The Bank of England has offered us a range of scenarios, anticipating potential outcomes from different types of Brexit, based on a long series of assumptions. These, for example, are possible eventualities relating to unemployment:
Jacob Rees Mogg has been complaining about the ‘wild inaccuracies’ of previous Treasury forecasts. That’s quite irrelevant. A projection is a conditional statement, saying what will happen subject to certain assumptions; a scenario is an alternative possible future; a prediction is a statement about what will happen. Projections and scenarios are not predictions. Putting lifeboats on passenger ships is not based on a prediction about what is going to happen; it’s a preparation for a particular scenario. It doesn’t mean the ship is sinking. Mind, in this case it might be.
I’m wondering about the timing of this. It looks like an attempt to persuade the HofC to support May’s not particularly good deal which may in fact be the bad deal which she insisted was worse than no deal.
The lesson from the Titanic is that you need more than one lifeboat unless you only intend to save a lucky few from drowning.