Plans ‘on the table’ to give us a brisk Brexit
Better out as Britain’s GDP rises
BRITAIN’S Brexit boom continues to grow with more good news yesterday as official figures showed GDP is rising.
The Office for National Statistics said the nation’s gross domestic product grew by 0.6 per cent in the second quarter of this year – up from 0.4 per cent in the first three months of 2016.
The ONS said there were few signs of the economy having been hit by uncertainty over Britain’s EU membership before the June 23 referendum.
It said: “There is very little anecdotal evidence at present to suggest that the referendum has had an impact on GDP in Quarter 2, 2016.”
Leave campaigners said the figures showed the Government’s scaremongering had not been based of hard facts.
Ukip’s MP Douglas Carswell said: “This confirms yet again that Project Fear was an attempt to manipulate public opinion. George Osborne’s dire warnings about the consequences of voting to Leave bore no relation to economic reality.
Foolish
“Maybe we now need to take a hard look at the civil servants and officials who propagated these myths.”
Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has battled with Bank of England Governor Mark Carney over his own dire economic warnings, said: “It seems some in the Remain camp have been determined to prove their pessimistic prognosticators right by trying to talk down the economy.
“It now looks increasingly likely that they are both wrong and rather foolish.”
In April David Cameron and George Osborne seized on an International Monetary Fund report that claimed the looming EU referendum had “already created uncertainty for investors”.
Mr Osborne said: “For the first time, we’re seeing the direct impact on our economy of the risks of leaving the EU.”
IT SEEMS so long ago but it has been barely more than two months since George Osborne and David Cameron were insisting that if we voted to leave the EU the economy would collapse. And that collapse would not be at some point in the distant future but right now.
Remember the post-Brexit budget with which Mr Osborne tried to scare us into submission? He said that in the aftermath of a Leave vote he would have to impose £15billion of tax rises alongside £15billion of extra spending cuts.
It was the most wilfully irresponsible speech given by a chancellor in my lifetime, deliberately talking the economy down. I do not think that Mr Osborne believed it for a second. He was playing politics with the economy in the most dangerous way.
The effect could have been catastrophic. After we voted to leave his words could have been a self-fulfilling prophecy. But the biggest rebuke to him has been the performance of the economy since June 23.
Mr Osborne tried to have us believe that the fifth largest economy in the world was so weak and enfeebled that a vote for self-government would send it into a tailspin. The opposite has happened. The fundamental strength and vigour of the economy and the optimism of the British people about our prosperity outside the EU have meant that there has been a cascade of good news.
There has indeed been one leading economy that has been engulfed with bad news but ironically it has been Germany that is now grappling with a dramatic slump in confidence.
HERE in the UK consumer confidence is rising at its fastest rate for nearly three-and-a-half years. High street sales are rampant. And even mortgage lending, which the Remainers said would collapse, is steady.
A YouGov poll of 6,000 people published this week found that consumer confidence rose by 3.2 points in August to 109.8 points. Households are even more confident than before the referendum about their financial situation, property value and job security.
But polls, as we know from the election and the referendum, are one thing, what actually happens in the real world can be quite another. Here too the news is good. The CBI – in the vanguard of Remain scaremongering – has published a survey of 131 retail businesses that must have stuck in its craw.
Doubtless the CBI would love to have been able to paint a picture of doom and gloom and demand that we ignore the referendum result. But its survey of shops, motor traders, wholesalers and the like found that August sales were buoyant. Indeed, 35 per cent said that volume sales are higher than in August 2015.
The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders reports that car production is up 7.6 per cent – by 126,566 vehicles – in July. That’s a 12.3 per cent rise year on year, the biggest for well over a decade. In Germany leading car manufacturers are cutting production.
And the Council of Mortgage Lenders has revealed that lending remained steady in July, with £21.4billion borrowed – down by a negligible £100million from June. And these are just figures published this week. Last week’s economic news was similarly good.
Official statistics showed that overall retail sales were up 1.4 per cent in July compared with June – far more than the 0.1 per cent forecast.
It’s clear that consumers – voters, in other words – are far more optimistic than officialdom. That should surprise no one. The establishment – economic, political and business – was firmly wedded to Remain and they all tried to persuade us that we had no serious choice but to stay in. No wonder the real world has turned out to be so much better than they told us it would be.
Employment statistics have also belied the gloom mongers. We were told that the mere fact of having a referendum was itself dangerous because “uncertainty” before the vote would impact on the economy.
What rot. In the three months before the June vote – precisely when the effects of this would supposedly be felt – the numbers in work hit a record high. And in July the Claimant Count – the dole, in other words – fell by 8,600 to 763,600. Our 4.9 per cent jobless rate is less than half the eurozone. Which economy would you rather be in?
Yes, there have been some bad figures. Retail sales fell by 0.9 per cent in June, for example, but the Office of National Statistics blamed the bad weather for that rather than the referendum.
AFTER months of the unrelenting scare stories of Project Fear it would hardly have been a surprise if confidence had taken a dive and if spending had fallen. But any falls were temporary – mere blips. And investor confidence, which is important for long-term growth, is climbing.
There is still a long way to go. Just because the immediate post-Brexit period has been so successful there is no guarantee of what will happen later. But there never is – Brexit or no Brexit we must never rest on our laurels.
What the latest round of economic news shows categorically, however, is just how wrong were the catastrophic predictions from the likes of the Treasury, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the International Monetary Fund.
Anyone would think they deliberately wanted to predict disaster to force us to Remain. As if!
‘Ironically the German economy is suffering’