| | | Britain Booms After Brexit — Will Last Country To Leave EU Turn Out The Lights?
2 Editorials by TERRY JONES
European Union: OK, quick: Of the seven major industrial nations, what country grew fastest last year? If you said Great Britain, you were dead right. Funny, because just last June after the Brexit vote, many experts were predicting a British collapse.
Here's the reality: "Britain ended last year as the strongest of the world's advanced economies with growth accelerating in the six months after the Brexit vote," says The Times of London.
Britain's economics community, not to mention its badly biased, anti-Brexit media, now have egg on their faces. Not only did Britain survive Brexit, it thrived after Brexit. In the first half of the year, preliminary data show economic growth averaged just 1.8%. But that jumped to 2.2% in the second half after Brexit.
Moreover, dire prognostications of market disaster and a global meltdown never came to pass. After the June 24 Brexit referendum, in which fed-up British citizens voted to leave the EU among dire prognostications of doom, Britain's bellwether FTSE 100 stock index surged to a record level by year end.
"It's a fair cop to say that the profession is to some degree in crisis," said the Bank of England's chief economist, Andrew Haldane, who likened economists' failed predictions in 2008 (when no one foresaw the financial crisis) and this year (nearly everyone predicting a crisis after Brexit) to renowned British weather forecaster Michael Fish's now-infamous TV prediction there would be "no hurricane" in 1987 — one day before the Great Storm of 1987.
Right now, there are EU "exit" movements across Europe, as average citizens weigh the benefits and costs of EU membership and decide that it's just not worth it. Too much loss of local control, too little freedom, too much bureaucracy, and too little ability to correct the haughty EU bureaucrats' official edicts. Since the EU went into full effect at the end of the 1990s, European nations have careened from fiscal disaster to fiscal disaster, while growth and productivity have both lagged.
Meanwhile, EU bureaucrats — complaining of "populism" and the "far right" — have let millions of refugees into Europe, including hundreds of terrorists, angering citizens who feel as if they're being systematically replaced.
France, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and even Germany, have burgeoning movements to leave the EU. Seeing Britain's success, it's only a matter of time before others join them in taking back control of their own countries.
Then, the only question left to ask may be: "Will the last member to leave please turn out the lights?"
RELATED:
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About All Those Dire Brexit Forecasts? Never Mind
No, Brexit Won't Kill The U.K.
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