy.

The hard numbers indicate that whatever they have been doing it has not been a great job. The UK economy fell into recession in the fourth quarter of last year and is projected by the International Monetary Fund to be the second-worst performer among the Group of Seven leading industrialised nations in 2024 in terms of growth.

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That said, none of this reality has got in the way of the Conservatives’ peacock-like behaviour when it has come to their perception of how they have done on the economy. That is, of course, if it is their perception as opposed to mere politicking. You would have thought, after all, that there would be a degree of self-awareness on this front given the inescapable economic reality.

In this vein, it seemed notable that Mr Sunak did not mention “Brexit” once in his speech to the Business Connect conference. This could be viewed either as surprising or entirely to be expected. Given the picture painted by the Conservative Brexiters that their hard departure from the European Union would somehow unleash the UK’s potential, some people might consider it odd that Mr Sunak did not even mention the “B” word in what was billed as a fairly major speech on the economy.

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt did not mention “Brexit” in his Budget speech last month either.

This same omission by Mr Sunak and Mr Hunt would not of course have surprised anyone following the fortunes of the UK economy.

Brexit has caused huge damage to the economy and will continue to do so.

It was good to see Mr Yousaf quantify the effect of Brexit on public spending in Scotland in his speech last month to the London School of Economics and Political Science’s European Institute.

As observed in one of my Business Voices columns in The Herald last month, there was some dispute over Mr Yousaf’s calculation of the amount of devolved public spending of which Scotland was deprived in 2023 as a direct result of Brexit.

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However, the column observed that, whether it is £1.6 billion, as Mr Yousaf said in his speech, or £1.2bn, as the National Institute of Economic and Social Research think-tank calculated, the crucial fact is it is a very big number.

The column noted that we have heard a great deal about the cost of the two long-delayed ferries being built by Ferguson Marine at Port Glasgow for Caledonian MacBrayne, which has ballooned to a few hundred million pounds.

And it observed this cumulative total cost of the ferries is dwarfed by the hit to devolved public spending in Scotland every year arising from the damage to growth and tax revenues caused by Brexit.

This is a crucial comparison. Amid all the political noise, it is important to look at the cold numbers.

Mr Yousaf said in his speech last month: “We have suffered – our institutions have suffered, our public services have suffered, and, ultimately, our people have suffered to the tune of £1.6 billion that could have been invested in Scottish public services because of a Brexit that, remember, Scotland overwhelmingly rejected.”

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It seems Mr Sunak is far less keen to talk about Brexit’s actual effects on the economy, tax revenues and public spending, for obvious reasons.

As observed in another of my columns, the most Mr Sunak could muster in his speech to the Business Connect conference last month was about the Tory plan “starting to work” and “moving in the right direction”.

The column pointed out that it does not appear that either of these things is actually happening.

And it concluded: “It perhaps says it all that these declarations were as far as Mr Sunak decided to push the Tory tall tale on the economy before a business audience, some of which, you might well imagine, will have been far from impressed by what the Conservatives have delivered.”

This article was first published in The Herald's Business HQ Monthly supplement