The Telegraph, for so long one of the great cheerleaders of Brexit, suggested during the campaign that any warnings about the economy were scaremongering or part of project fear, After the vote they thought everything would be rosy and in one notable recent column (HERE) actually claimed that world growth was surging making "a mockery of Brexit panic".
Now the tune has changed. In what seems to be a grudging acknowledgement that there is a problem, The Telegraph seeks to put the blame on those who issued the warnings! "Don't blame Brexit for this rate cut, blame project fear" is the headline to their editorial (HERE).
This is amazing, not least because it points to a dent in consumer confidence that the warnings are supposed to have caused. Yet the BoE assumes that retail spending will increase at 2.5%, just as they had assumed before the vote. In other words the rate cut is not even mainly intended to address consumer confidence but business confidence. The Telegraph assumes that everyone, including all the economists, the markets and global businesses and organisations like the IMF were all taken in by British government warnings. As someone has already pointed out, if these people can be influenced simply by statements from governments we wouldn't need monetary policy at all.
Professor Simon Wren-Lewis – of the Blavatnik School of government at the University of Oxford – says this doesn’t add up:
“For this idea to be true, it isn’t just consumers who have been collectively fooled, but firms who have stopped investing and hiring, and the markets. In fact, the only people who think the negative effects of the uncertainty created by Brexit are unreal are those Brexit advocates who now seek to pretend it has nothing to do with them".
Having urged people to behave like lemmings, they now blame those who were shouting the warnings and as the terrible impact of Brexit grows, they absolve themselves and clamour ever more loudly for someone else to fix it.
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