UK’s economy is booming – so much for Project Fear
THROUGHOUT the EU referendum campaign in 2016 the Remainers constantly warned that Brexit would be a catastrophe for our economy. According to their alarmist propaganda, a vote for leave would immediately result in financial meltdown, soaring unemployment, a collapse in the property market and dwindling international trade.
Yet the grim narrative of Project Fear keeps being confounded by reality. The economic apocalypse has still to arrive. On the contrary the economy continues to perform robustly.
This week the release of the latest job figures by the Office of National Statistics showed yet another drop in unemployment, down to 1.36 million or just four per cent of the adult population. The dole queue has now shrunk to its shortest length since the early 1970s, while the number of people in work is at its highest ever level. Nor is there any sign that this pattern will soon be reversed since the current number of job vacancies is at a record high of 829,000.
Progressive campaigners like to assert that this growth is based on part-time and zero hours recruitment, thereby fuelling poverty and insecurity. But that is just more mythmaking from the school of Project Fear. In fact the recent surge in employment has been driven by full-time positions and the number of zero hours contracts actually fell by more than 100,000 between last December and now.
OFFICIAL figures this week also undermine one of the pro-EU lobby’s favourite arguments: that Britain must maintain freedom of movement because our supposedly fragile economy is dependent for its survival on European immigration. In fact over the last year the number of EU workers here has fallen by 86,000 yet the number of Britons in employment has gone up dramatically.
Remarkably the increasing tightness of the labour market has not resulted in galloping inflation. Yesterday it was reported that the Consumer Price Index rose marginally to 2.5 per cent but that is still below the current rate of growth in average earnings, which stands at 2.7 per cent. The vote for Brexit has been nothing like the epic act of selfharm that fashionable “experts” predicted. Their jaundiced analysis held that Britain should be in the middle of a recession by now yet in the second quarter of this year our economic growth was 0.4 per cent, the same as in the Eurozone, and higher than that in France and Italy, which both expanded at just 0.2 per cent over the same period.
Much of the so-called “expert” opinion is nothing more than prejudice and wishful thinking from diehard Europhiles. That is why, in their desperation to prop up their case, they seize on every piece of bad economic news, such as store closures by DIY chain Homebase. But throughout history commercial life has always been in flux because of technological advances and social change.
Beyond the bleak tale peddled by the Remoaners there is another Britain out there, one that is adapting and booming. Much of the media focuses on negativity but there is a host of British companies doing well. Yesterday the construction firm Balfour Beatty, which was in dire trouble only three years ago, announced that its pre-tax profits had quadrupled in the six months to June.
Similar success has been enjoyed by insurance giant Admiral, whose profits rose by nine per cent to £211million in the first half of the year, driven by a rise in customer numbers to more than six million. Meanwhile ITV recently reported the fastest growth in its modern history, with revenues up by eight per cent in the first six months of 2018 and pre-tax profits reaching £265million.
So many sectors are defying the Remoaner prophecies of calamity. House price growth is still steady at three per cent. Much of coastal Britain is enjoying a revival thanks to the burgeoning domestic tourism. Hi-tech Britain flourishes due to our pioneering expertise and freedom of enterprise. “Cambridge is going like a train,” said business leader Jane Paterson-Todd in response to a report this week that demonstrated how the city’s life sciences hub contributes almost £3billion to the economy. New car sales, a frequent target for Remoaner scaremongering, increased by 1.2 per cent in July, a reflection of “the feelgood factor” that kept “showrooms relatively busy,” in the view of the Society of Motor Traders and Manufacturers.
JUST as fallacious is the Remoaner idea that because of Brexit we are now hopelessly isolated on the international stage. Official figures published at the beginning of this month showed that our global trade grew by a record £616billion last year, with exports of goods up 13 per cent and those of services by seven per cent.
Given the remorseless warnings from Remoaners about our alleged dependence on the Eurozone it is telling to note that the USA is by far our biggest export market, representing almost a fifth of all overseas sales and up by 8 per cent on the year before. Our trade with China increased even more significantly, leaping by 20 per cent to £22.3billion.
There are plenty of serious problems with our economy, such as Government debt and housing shortages. But they can only be resolved by us, not by craven reliance on the EU. As the latest evidence shows, we have nothing to fear from independence.
‘No need to worry about independence’