BRITONS ‘FEELING SECURE’
BRITONS are full of confidence in Brexit, with 41 per cent feeling secure about their job – almost four times as many as those who are worried.
A YouGov poll also found 40 per cent think their finances will be safe, three per cent above those who do not.
The survey boost comes as International Trade Secretary Liam Fox today continues the latest stage of his Brexit charm offensive with China.
The Department for International Trade announced up to £25billion in support for UK businesses in the Belt and Road Initiative, set up by the Chinese government to increase economic cooperation with countries along key transport routes.
GIVEN the daily diet of gloom we are fed by the Remain lobby, Britons could be forgiven for having retreated into their bedrooms, guarding little piles of gold they have stashed beneath the mattress. Yet we are feeling surprisingly chipper about our economic prospects in 2018.
According to a YouGov poll, 41 per cent of us believe that our jobs are secure – a rise of three per cent compared with the same survey last year. There has been a similar rise in the percentage of us who think our family finances will improve over the course of the year.
Admittedly we are not exactly swinging from the lampposts but then we rarely do when asked about our finances. The biggest group are those expecting to end 2018 in much the same financial situation as they are starting it.
But if there is one message to take from the YouGov survey it is this: that we are becoming rather weary of being told that the nation is embarked on a self-inflicted, Brexit-induced plunge into the abyss. We look around and see that people are still spending, working and saving, and come to the conclusion that Michael Gove was right about economic experts. Their predictions are worthless.
NO ONE should be allowed to forget the economic forecast made by the Treasury in May 2016, a month before the referendum, in a document entitled “the immediate impact of leaving the EU”. It should be put on the national curriculum as an example of hubris.
“A vote to leave would represent an immediate and profound shock to our economy,” it read. “That shock would push us into recession and lead to an increase in unemployment of around 500,000.”
As a piece of navel-gazing it has proved even more of a failure than Michael Fish’s infamous reassurance that there was no hurricane on the way – hours before southern England was flattened in the Great Storm of 1987.
No one, on the other hand, taking the Treasury’s predictions to heart would imagine that 18 months later the economy would be growing at about 1.5 per cent a year, unemployment would be at a 42-year low and the FTSE100 index would be at its highest level ever. Even