How 90% of Project Fear’s dire Brexit threats turned out false
JUST one in 10 key Government forecasts about the dire impact of leaving the European Union has come true.
The findings expose the depths to which the Government-led campaign – dubbed Project Fear – plunged in its doomed bid to frighten voters off backing Brexit.
The pro-Brexit group Change Britain issued its dossier on today’s anniversary of the Treasury’s first gloomladen report assessing the likely impacts of a June 23 vote to leave the EU.
Just two out of 19 key predictions made in four major Government papers in the run-up to the referendum can be shown to be true, said Change Britain.
Three-quarters were either “false” or “likely false”, and three were “only partially true”. Change Britain chairman and leading pro-Brexit Labour MP Gisela Stuart said: “The Remain campaign fed the public with stories of doom and gloom, but this analysis shows why voters were right to see through their scaremongering.
“The British people had the confidence to reject Project Fear.”
Seven demonstrably false statements issued in the runup included the Treasury claiming a Leave vote would drive the UK into recession, unemployment would rise by 500,000, and that uncertainty would paralyse spending.
Economic growth has in fact continued and the employment rate and consumer spending are both up.
The Treasury was also wrong to claim that a Brexit vote would immediately push up the cost of borrowing.
Among seven statements branded “likely false” – the outcome not yet certain – was the Treasury claim that “significant access” to the EU single market would mean accepting continued open door immigration.
Also that a free trade deal would reduce British firms’ access to the single market, both of which ministers say is not the case.
It was also “likely false” that Brexit would harm national security and reduce foreign investment.
Three Government statements deemed “only partially true” were that there is no guarantee Britain can fully replicate existing cooperation on things like crime, that the UK would have to pay for significant access to the EU single market and that inflation would be 2.3 per cent higher after a year.
Inflation has risen by 1.8 per cent since last March, but is also up in the eurozone.
The two Government statements deemed true were that failure to reach an EU deal by the end of two years would see the UK leave without one, and that a Leave vote would affect Britain’s influence on EU decision-making on its Brexit strategy.
Yesterday, Nick, now Lord, Macpherson, who was a top civil servant at the Treasury until shortly before it published its report on the likely cost of three different versions of Brexit, claimed that the analysis “still looks rigorous and remarkably prescient”.
But how politicians presented it, including then Chancellor George Osborne’s threat of a cost-cutting “punishment” Budget in the event of a Leave vote, was a gamble that “in defeat becomes a symbol of a losing campaign”.