Is Carney’s growth forecast anything to get excited about?

It is really worth bothering with Mark Carney’s upgrading of the Bank of England’s growth forecast for 2018 from 1.5 per cent to 1.7 per cent? Carney, you might just remember, warned before the EU referendum that the UK would most likely suffer a technical recession if Britain voted to leave. Even in August of that year, six weeks after the vote, when it was already clear that the economy was not diving into the abyss, he was predicting a sharp slowdown. Growth in 2017, he suggested, would come out at 0.8 per cent. In the event it was 1.8 per cent.

We have seen enough forecasts over the past couple of years to realise that Michael Gove was absolutely right when he said during the Leave campaign that the country has had enough of economic experts who try to foretell the future. They cannot do it. Such is human psychology, though, that we cannot resist clinging to whatever information we have to hand.