Brexit supporters rounded on gloomy forecasts predicting a 59-billion pound bill for Britain's departure from the EU today, while finance minister Philip Hammond warned of "uncertainty" over the numbers.
Former cabinet minister Iain Duncan Smith said the predictions from the government's budget watchdog, the independent Office for Budget Responsibility, had offered "another utter doom and gloom scenario" in its latest update yesterday.
"The key thing is that the OBR has been wrong in every single forecast they've made so far. On the deficit, on growth, on jobs, they've pretty much been wrong on everything," Duncan Smith told the Daily Telegraph newspaper.
His criticism followed that of another eurosceptic lawmaker in Prime Minister Theresa May's Conservative party, Jacob Rees-Mogg, who told BBC television that "experts, soothsayers, astrologers are all in much the same category".
Hammond delivered his regular autumn mini-budget yesterday, presenting OBR forecasts for significantly slower growth and an extra 122 billion pounds (USD 152 billion, 143 billion euros) in borrowing in the period to 2021.
About half of that - 58.7 billion pounds - is a direct consequence of Britain's decision to leave the European Union, according to the OBR, which blamed factors including lower migration, slower productivity growth and higher inflation.
In a round of broadcast media interviews today, Hammond said there was uncertainty over the figures given that negotiations on how Britain would leave had not even begun yet.
"The OBR itself makes the point very clearly in its report that there is a very high degree of uncertainty around the report they issued yesterday because of the circumstances we are in," he told BBC radio.
He added: "We should look at what the report is projecting, we should certainly not ignore that, we should look at it as one of the possible range of outcomes that we need to plan for."
The OBR warned that it was "impossible to predict" the precise outcome of the Brexit negotiations, given that it had no privileged information on the talks that May's government says will start by the end of March.
Its findings are based on the assumption that Britain leaves the EU by April 2019, the negotiation of new trade deals slows import and export growth for ten years, and migration is cut.
Its forecasts predicted better-than-expected growth of 2.1 per cent this year, falling to just 1.4 per cent in 2017, and returning to 2.1 per cent in 2019.
Eurosceptic Conservative lawmaker John Redwood said they proved there was no post-referendum recession, as had been forecast by some during the campaign - but said the OBR was "quite wrong" about 2017.
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