Post-referendum good news just keeps on coming
IT SEEMS like something from another era but remember those blood curdling threats from Project Fear? According to the Remainers we should now be in a deep recession, in the middle of a dire economic crisis. In the run-up to the referendum they told us that a Leave vote would turn us into an economic basket case. But we ignored them. And the result?
In the week in which the royal assent was given to the EU Withdrawal Act, we now have an amazing economic platform on which to build our Brexit success. The good news keeps rolling in.
Instead of the crash that the Remainers promised there has been a succession of positive economic stories, pretty much non-stop since the vote. Take this week’s unemployment figures, for example. They are at a 40-year record low.
The FTSE-100 share index has never been higher. And Toyota has just announced a £240million investment in the UK. If that’s an economic crisis, please let’s have more.
The unemployment figures are truly remarkable and a devastating contradiction of some of the nonsense spouted by Remainers. If businesses were worried about the future, the first thing they would do would be to lay people off. Yet they’re doing quite the opposite.
The number of redundancies is now at the lowest level since before the referendum. And more significantly, unemployment is at a mere 4.7 per cent, its lowest level since 1975.
THE number of people without a job fell in the last three months of 2016 by 32,000 to 1.58 million. And the jobs miracle that began under the coalition has intensified. In the same three-month period, companies created 92,000 new jobs, pushing overall employment to a record high of 31.85 million.
These are good jobs, too. There was an increase of 136,000 in the number of people working full time, to 23.3 million. Part-time jobs fell by 44,000 to 8.5 million.
If the Remainers had been right, we would now be talking of the collapse of the British economy as we regained our independence.
Instead we have businesses preparing for the exciting prospects ahead after we leave the EU. It’s salutary to remind ourselves