A No Deal Brexit will cause UK house prices to crash 30 per cent, the pound will be worth less than the dollar, and unemployment will rise by more than one million.
Or so says the Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney.
But no one believes him, any more than they believe the claim – attributed to DEFRA Secretary Michael Gove — that Britain could run out of clean drinking water; nor the one from the government, claiming that it would cause a 9.3 per cent reduction in GDP; nor the most risible claim of the lot — that the surrender document on the table represents a “good deal that fulfils the vote.”
That last claim, by the way, comes courtesy of Prime Minister Theresa May. May was once asked what the naughtiest thing she’d done as a child and replied that it was “running through fields of wheat.” If that’s really the case, then she has been making up for lost time since. Certainly, I’d say that telling such blatant lies to the electorate when you’re prime minister comes rather higher up the sin list than disturbing a few sheaves of corn. If she were a company CEO and tried selling a deal on such a blatantly false prospectus she’d be out of her job in no time and facing heavy fines and a possible prison sentence.
Same goes for the World’s Official Second-Worst Canadian Mark Carney. Carney is a creature of the global financial elite, Davos Man personified, a tentacle of the Vampire Squid (Goldman Sachs, where he worked for many years, as all the world’s worst central bankers tend to do). What Carney doesn’t know about compliance and regulation and fiduciary duty isn’t worth knowing.
Yet apparently, when you’re Governor of the Bank of England, these rules don’t apply. You can just make up shit, really the crazier the better, about the bad things might happen if your old organ grinder George Osborne and the rest of your Remainer establishment chums don’t get their way. And the dumb public are just supposed to sit there nodding like imbeciles because, hey, the actual Governor of the actual Bank of England must know better than we peasants do about economic forecasting, right?
Jacob Rees-Mogg, with his usual charming restraint has made a joke about all this nonsense:
“Before the referendum we were threatened with the plague of frogs. Now they warn of the death of the first born.”
This is true. In the run up to the referendum, the global Establishment — everyone from the then Prime Minister David Cameron to the head of the International Monetary Fund Christine Lagarde to President Obama to the inevitable Mark Carney — ganged up to concoct all manner of doomsday predictions about what would happen if Britain voted Brexit. Apart from a dip in sterling (not unexpected given the markets’ resolutely Remainer mentality, but also not disastrous given the boost to exports), none of those grim prognostications came even close to coming true.
But behind the humour lies a very serious concern: we now appear to have entered an era where the United Kingdom — a nation internationally renowned for its probity; the world’s fifth largest economy where everyone wants to do business — is now in the hands of a political Establishment which holds the truth in about as much regard as did Stalin’s Politburo.
This is a quite extraordinary and a recent development. Sure, Churchill once said that the “truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies” — but he was talking about the special circumstances of wartime. Sure, we’ve always expected politicians, as the roguish Thatcher minister Alan Clark once put it, to be occasionally “economical with the actualité.” But rarely if ever before in British political history, has the Establishment lied on such a scale and with such shameless fervour.
Rees-Mogg says of Carney:
“It is unusual for the Bank of England to talk down the pound and shows the Governor’s failure to understand his role. This is Project Hysteria. The reputation of the Governor has plummeted by more than any economic indicator. It was always a mistake to appoint a Canadian politician to a senior economic role.”
True. But in many ways, Carney and his ilk are doing us all the most enormous favour. Every time these mendacious toerags open their lying lips and spout yet more porkie pies, we’re reminded exactly who the enemy is and why we voted Brexit.
Like President Trump’s Swamp in the U.S., the British governing elite are self-serving parasites, shysters, con-artists, and traitors who give not one smidgen of a damn about the interests of the ordinary people they are supposed to serve.
None of Carney’s predictions will come true. But even if they did, those of us who voted Brexit would still think it was worth it — if only for the joy of showing scumbags like Carney exactly what we think of them.