Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: How Project Fear failed to materialise

Exactly a year ago today, George Osborne was busy unveiling the Treasury’s famously doom-laden analysis about Brexit. Now with his six jobs and bulging bank balance the former chancellor is busier than ever. But the worries he spoke of about economic uncertainty have failed to materialise, and the prophecies of misery foretold by Project Fear are nowhere to be seen.

The Daily Mail says the Treasury document ‘formed the centrepiece of Project Fear and deployed a barrage of apocalyptic forecasts’ about what would happen if Britain voted Leave. In reality, the paper says, only one in ten of Osborne’s predictions have come true – and the ‘the worst ones have all proved to be demonstrably false’. We were told unemployment could rise by half-a-million, for instance; instead, the Mail points out, employment levels are better than ever.

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