A new study has estimated that the impact of a vote to Leave the European Union predicted by George Osborne’s Treasury was out by around £100 billion.
As the Remain campaign’s ‘Scaremonger-General’, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer had Treasury mandarins produce estimates predicting that the British economy would suffer an “immediate and profound shock” in the event of a Leave vote.
“A vote to leave would cause an immediate and profound economic shock creating instability and uncertainty,” the report warned.
“The central conclusion of the analysis is that the effect of this profound shock would be to push the UK into recession and lead to a sharp rise in unemployment” — estimated at around 500,000, or over 800,000 under more pessimistic projections.
“Instead of employment falling by hundreds of thousands, it has risen by hundreds of thousands,” notes the new report, which will be published in an upcoming edition of Standpoint magazine, according to The Telegraph.
“Instead of house prices going down, they have gone up. Instead of the public finances lurching more heavily into deficit, they have been better than at any time since the Great Recession, making the prospect of an eventual surplus far from silly,” it adds.
The report, which was authored by noted economist Professor Timothy Congdon, does not pull its punches, attributing the Remain campaign’s bogus estimates to “a mixture of malice and ignorance, of wicked politics and trashy economics”.
Morever, the report is clear that the estimates do not merely represent a “giant error” insofar as events have proved them wildly inaccurate but a “gross miscarriage of government”.
This echoes similar findings by a team from Cambridge University’s Centre for Business Research, which judged the ‘Project Fear’ reports “very flawed and very partisan”, and Professor David Blake of the Cass Business School, City University London, who described them as “dodgy dossiers” worthy of Tony Blair, and an “extraordinary abuse” of economic modelling.