Brexit continues to deliver sterling results – in the most unexpected of places.
You may well be familiar with some of the strong economic gains the UK has reaped since 2016: low unemployment, wage growth, interest rates above zero and a positive yield curve, inflation actually hitting the Bank of England’s target (good luck finding any of this in the eurozone of course).
It’s for reasons like this that earlier this year my colleague Nickolai wanted to launch a campaign for “three more years of Brexit chaos”, by merit of how well the UK economy has performed since the referendum. Provided you didn’t pay attention to the newspapers and just looked at the economic data coming in, things were looking pretty good. We didn’t end up calling for said chaos while brandishing large signs before Westminster – as seems to be a national pastime for many these days – but you get the idea.
What was already the undisputed king of the global FX market, the City of London, has seized an even greater share of the world’s currency trades since 2016, for reasons I detailed in The Fleet Street Letter Monthly Alert not long ago. You can almost feel the anguish of the journalists, tearing up as they raggedly type “despite Brexit” with clenched teeth yet again.
However, amid all this good news, who would have thought a repeat of the 1981 Eurovision was on the cards? Certainly not me.
I was too young to experience Buck’s Fizz winning the Eurovision back in 1981, but thanks to Brexit, I can now vote for a repeat. Taking a look at who’s standing in my local constituency of Kensington, I discovered that I can actually vote for one Jay Aston, the youngest member of the original band, who is now standing as an MP for the Brexit Party. What interesting times we now live in, where Eurovision winners are staunch eurosceptics.
Kensington is currently held by Labour, who won it from the Conservatives in the last election, a shift which may well have been brought about by the Grenfell tragedy. Interestingly however, I’ve only been receiving propaganda in the mail from the Liberal Democrats, who’ve been churning it out at an impressive pace.
As for whether I would have voted for Buck’s Fizz back in 1981, and whether I’ll do that now that I have the opportunity… well, I’ll leave that to your imagination.
On the topic of “Making Your Mind Up”, I would imagine it’s hard to find any politico even remotely interested in small government, low taxation, and sound money at any point in recent history, but its lack of disciples in the developed world seems especially strong these days. Here’s US presidential candidate Andrew Yang:
“What’s a man gotta do to get elected around here?”
Source: Twitter
My £0.02 on tomorrow’s election (for what it’s worth), will be that Boris Johnson will win with a majority, but it’ll be much slimmer than many expect. In the three years since the referendum, many millennials who opposed leaving the EU have joined the electorate, while many older folks who supported leaving are no longer with us.
Several general elections ago, this shift in demographics wouldn’t have mattered so much, but age has since become one of the most (if not the most), significant fault lines in British politics.
I’ll leave it there for today. I’m just off to host an election special conference call for readers of The Price Report. Tim Price’s mind is very strongly made up – and as euroscepticism goes, I reckon Tim would give even Jay Aston a run for her money…
All the best,
Boaz Shoshan
Editor, Capital & Conflict
Category: Market updates