Leading Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg MP has launched his most excoriating attack on Bank of England governor Mark Carney to date.
The Somerset MP, who fronts the European Research Group (ERG) of Tory Brexiteers in Parliament, was motivated to speak out after the Bank of England boss published an economic forecast for ‘No Deal’ Brexit predicting a catastrophic 8 percent crash in GDP in a single year.
The prediction was so dire that even former members of the central bank’s Monetary Policy Committee, such as Remain-supporting economist Andrew Sentance, stepped forward to ask: “Does anyone really believe any of this as a real-world scenario?”
Sentance further suggested that the Bank of England was “undermining its credibility and independence” with such “extreme scenarios and forecasts”, adding that the “reputation of economic forecasts has taken a bad blow today with both [the Treasury] and [the Bank of England] appearing to use forecasts to support political objectives.”
Mr Rees-Mogg, who normally opts to kill his political opponents with kindness was even more scathing, branding Governor Carney “a second-tier Canadian politician who failed to get on in Canadian politics and got a job in the UK.”
He added that, contrary to the establishment hype around the well-spoken technocrat, he did not think Carney was “greatly respected”, and accused him of being “deeply politicised to the damage of the Bank of England’s reputation.”
Interestingly, Carney is not only Governor of the Bank of England, but also a member of the General Council of the European Central Bank, whose meetings and documents are confidential — and the European Union has previously struck down a “problematic” law requiring its own central bank boss to take an “oath of fidelity to the country and its interests” as incompatible with their responsibilities on said General Council.
Rees-Mogg’s intervention comes as David Davis, the former Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union and the first frontline politician to resign from Theresa May’s government after it became apparent that she was pursuing what he describes as “Fake Brexit”, launched a similar attack on the similarly dire forecasts of the Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip ‘Remainer Phil’ Hammond’s Treasury.
“The Treasury’s forecasts in the past have almost never been right and have more often been dramatically wrong,” Davis said in a speech to the Brexit-backing Economists for Free Trade group.
“The Treasury forecasts for the effects of a Leave vote made in May 2016 are these: they said that in the 18 months after the referendum the economy would contract by at best 0.1 percent and at worst 2.1 percent. What happened? It grew by 2.8 percent.
“The Treasury was wrong to the tune of between 2.9 – 4.9 percent. This is a sum of up to £100 billion. Quite a lot of money. Quite a big mistake,” he noted dryly.
“[Former Chancellor] George Osborne spelled out the numbers in starker terms. Unemployment would jump by 520,000 under the ‘cautious’ projection and by 820,000 if the exit was on [World Trade Organization] terms… Needless to say, none of this spine-chilling nonsense came to pass. Families are no worse off and the economy has since grown by around 4 per cent. Unemployment has fallen by hundreds of thousands,” he added.
In particular, Davis took issue with the Chancellor’s decision not to show his work by disclosing the underlying assumptions behind his forecasts, branding this behaviour “disgraceful”.
“The Withdrawal Agreement and the Political Declaration are a bogus prospectus,” he concluded.
“They will keep Britain in orbit around the EU. We will be nothing more than a satellite state ruled from afar. It is our duty to reject that prospectus and genuinely take back control.”