Matthew Lynn

Less than the cost of a Spotify subscription. Less than Netflix charges you every month. True, you might not be able to get the latest Taylor Swift remix or episodes of Stranger Things, but the Labour Party is trying to reach out to the streaming generation with the claim that the state costs you less than either your music or TV fix. According to its Twitter feed, someone earning just £82,000 a year has to pay only £8.33 a month for ‘free healthcare, free education, properly funding the NHS, lifting children out of poverty, ending the climate crisis, and ending homelessness.’ https://twitter.

The morning of 13 December. A series of salacious revelations about his private life have sunk Boris Johnson’s campaign. A re-energised Nigel Farage has led a Brexit party surge in the north, splitting the Leave vote. The ousting of Jo Swinson in a coup organised by refugees from the People’s Vote campaign led to Remainers flocking back to Labour. The SNP has swept Scotland. Plaid Cymru and the Greens have picked up a dozen seats where they co-operated. And a couple of Tory rebels have managed to hang on as independents. After the dust settled on the most chaotic election campaign in memory, Jeremy Corbyn had just enough votes to lead a Labour/SNP/Green/Plaid/Independent coalition. The first 100 days of the Corbyn government were to prove a challenge, however.

If you wanted to completely destroy a modern twenty-first century economy there are various places you could start. You could print money to finance unlimited government spending. You could put up tariff barriers on all your main imports. You could even try raising the minimum wage to £30 an hour, while cutting the working week to three days. In truth, however, if you wanted to do some real long-term damage your best bet would probably be this. Nationalise the broadband network. Unfortunately, that is what the Labour party has just proposed. Labour has made a splash today with a headline grabbing proposal to provide free broadband for everyone by 2030.

We were about to crash out of the EU without a deal. The political system was in deadlock. Businesses were fleeing the country and investment was drying up, all against a backdrop of global trade wars and slumping demand across the eurozone. And what happened to the British economy against all those headwinds? As we learned this morning, it sailed right through the storm with steady, if hardly spectacular, growth. It now looks certain that far from reducing us all to poverty, leaving the EU won’t even create a brief technical recession. The predictions of catastrophe could hardly have been more wrong. If you had to choose a day to officially declare Project Fear dead, this would be it.

The schools will all get new books. The hospitals will all be rebuilt. Long-suffering public sector workers will finally get a pay rise and there will be a ton of money to fight climate change. Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson is promising there will be a £50 billion ‘Remain Bonus’ to spend on public services after she has won the general election and cancelled our departure from the European Union. If she weren’t quite so humourless she might even be tempted to put that figure on the side of a bus. But hold on. From die-hard Remainers, who accuse the other side of peddling dodgy figures and who pride themselves on ‘evidence-based’ policy-making, that claim is more than little outrageous.

The uncertainty will be lifted. Businesses will know where they stand. Our politics can return to something approaching normality, and the government can get on with tackling all the other issues the country faces. Whatever the precise pluses and minuses of Boris Johnson's Withdrawal Agreement for getting out of the EU, you might think that finally resolving the issue would be helpful for the economy. Except apparently not. Just when you might think we had seen enough forecasts of this deal or that to last several lifetimes along comes the National Institute of Economic and Social Research with the alarming news that not only will leaving the EU make us poorer, this particular way of leaving will make us even poorer than Theresa May's deal. By how much?

Some fiddly amendments from Sir Oliver Letwin that no one quite understands. A legal action against someone or other from Gina Miller. Lots of protest marches. A petition or two – and possibly even an unreadable novella from Ian McEwan/JK Rowling/John Le Carre (delete as applicable) ranting against Brexit. We don’t quite know yet how exactly we will fill up the latest three-month extension to the already protracted saga of our departure from the EU. It probably won’t be a great deal different from the last three months, or the three months before that. There is one thing we should know for sure by now, however. It will be very bad for the economy.

It is one of the most diabolical plots of all time, a conspiracy so vast, so deep, and so wicked it could have come from the pen of Dan Brown. A small cabel of powerful hedge funds have installed Boris Johnson at Number 10, paying for his campaign and his advisers. Once there, his task is to crash the UK out of the European Union without a deal, plunging the economy into chaos, and sparking a rout of sterling and a collapse in the FTSE. In the background, those same hedge funds will have ‘shorted’ the pound and the London equity market. In the process, they will make a few quick billion before they disappear to their Cayman Islands' mansions to sip champagne and chuckle over the brilliance of their scheme.

The government has lost its majority. The constitution has fallen apart. The country no longer has any idea whether it is leaving the European Union or not. Historians and political commentators are queuing up to tell us this is the lowest point in the country's history since the Suez Crisis/Civil War/Dissolution of the Monasteries (delete as applicable). And yet, amid all this chaos and confusion, something else is happening. The economy, slightly surprisingly, is purring along quite smoothly. The explanation? In truth, the EU doesn't make much difference to the economy anymore. And insofar as it does, leaving is a marginal improvement. The City expected the economic data released this week to make grim reading.

The ‘Non’ was not quite as frosty as it might have been. When Boris Johnson met up with France’s president Emmanuel Macron there were at least some pictures of the two men talking amicably. Even so, while Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel and some of the EU’s other leaders have at least left the door a tiny bit open to renegotiating the UK’s departure from the EU, Macron made it clear it was almost completely shut. In fact, Macron is making almost as big a bet as Johnson. His calculation is that a no-deal Brexit will work to France’s advantage. Yet he may well have mis-calculated – and it could easily drive his own economy into recession.