Project Fear (cont.)
REALLY, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. In recent weeks, David Cameron and George Osborne have predicted a vote for Brexit will lead to – among other disasters – genocide, war, recession, migrant camps in Kent, house price collapse and the end of cheap holidays.
During this period, the polls have moved towards Leave, as growing numbers of voters reject the increasing hysteria being whipped up by Project Fear.
But far from recognising the folly of treating the public like children, the Remain campaign will today deliver its most lurid and apocalyptic warning yet. Standing alongside former Labour chancellor Alistair Darling, Mr Osborne will say the shock of Brexit would be so great that, in an emergency Budget, he would be forced to raise the basic rate of income tax by 2p, the higher rate by 3p and inheritance tax by 5p.
A gargantuan black hole in the public finances would also, he will insist, mean £15 billion of spending cuts, with the NHS, defence, education and pensions hit.
Typically, Mr Osborne singles out cherished services for the chop and ignores his sacred foreign aid budget which, at more than £12 billion, could make up much of the imagined shortfall. The Chancellor would do well to remember his terrible track record of incompetent Budgets failing to meet their woefully inaccurate targets.
As for Mr Darling, we should remember he presided over the biggest economic crash in Britain’s post-war history.
Not for a minute does the Mail accept their ludicrously bleak prognosis for the future. The irony is that several countries in the EU — Greece, Spain, Portugal and increasingly Italy and France — are the very economic basket cases the Chancellor says Britain will become if we break away. The ever-more mighty Germany is, of course, an exception.
What this demonstrates is Mr Osborne’s willingness to talk his country down, and his contempt for the electorate. Does he really think the British public are idiots who will be meekly bludgeoned by such brazen and fantastical scaremongering?