On Wednesday, June 23, 2021 — the five year anniversary of the Brexit referendum — The Spectator had a good article about how wrong Project Fear’s predictions were.

Excerpts from ‘Five of the worst Remain predictions five years on’ follow (emphases mine).

The sources for these are then-Chancellor George Osborne, the banks, an international accounting firm, then-Prime Minister David Cameron and the EU’s Donald Tusk.

George Osborne

George Osborne and the Treasury peddled three Project Fear disasters: impoverished households, huge job losses and what The Spectator calls a ‘punishment budget’.

On households, using Treasury figures, he predicted that each household in Britain would be poorer by £4,300 in 2030. Even the Remainer BBC had a problem with that. Their fact check said that the figure was:

questionable and probably not particularly helpful.

In reality, the opposite has happened:

records from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show in the five years since that real disposable income per head has risen from £5,177 in the second quarter of 2016 to £5,354 at the end of 2020. 

On the jobs front, Treasury figures predicted 500,000 job losses across Britain.

In reality, early in 2020, before coronavirus hit, the employment rate was at a record high:

a million jobs were added by the time Covid hit, with the employment rate for those aged between 16 to 64 rising from 74.5 per cent in June 2016 to 76.6 per cent in January 2020 – the highest level since 1971.

Before the 2016 referendum, Osborne told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the UK would leave the EU with no economic plan, therefore, a punishment budget of higher taxes and public spending cuts would have to be implemented.

In reality, after Cameron resigned at 9:30 a.m. on June 24, 2016, Osborne left his post as Chancellor. Philip Hammond, his successor, said that no such budget would be implemented.

As a result:

Hammond’s first budget was described as a ‘low-key package’ that increased national insurance contributions for the self-employed and enjoyed stronger-than-expected tax receipts since the EU referendum. Britain even finished the year as one of the fastest growing economies in the G7.

The banks

Goldman Sachs predicted a British recession by early 2017.

Nomura and Credit Suisse predicted falls in GDP: 1.3% and 1%, respectively.

JP Morgan predicted that Scotland would leave the Union and create their own currency.

In reality, Scotland is still yearning to break free with no plan on how to do it:

with the British economy growing up until the first quarter of 2020 when Covid struck with 1.7 per cent annual GDP growth in both 2016 and 2017 followed by 1.3 per cent in 2018 and 1.4 per cent in 2019.

Big accounting firm

PricewaterhouseCoopers predicted a loss of up to 100,000 financial services jobs.

EY (Ernst & Young) came closer to the true figure:

Rivals EY estimated last month that PWC’s figure had overestimated such losses by a factor of nine, with just 7,600 going overseas as of March 2021.

Donald Tusk and David Cameron

The EU’s Donald Tusk predicted the loss of:

Western political civilization in its entirety.

David Cameron predicted a Third World War.

In reality:

it appears that the greater threat to the EU is in fact its own leaders, given the ongoing debacle of the vaccine rollout in the face of public dismay. Western political civilisation meanwhile has somehow remained intact.

Ordinary citizens — the 52% who voted to Leave — can discern the situation on the ground better than the experts — our notional betters — can.

Thanks again to all Britons who voted Leave on that rainy, miserable day five years ago.

We’re out and, together as a Union, we are putting the ‘Great’ back into Britain. Our coronavirus vaccine rollout has been spectacular, surpassing the EU’s by a country mile. More great accomplishments for us lie ahead.

When it comes to the EU, better out than in.