Pound surges on record job figures

THE pound soared against the euro yesterday courtesy of record jobs figures and higher retail spending.

Sterling rallied to 1.305 euro yesterday, the currency’s best level since early February.

The pound strengthened on the back of figures showing sales in shops were .3 per cent higher last month than a year earlier. British buyers spent £28.1billion in April as cheaper oil cut prices at the pump and left families flush.

Added momentum came from jobs figures showing 31.5million people were employed, 7 per cent of the working age population.

SIX weeks have passed since the launch of the proEU ‘Hug a Brit’ campaign, and still I’m waiting for my first fond embrace from a leggy Italian supermodel. For those who missed it, I should explain that this exciting initiative was the brainchild of young European citizens living in London.

Their idea was that it might help persuade British voters to remain in the Brussels club if they went around hugging us, to show how much they love and appreciate us, and then posted selfies of these encounters on the internet.

You will find examples of #HugABrit on the website PleaseDontGoUK.com.

Katrin Lock, a German who has lived in London for seven years, explains: ‘It’s a little bit hippy, but a little bit of hippiness is needed. People are always arguing about cucumbers and shower caps.

‘We wanted to do something positive instead of just talking about rules and regulations. It’s a love-bomb for the UK.’

I confess that when I first read about this, hardened old cynic that I am, my mind flashed back decades to that hilarious competition in the New Statesman magazine (often re-run since) in which readers were asked to suggest misleading advice for foreign tourists.

You know the sort of thing: ‘When visiting the Reading Room at the British Museum, do be sure to test the famous echo.’

Soppy

More to the point of my topic this week, another entry went something like this: ‘When boarding a London Underground train, it is customary to shake hands with everyone in the carriage.’

If these soppy young Europeans knew anything about our national character, I thought, they would surely realise that the very last way to convert us British eurosceptics to the dream of ever-closer union would be to bowl up to us in the street and give us great big garlicky hugs.

Heaven knows, I get embarrassed enough when I greet my closest female friends and have to wrestle with that agonising modern dilemma: one cheek or both?

In the good old days, when life was so much simpler, we were all one- cheek kissers, in the old-fashioned British way.

But as the Continental habit of kissing both sides became fashionable on this side of the Channel, I constantly found myself pulling away after a single peck, just as my kissee was presenting her other cheek and diving in for seconds.

Well, I’ve always hated to appear standoffish, and so, nowadays, I vary my approach according to my assessment of whether the lady I’m greeting is likely to be a one-cheeker or a two-er.

The trouble is that, like so many other Britons (you see it happening all around you at parties), I’m always getting it wrong. If I stop at one, you can be sure she’ll be expecting two — and vice versa.

Nor is it any good trying to recall which practice a particular friend favours. If you remind yourself that the last time you met, she went for two kisses, she will remember that you went for just the one.

So the next time you meet, both of you will adapt your approach accordingly — with the upshot that, on this occasion, your roles will be reversed, with similarly awkward results.

You’ll be the one who is left looking overfamiliar — with affected foreign ways — while she’ll be worrying that she appears unfriendly.

But I don’t know why I’m telling you this. We’ve all been through it.

My only point is that if many of us go through agonies wondering about the etiquette governing greetings to our friends or acquaintances, then how much more awkward will we feel about being cuddled by a love-bombing crusader for the EU bureaucracy?

As for having one’s picture taken, midhug, and then posted on the internet, I can’t say I’m too happy about that, either.

Leave aside that Mrs U might get the wrong idea if she stumbled across the photograph while surfing the web.

Camera- shy at the best of times (see above, and you’ll understand why), I have a particular aversion to ‘selfies’ — and the thought of having my ugly mug displayed on a europhile website fills me with alarm.

Meaningless

Such were my first thoughts, anyway, when the Hug- a- Brit campaign was launched. But, since then, I have been mellowing.

Say what you like, but it makes a pleasant change from David Cameron’s approach of trying to terrorise us into voting Remain, with warnings that we’ll be vaporised by H-bombs or devoured by giant killer rats if we dare to reclaim our national independence on June 23.

Looking through the photographs on #HugABrit, the guilty thought also occurs to me (though don’t tell Mrs U) that it wouldn’t be such a terrible experience to be hugged by one or two of the more attractive senoritas and mademoiselles among the campaigners.

Knowing my luck, however, I’m probably more likely to be love-bombed by a toothless Romanian beggar or a burly, beer-swilling Lithuanian bloke.

But I may as well warn them now. Even if I’m hugged by the most gorgeous of London’s vast community of ex-pat EU citizens, I can’t see myself changing my mind about my intention to vote Leave.

It’s not that I don’t love them, or fail to appreciate their love of us. Really, it isn’t.

Indeed, I understand absolutely why they say on their website: ‘We — EU citizens residing in the UK — enjoy the benefits the EU has brought us. We love living here.’

But doesn’t that last sentence give the game away, suggesting as it does that the greatest benefit Brussels has bestowed upon them is their right to settle in Britain — and so to escape from the horrors of the eurozone?

Here, they have jobs and a future to look forward to, while in some areas of the countries saddled with the single currency — particularly Spain, Italy and Greece — youth unemployment is well over 50 per cent, and the prospects are bleak indeed.

Crisis

Can’t they see that their home countries, Germany apart, are the victims of too much Europe?

By that, I mean too much centralised control of their economies from Berlin and too much political control from Brussels, whose sclerotic, empire- building bureaucracy makes their votes (and ours) more and more meaningless from one election to the next?

Why should we in the UK sit back and wait until Brussels completes its work of doing to us what it has already inflicted on the countries of their birth, driving them in their millions to take refuge in Britain?

And I mean millions. In the year to March alone, another 224,000 EU citizens came to work here, bringing the total to a record 2.15 million.

That’s according to this week’s official figures from the Office for National Statistics, which, bear in mind, take no account of the unknown numbers working in the black economy.

Meanwhile, foreign- born workers accounted for some 80 per cent of last year’s 413,000 increase in UK employment.

And now, as the Mail reveals today, the European Commission has the sheer brass neck to instruct us to build another 220,000 homes a year, ASAP, warning that we are heading for an ‘acute’ housing crisis caused by massive population growth.

Well, yes, we noticed — those of us, at least, who have grown-up children unable to find lucrative enough jobs to afford homes away from the family nest, in a capital stuffed to the rafters with refugee EU citizens.

Big hugs to them all but, no, it will take more than a ‘little bit of hippiness’ — or Mr Cameron’s unhinged scaremongering — to persuade me to change my mind.

I’m voting Leave.