Cuts start on Friday if we leave claims scaremonger Osborne
Jobs losses will be ‘very quick’ and cash will flee UK, he says
GEORGE Osborne last night suggested that workers could start losing their jobs as soon as Friday morning if Britain votes for Brexit on Thursday.
In an extraordinary escalation of the scaremongering, the Chancellor warned that people could begin losing their jobs ‘very quickly’ as a result of the ‘economic shock’.
Ramping up Project Fear over the economy, he also refused to rule out suspending trading on the London stock market if Britons voted to leave the EU.
Asked in an LBC radio interview about whether redundancies warned of by banks such as JP Morgan could come as early as Friday, Mr
‘Make sure you are well prepared’
Osborne said: ‘That will start to happen very quickly, sadly.’
He then warned of a flight of money out of the UK if Britons vote to leave.
He said: ‘On Friday morning you will see the first reaction in the financial markets because they’ve placed all these bets that they will move money out of Britain if Britain votes to Leave.’
Asked by presenter Iain Dale whether, if the financial markets plummeted on Friday, he would he consider suspending trading on the stock market, Mr Osborne did not rule it out.
The Chancellor responded: ‘Well look, the Bank of England and the Treasury – Governor Carney and myself – we have of course discussed contingency plans.
‘But the sensible thing is to keep those secret and make sure you are well prepared for whatever happens but if you set them all out in advance then you rather undermine the power of those plans.’
Pushed again on the contingency plans, Mr Osborne said: ‘I have a responsibility to the people listening to this programme to do all I can to protect them. But I have to tell you that you cannot in the end protect people from the economic shock that leaving the EU would bring about.’
He refused to reveal how many Treasury civil servants were working on the issue – but said they were focusing on plans for the immediate aftermath of a Brexit vote.
Mr Osborne stressed that in the longer term there was ‘no plan’ for what would happen after Britain left the EU. He added: ‘We have not got plans for what you then do.’
The Chancellor predicted there would be no answer for ‘years and years’ to come, adding: ‘It’s not for me to come up with [Leave’s] plan.’
He also pointed to warnings from the London Stock Exchange that there would be 100,000 job losses in the City after a Brexit.
And during a visit yesterday to the headquarters of supercar maker McLaren in Woking, Surrey, Mr Osborne told staff that businesses such as theirs could be hit if Britain leaves the EU.
His comments came as ten Nobel Prize winners were compared to the economists who opposed Margaret Thatcher’s economic reforms after they made a plea to British voters to stay in the EU.
The senior economists, hailing from the US, Greece and France as well as Britain, said yesterday that they believe the UK will be ‘better off economically’ inside the EU. In an open letter, they say Brexit would create ‘major uncertainty’, with effects which would persist ‘for many years’. Signed by Cambridge professor Sir James Mirrlees and nine other winners of the Nobel Prize for economics, the letter claims economic issues are ‘central’ to the referendum debate.
But Leave campaigners pointed out that economists have often been wrong before, most notably
the example of the letter written to the Times in 1981 by 364 economists about the Thatcher reforms.
Yesterday’s letter came as former bosses of Tesco, Sainsbury’s, M&S, Asda, Waitrose, Morrisons and B&Q warned that families would face higher prices if Britain leaves the EU.
Research by retail union USDAW claimed that, if the UK were to leave, the fall in the value of sterling and the imposition of tariffs would increase prices for families by £580 a year.