I DON’T want to make light of the death of George Michael but I imagine the news generated a kind of relief on the faces of some BBC editors. No longer would the pro-Remain Today programme have to lead on its own scoop – former Bank of England governor Lord King’s comments on Brexit – and could instead fill up most of its two hours playing pop music.
REX
What we should have woken up to yesterday morning was the headline that Lord King believes Britain should have “greater self-confidence” in leaving the EU and that we should quit the single market and customs union. It would not make sense, he said, to remain in the customs union when it would preclude doing our own trade deals with countries outside the EU.
He added that free movement should be “non-negotiable” – that the Government should get on and devise a migration policy for post-EU Britain, not throw it into the pot of things to be negotiated as part of our leaving settlement.
For the benefit of Radio 4 listeners who turned off after the umpteenth airing of Careless Whisper and didn’t get to hear the short clip of Lord King which was eventually played, the former governor also made some damning remarks about the euro. He intimated that the single currency is doomed because the EU has “simply not put into place the framework to make it a success”.
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n the end, he added, the EU will have to recognise that it was wrong to rush ahead with the single currency in 1999 and that the patience of German voters would run out when they realised their money is being thrown away bailing out southern European economies.
This was explosive stuff from Lord King, not least because it conflicts so starkly with the views of his successor at the Bank of England, Mark Carney, who lost no opportunity during the referendum campaign to claim we would be making a huge mistake if we voted to leave.
Last January Carney claimed that leaving the EU would put Britain at the mercy of “the kindness of strangers” because foreign investors in government bonds might decide to dump them.
In March he warned a committee of MPs that Brexit presented “the biggest domestic risk to financial stability” and that it would push up inflation.
He was still at it in August when the Bank of England announced a panic 0.25 per cent reduction in interest rates, which Carney said would “blunt the slowdown” that Britain was suffering as a result of the Brexit vote.
We now know that Carney’s warnings were just fantasy. The economy continues to grow strongly – in fact faster than any other large EU country. International investors have carried on investing in UK government debt and while the rate of inflation has risen, it is still only just a little over half the Bank of England’s target.
While Lord King did not directly criticise his successor it was quite clear that had he still been governor during and after the referendum campaign he would have had a far more constructive attitude. He would not have spent his time talking down the UK economy.
It is refreshing to hear Lord King being upbeat because it was once he who was the needlessly gloomy one. In his last months as governor in 2012 and early 2013 he issued a series of warnings on the economy which, as we later discovered, was doing a lot better than he suggested in recovering from the crisis of 2008/09.
Part of the job description of leading the Bank of England is to boost confidence in the economy, not to engage in Panglossian propaganda but to balance warnings of economic risks with observations on how things could turn out very much better.
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Mark Carney says he was “only doing his job warning of risks” but why didn’t he also warn of the risks of staying in the EU and being dragged down by the festering economic crisis in the Eurozone?
I can’t imagine Carney ever bringing himself to admit in public that there are great opportunities for Britain in leaving it.
Whatever it is that Remainers like about being members of the EU they cannot deny that leaving will give us the freedom to negotiate our own trade deals with countries outside the EU, something which has been denied to us for the past 44 years.
It allows the possibility, at least, that we will be able to open up trade with China and Japan, the world’s second and third largest economies, with which the EU has so far failed to deregulate trade.
As Lord King said yesterday, these are not opportunities that can be exploited by being halfhearted about Brexit. He may have intended his comments as a rebuttal to the suggestion by Carney that the Government should commit to a drawn-out transitional phase of withdrawal.
No one will serve our interests by dreaming up some fiddle by which we are half in, half out of the EU. The debate needs to move quickly to how best we can exercise our new freedoms. What should be our migration policy, our trade policy, our industrial and agricultural policies? There is plenty of room for debate on all those matters.
Brexit doesn’t commit us to any particular line, it merely repatriates the powers to decide for ourselves.
But so long as frustrated Remainers prefer to spend their energy trying to undo the referendum result, they are debates in which it will be difficult for them to engage.
http://www.express.co.uk/comment/expresscomment/747489/lord-king-brexit-clarity-confidence-bank-of-england-governer-mark-carney
