Don't listen to the ‘alternative facts’ being spewed out about Britain's economy

I don’t know about Donald Trump’s press conferences, but there are certainly enough ‘alternative facts’ being spewed out by the Remain lobby. This morning the Office of National Statistics (ONS) produced its first estimate for economic growth in the last quarter of 2016. It came out at 0.6 per cent, a notch up from the 0.5 per cent which analysts had been expecting and putting annual growth at 2 per cent. We can no longer claim to be the fastest-growing economy in the G7 as annualised growth in a booming US has accelerated to 3.5 per cent. Moreover, the ONS’s figures are provisional. But we can certainly claim to be the fastest-growing major economy in Europe – and it is quite clear that the forecasts made by the Treasury and many others for economic doom in the event of a Brexit vote were not just wrong; they were catastrophically so.