Project fear

We were about to crash out of the EU without a deal. The political system was in deadlock. Businesses were fleeing the country and investment was drying up, all against a backdrop of global trade wars and slumping demand across the eurozone. And what happened to the British economy against all those headwinds? As we learned this morning, it sailed right through the storm with steady, if hardly spectacular, growth. It now looks certain that far from reducing us all to poverty, leaving the EU won’t even create a brief technical recession. The predictions of catastrophe could hardly have been more wrong. If you had to choose a day to

‘Project Fear’ didn’t work out in the 2016 Brexit referendum, with voters turning against the ‘experts’ maligned by Michael Gove and other Leave campaigners. So it’s strange to see the Conservatives reigniting it again in the run-up to Tuesday’s vote on Theresa May’s Brexit deal, warning of six months of disruption at Dover and other ports in the event of no deal. There’s no evidence that this squeeze message is really going to work on Tory MPs and whittle down the scale of the expected defeat next week. The return of Project Fear is also a reminder of the danger of a second referendum for those who hope that it

It’s just over two years since the UK voted to leave the European Union in what proved to be a shock result that caught both politicians and commentators off guard. Unlike Lord Ashdown’s hat-eating, or Matthew Goodwin’s book eating after the two most recent General Elections, many didn’t get held accountable to their off the mark Brexit predictions. Happily, Mr S is on hand to correct that. Steerpike has compiled a list of some of the Brexit predictions that failed to come true: 1. JP Morgan: Scotland will leave the UK and get a new currency Days after the EU referendum, investment company JP Morgan announced in an email to

Enough of all these vital, apocalyptic, existential elections. They don’t half wear you out. The Scottish referendum was vital and apocalyptic, so they said, because the wrong decision would have seen Britain crack like a plate, and Scotland spiral off into insane debt, and residual Britain fade in geopolitical importance. Or, on other side, Tory rule for a millennium, which no Scot could ever want. Hmmm. Then the 2015 election was vital and apocalyptic, too, because Ed Miliband… Ed Miliband… Hang on. What was the big problem with Ed Miliband? There definitely was one. Ah yes, his dad hated Britain. Also he was incompetent. Didn’t even know how many kitchens

In the run-up to the referendum, the Treasury warned that unemployment would rise by half-a-million. Today, this prophecy comes in for criticism in the papers following yesterday’s news that the number of Brits out of work had tumbled to an 11-year low. It’s not only Project Fear which gets a hard time in the editorials though. The moaning ‘anti-Brexit mob’ are also criticised – while the Guardian savages Boris Johnson for making a ‘fool of himself’. The Sun launches an attack on the moaning ‘anti-Brexit mob’ in its leader this morning, saying that it seems that the better the economic outlook since the referendum ‘the louder the caterwauling’ from those unhappy with the

In the run-up to the referendum, we were warned Brexit would unleash misery. George Osborne suggested a vote for Brexit would lead to a DIY recession. And numerous business bosses and the great and the good piled in to add their warnings to the doom-mongering. Yet in the weeks since the referendum, their predictions of chaos have not come true. What’s more, many of those shouting the loudest about the consequence of Brexit are now furiously rowing back on their warnings. Here, The Spectator compiles the Brexit u-turns and referendum backtracking: In the aftermath of the vote, many major banks and financial institutions continued to warn that Brexit spelt bad news for the

In the referendum run-up, we were inundated with warnings and messages of doom and gloom about the untold damage Brexit would unleash – and unleash immediately. It took a pub boss – Tim Martin, the founder of JD Wetherspoon’s – to add a bit of perspective. Why, he argued, would consumer sentiment plunge of a majority voted Brexit and got what they wanted? Why, if we wouldn’t actually leave the EU for two years, would the economy fall of a cliff? At the time, he was mocked for knowing nothing more than how to pull pints. But now, with the prophecies of economic woe having failed to materialise, it seems he was more

Those who acted as the biggest cheerleaders for Project Fear in the run-up to the referendum now have the awkward task of changing tack. One of those shouting loudly was Rob Wainwright, the British head of Europol. A key campaign strategy of David Cameron was that Britain would be safer in the European Union – and, ergo, less safe outside of it. Joining him in those warnings was Wainwright, who said that if the UK was no longer a member of the EU, Britain would become a ‘second-tier member’ of the crime-fighting club. He said, in the event of Brexit, that: ‘It would make it harder for Britain to fight

