The Daily Telegraph, much to the chagrin of its elderly readers\u2019 cardiologists, is Britain\u2019s most excitable newspaper. On a sunny day, when a pleasant breeze blows through Britain and all our troubles seem so far away, it is there to remind us that the country is on the brink, on the slide, in the middle of a meltdown, in a full-blown spiral, heading for extinction-level event and going the way of the dinosaurs.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Telegraph turns every drama into a crisis \u2013 especially those dramas with non-white actors playing Edwardian gentry. It is the only paper that could write \u201cCelebrity Traitors is yet more evidence that Britain is heading down a slippery slope to illiterate oblivion\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It employs a journalist called Allister Heath, known by some at the paper as Chicken Little after the children\u2019s character who felt an acorn dropping on his head and declared that the sky must be falling. He churns out columns like the magnificently precise \u201cBritain has a 75 per cent chance of going full banana republic\u201d (November 19), plus cheery stuff like \u201cThis is how civilisations finally die\u201d (September 24), \u201cStarmer\u2019s Britain is descending into anarcho-tyranny\u201d (September 3) and \u201cIt is now too late for Britain to avoid financial Armageddon\u201d (June 11). A normal newspaper would have sent him to the seaside for a nice long rest; the Telegraph promoted him and made him editor of its Sunday title.<\/p>\n
But now, to many of its readers, the Telegraph has finally gone too far. And the culprit is not the ludicrous Heath, busy shrieking that \u201cStarmer and Reeves are now a threat to British democracy\u201d (December 3), but a quite reasonable article about Brexit.<\/p>\n
On November 29, veteran assistant editor Jeremy Warner, described by the paper as \u201ca serial winner of awards\u201d and \u201cone of Britain\u2019s leading business and economics commentators\u201d told the Telegraph faithful it was \u201cTime to admit the truth: Brexit has been an unmitigated economic failure\u201d. His article discussed the recent estimate by the US-based National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), that \u201cBrexit has reduced UK GDP by 6pc to 8pc, far more than most previous estimates\u201d.<\/p>\n
The NBER estimate was so apocalyptically Heathian in nature that Warner began with some caveats. \u201cAll economic analysis of Brexit tends to reflect the prejudices of those involved in putting it together,\u201d he wrote. \u201cAll five of those who have put their names to the NBER paper are highly respected economists but there doesn\u2019t appear to be a Brexit-supporting voice among them.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
And he added that because UK GDP growth since the start of 2016 had marginally outstripped that of Germany and Italy, \u201cthere is something faintly incredible about the (NBER) numbers\u201d.<\/p>\n
Yet this was where the good news ended for Brexit-supporting readers of the Brexit-supporting Telegraph. \u201cEven Brexit\u2019s most enthusiastic cheerleaders \u2013 including the leading lights of Reform \u2013 would concede that on almost every front, Brexit has so far proved a major disappointment,\u201d wrote Warner.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Instead, he said, it has delivered \u201ca regulatory burden that almost unbelievably makes business leaders long for the comparative freedoms once enjoyed within the European Union\u201d. The \u201cBoriswave\u201d of higher net migration and post-Brexit trade deals were \u201cjudged by the OBR to be too insignificant to qualify as a meaningful positive for medium-term economic growth.\u201d<\/p>\n
Warner concluded: \u201cIf Brexit was supposed to be a moment of national economic renewal, it has comprehensively failed to deliver as it was supposed to.\u201d He might have added that the king was in \u201cthe altogether, altogether as naked as the day that he was born\u201d.<\/p>\n
In the Emperor\u2019s New Clothes, a single shout from the crowd is all it takes for everyone to realise that the monarch is naked. Alas, the same has not happened after Warner\u2019s warning cry, and the Telegraph\u2019s comment section remains a throng of people praising the daring cut of Brexit\u2019s invisible cloth.<\/p>\n
The piece has attracted 4,155 comments, the vast majority of them hugely negative. \u201cUnmitigated rubbish\u201d, \u201cridiculous article\u201d, \u201cboring\u2026 one-sided predictable hatchet job\u201d, \u201cpathetic\u201d and \u201cwhat a load of Brussels Sprouts\u201d are among the acclaim for Warner, as well as a suggestion that he might \u201cmove to the EU if you hate our country so much\u201d. That was, of course, an option Jeremy Warner would have had if we had not left the European Union.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would give up 3% or more economic growth just so I didn\u2019t have to be told what to eat, drive, think or how to work by a commission of unelected Belgians,\u201d wrote one subscriber, who didn\u2019t give their views on giving up at least double that in lost GDP. \u201cRemainers were in charge of Brexit from start to finish,\u201d wrote another.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A third, even more confused, fretted about something that didn\u2019t sound like Brexit at all \u2013 \u201cif we refused the French access to fishing waters unless they stop the dinghy parasite invasion or play fair on other fronts, they would turn off our electricity supply in the winter\u201d.<\/p>\n
The best comment of all came from a breathless-sounding Mervyn Lee. He wrote: \u201cThe problem is the governments have not made the most of Brexit we should now be like Singapore and deregulate everything and not panda to Europe.\u201d Panda! No wonder Brexit is now an endangered species!\u00a0
After this outbreak of unwelcome reality, it surely can\u2019t be long before the Telegraph retires Jeremy Warner and gives Mervyn his column instead. For, after all, it is a paper whose mascot should be the Brexit panda: eats, shoots itself in the foot and leaves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Daily Telegraph, much to the chagrin of its elderly readers\u2019 cardiologists, is Britain\u2019s most excitable newspaper. On…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":612425,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5226],"tags":[802,748,2000,299,5187,1699,4884,2452,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-612424","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-brexit","8":"tag-brexit","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-eu","11":"tag-europe","12":"tag-european","13":"tag-european-union","14":"tag-great-britain","15":"tag-media","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115663413261027807","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=612424"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612424\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/612425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=612424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=612424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=612424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}