House prices rising, Pound up and I thought Brexit was supposed bring on Armageddon
SO all still here then? Not dead yet? Third World War hasn’t broken out?
SO – all still here then? Not dead yet? Third World War hasn’t broken out?
There are no nukes raining down on us, so far as I can see.
What’s more, you’re probably still in the same house you were living in on June 22. Doing the same stuff.
No change.
You haven’t had to sell your kids for medical experiments in order to buy a loaf of bread.
House prices have not slumped — indeed, they’ve gone up, again.
We are not all carrying begging bowls and wishing to hell we’d voted Remain on June 23.
In fact, the economy is looking pretty pukka.
The grey-skinned experts at the International Monetary Fund warned us all that if we voted for Brexit we would be in a recession, right now, and things would get worse.
They’ve just had to revise that stupid prediction. Less than one month after we voted to leave, they’ve predicted the UK economy will rise by 1.7 per cent this year and 1.3 per cent next year.
So, they got it completely wrong, as usual.
And those figures are a hell of a lot better than the economic forecasts for Germany, France and Italy. Those countries stayed in the EU, if you re- member. Good luck to them. But not only that. We were told before the vote that investors would run like hell if we voted to leave.
And yet this week there have been a whole bunch of big new investments in the UK. Including a £24billion takeover of Arm Holdings by the Japanese communications giant SoftBank.
So industrial confidence is not deserting the country, as the Remain camp insisted it would.
I spoke to one of the country’s most senior economists recently.
He told me that there was no great problem with Brexit.
But there was a potential problem with the money men and the Remain camp talking our economy down.
That’s about the size of it. The rumours of our demise have been exaggerated by those who wished we’d voted to stay in the EU. They are desperate for us to fail.
And yet the indications are that we are not failing at all. Even the poor old Pound has bounced back remarkably after the big fall on June 24.
You see, the Remainers insist that the vote should be run again because the Brexit camp lied to the public.
Well, they probably did lie. But a lot less, I would suggest, than the Remain camp lied — with their warnings that the Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse were already being weighed in and would soon be at the starting gate.
And the rest of Europe? Ferment is growing daily. The French, or the Swedes, or the Dutch will be next to demand an exit.
The Hungarians are soon to vote on whether they should accept more than 100,000 immigrants into the country under EU rules. Go on, take a guess how that vote will turn out.
We made a brave decision on June 23. But with every day that passes it becomes more and more evident that was the RIGHT decision, too.
The day I ‘bullied’ Owen
THERE’S a perfectly good chance that a Welsh bloke called Owen Smith will be the next leader of the Labour Party.
He’s standing against the might of Jeremy Corbyn, on behalf of the Labour moderates.
I wish him well.
He was on a breakfast programme yesterday and talked about a “culture of bullying” at the BBC Today programme when he worked there 15 years ago.
He wouldn’t name the chief bully. I will – it was me. I employed him as a producer.
And the reason he said there was a culture of bullying was to excuse something he did one morning which got the programme into trouble.
I told him to find a police spokesman for the lead slot on the show.
D’you know what he did? Go on, have a guess. Yes, he rang 999. I suppose he thought it was an emergency.
The police went berserk. I think I shouted at him, in between fits of laughter.
There wasn’t a “culture of bullying” at Today, but there was a culture of shouting at Owen when he did something deranged.
Still, he was young. And other than that single . . . um . . . lack of judgment, perfectly competent.
Anyway, Owen, as leader of the Labour Party . . . I’d keep that number handy. You may need it.
Fatima’s right to cover it
FOR just about the first time, I don’t quite agree with my mate and colleague Kelvin MacKenzie.
Kelv questioned why Channel 4 News thought it was suitable to have a Muslim woman in a veil, Fatima Manji, report on the tragedy in Nice where
a Muslim nutjob had run amok in a lorry, murdering 84 people.
I don’t doubt for a minute that Channel 4 News chose Manji, above, deliberately to provoke.
And I don’t doubt that the veil is an Islamic symbol of female subjugation.
I don’t think teachers, for example, should be allowed to wear it.
But I don’t think we should start telling female reporters what they can and can’t wear.
And nor should Muslims be discriminated against in any profession.
Maybe Channel 4, which luckily nobody watches because it’s awful, will choose Fatima to report on all Muslim outrages and attacks.
I hope she’s not going to be too busy.
—WHY did 50,000 Brits go to Turkey on holiday this year?
Are they mental? Even without the attempted coup to overthrow the country’s horrible president, the place is a febrile rathole.
About as safe as going up to the leader of IS and saying: “I’m a Jewish homosexual infidel spy and I’ve an itch on my neck. Is there anything you can do to make it go away?”
Here’s a tip. With very few exceptions – maybe Malaysia, maybe Indonesia – avoid Islamic countries for your hols, huh?
The western leaders all condemned the coup against President Erdogan, despite loathing him for being an authoritarian Islamic despot.
That’s hypocrisy. And don’t forget, Turkey is the country David Cameron said he wished to see in the EU. Thank Christ we’re on our way out.
Mick does it old school
JUMPING Jack Flash has been at it again. Sir Michael Philip Jagger, 73 next Tuesday, is about to have his eighth child.
Mick’s minxy girlfriend Melanie Hamrick, aged 29, is expecting.
It is not so much a wonder that there is still lead in his pencil, but, given his age and lifestyle, that there is a pencil at all. Or a pencil case, for that matter.
Mick’s offspring, generally scattered around the world on catwalks, range in age from 45 to 17, and he is already a great-grandfather.
Congratulations to the two of them, anyway. It is rather refreshing to have a pop star who has babies in a way we might describe as orthodox, rather than buying them in job lots from a marketplace in Mogadishu, or cooking them up in a tube.
—WE don’t like it when it gets too hot, do we?
I tried everything to cool down on Tuesday. I put my underpants in the fridge, for a start.
And forgot they were there – only found them when I went to get out half a bowl of cauliflower cheese I’d saved for lunch. Especially flavoursome.
My dog was so whacked out she scarcely had the energy to fart, which was a rare blessing.
But anyway, given that everyone was moaning about the temperature, why, then, do we all book holidays in places where it’s worse than that all the time?
Is it just so we can enjoy air-conditioning?
—LORDY – have you seen Annie Hawkins-Turner?
She’s the American woman with breasts the size of a small Mediterranean island.
Both of them: Sardinia on the left, Corsica on the right.
She has made a lot of money from having vast, heaving, baps that make Katie Price look flat as a pancake. And she goes under the name of Norma Stitz.
Good luck to her – we have to make the most of what God has given us, I suppose.
I’ve got a penis the length and shape of a bat’s nose. If I could monetise this oddity, I would.
As it is I just use it to entertain guests at Christmas.