The best thing that can be said for David Cameron’s current predicament is that he has been here before. His career has been punctuated by moments when the polls and the pundits have said he was done for. In 2007, with the new Prime Minister Gordon Brown enjoying a honey-moon and considering a snap election, this magazine pictured him on the cover with a noose and the headline ‘Get out of this, Dave’. He did. At times, even he has thought his leadership was over. On election day last year, he spent the early evening rehearsing his resignation speech to his closest aides. Hours later, he was hailing the ‘sweetest

‘Remain’ have being having a woeful time in the polls lately, with numerous surveys putting ‘Leave’ ahead. But north of the border, it’s been widely thought that it’s a different picture and that those wanting Britain to remain in the EU outnumbered those backing Brexit. A new poll out just now suggests that whilst that might still be the case, ‘Leave’ has also gained considerable ground in Scotland. The STV poll, put together by Ipsos Mori, shows that support for ‘Remain’ has been slashed by 13 per cent since April. Back then, 66 per cent of Scots surveyed backed Remain, compared to just 29 per cent who were planning on

It’s happened. After weeks of Project Fear warnings from the Remain camp — from WW3 to house prices actually falling —  Donald Tusk has offered the most apocalyptic warning yet. A clear frontrunner for Mr S’s ‘Project Fear’ award, the president of the European Council has claimed today that Brexit could spell the end of… western civilisation. Yes, Tusk says that a vote for Leave could lead to the end of ‘western political civilisation in its entirety’: ‘Why is it so dangerous? Because no one can foresee what the long-term consequences would be. As a historian I fear that Brexit could be the beginning of the destruction of not only the EU

Nicola Sturgeon urged the Government yesterday to lay off the ‘Project Fear’ strategy and instead focus on spelling out the positive reasons for remaining in the EU. Unfortunately, it seems it’ll take the Prime Minister some time to heed that advice. Cameron will warn today that Brexit would ramp up the price of a holiday. He’ll argue later that: ‘The choice facing the British people on 23 June is increasingly clear: the certainty and economic security of remaining in the EU, or a leap in the dark that would raise prices – including the cost of a family holiday. All the evidence points to the value of the pound falling

Churches are generally ideal venues for public debates. But there’s a slight chance that a speech about the perils of EU membership will be interrupted by a homeless person doing a pee in the corner. At a debate on Christian responses to the EU at St James the Less church in Pimlico last night, Giles Fraser left off quoting his hero Tony Benn on the evil of unaccountable power in order to do his muscular Christian duty and help eject the man, who spluttered invective as he departed. Did I imagine it or did he shout ‘Fexit Brexit’? A bit earlier, his opponent Ben Ryan had set out an optimistic

The Leave campaign was right to pour scorn on David Cameron’s warning this week that Brexit could threaten Europe’s military stability and lead to war. Boris Johnson mocks the Prime Minister about his prophecy on page 14. If Cameron really believed that Britain leaving the EU could lead to war in Europe, why on earth did he risk having a referendum at all? Why was he suggesting until a few weeks before his negotiations with EU leaders that he would consider voting for Brexit if he didn’t get his way? It’s easy to tease the increasingly shrill alarmism of the Remain campaign. But it is harder to say how exactly

So far the campaign for the EU referendum has resembled a contest as to which side can spin the most lurid and least plausible horror stories. On the one hand, the ‘in’ campaign claims that we’ll be £4,300 worse off if we leave; that budget airlines will stop serving Britain and that we will become more prone to terror attacks. Not to be outdone, the ‘out’ side warns that we will be crushed by a fresh avalanche of regulation and immigration, and more prone to terror attacks. The tone of the debate was summed up by Michael Gove this week when he accused the ‘in’ campaign of treating the public

After yesterday’s furore over Treasury warnings about exactly what Brexit will cost British families, today it’s Michael Gove’s turn to hit back. The Justice Secretary is set to accuse the Government of ‘treating voters like children who can be frightened into obedience’. It’s extraordinary just how quickly the war of words seems to be intensifying, given that there are still more than nine weeks to go until the actual referendum. But is there a danger that all this noise is just going to switch off voters to the actual arguments being made? Michael Gove did his best this morning to make a clear-cut case for ditching the EU after being