Brexit Armageddon was a terrifying vision – but it simply hasn’t happened
By Larry Elliott – The Guardian.
Project Fear predicted economic meltdown if Britain voted leave, so where are the devastated high streets, job losses and crashing markets?
Unemployment would rocket. Tumbleweed would billow through deserted high streets. Share prices would crash. The government would struggle to find buyers for UK bonds. Financial markets would be in meltdown. Britain would be plunged instantly into another deep recession.
Remember all that? It was hard to avoid the doom and gloom, not just in the weeks leading up to the referendum, but in those immediately after it. Many of those who voted remain comforted themselves with the certain knowledge that those who had voted for Brexit would suffer a bad case of buyer’s remorse.
It hasn’t worked out that way. The 1.4% jump in retail sales in July showed that consumers have not stopped spending, and seem to be more influenced by the weather than they are by fear of the consequences of what happened on 23 June. Retailers are licking their lips in anticipation of an Olympics feelgood factor.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/20/brexit-eu-referendum-economy-project-fear
Also read:
Don’t be fooled. There will be damaging fallout from Brexit – By
Two months on, leave campaigners now acknowledge that a key driver of their successful campaign was not to argue via fact and evidence, but rather to stir raw emotions – “psy ops” as Iain Duncan Smith has called it. Fact-based criticism was dismissed as part of “Project Fear”, a way of monstering inconvenient challenges to the blithe it-will-all-be-fine claims of leave. It worked then, and to a saddening degree, it is still being deployed.
Comments
Too soon to know Brexit’s full effect. Britain hasn’t yet cut its umbilical cord from the EU.
“the Treasury, the Bank of England, the International Monetary Fund and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development – about the dire consequences that would inevitably flow from Brexit.”
Since these organizations, including several others along with government are FULLY RESPONSIBLE for the economic and financial doldrums and disasters the British economy has been experiencing over the past several decades, the people were wise not to listen to another of their ‘the sky is falling’ extreme fear mongering. Brexiters cannot be blamed for the 2008 meltdown that Britain also suffered. London is home to more wealthy absentee foreigners than local natives. London is the money laundering capital of the world. None of which benefit the locals, except to get jobs cleaning these folks houses, maintaining their yards, and panhandling for their suppers like the Will Hutton guy. Not that I feel terribly sorry for these folks given their country’s history of the rape, plunder, murder, exploitation and oppression of weak, defenseless countries. Karma?