06-15-2017, 10:30 PM
Watching Brexit unfold is such a pleasure. One year on from the referendum of 23 June 2016, it is now clear that what we predicted is coming true: leaving the European Union is exceptionally difficult (assuming it is even possible), carries an undeniable cost, and plays havoc with the politics of the country attempting it – as the fiasco of Britain’s snap election, on 8 June, amply demonstrates. That’s why I was in favour of a victory for leave: it would mean all the Europhobes and Eurosceptics of the union would see their dreams shatter on the brick wall of reality.
Yet more than nine years after the slump of 2008 began, wages – the yardstick by which most people judge whether the economy is doing well or not – have not recovered. In fact, according to the Office for National Statistics, they have gone backwards. The average basic weekly wage, adjusted for movements in prices, now stands at £458. This is a quite staggering performance, which breaks all sorts of records for all the wrong reasons. There has been nothing like the current squeeze on real wages in living memory. The Resolution Foundation, a thinktank that concentrates on the living standards of those on middle and low incomes, says the 2010s are on course to be the worst decade for wage growth since the one that included the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.
All the frontrunners in the nascent Conservative leadership election would make voters less likely to back their party if they became leader, according to a new poll. The finding comes as a survey by Survation, the most accurate pollster of the general election, gives Labour a six-point lead over the Tories in their first poll after the election. But supplementary questions asked by the pollster in the same survey show that Boris Johnson, David Davis, Michael Gove, Amber Rudd and Philip Hammond would all make people less likely to vote Tory.