EU Referendum


Brexit: compounding the lies


25/11/2016




No more egregious a lie exists than the Vote Leave claim that Brexit would bring us a dividend of £350 million a week, which could be spent on the NHS.

But like most liars, the perpetrators don't know when to give up. In the Mail today is the wholly spurious claim that the "Brexit dividend" does exist after all and, over the course of three years from 2020, the UK stands to save £31.9billion from not making EU transfers, which can be used for domestic purposes.

The claim is repeated in several other media sources, including The Sun and Guido Fawkes, the latter apparently relying on figures "tucked away in the back of this week's Autumn Statement" which, the site claims, "forecast that "Britain is expected to stop tipping any money into the Brussels coffers in 2019-20".

On this basis thirteen "leading Leave campaigners" including Michael Gove and Gisela Stuart are urging the Government to spend the money on the NHS. Tory ex-health secretary Andrew Lansley is critical of the "disappointing" decision not to hand over extra money. He says: "The next two years are going to be incredibly difficult and I think the time is now for trying to put some measures in place to try and help health and social care through those next two years".

According to Guido, in an open letter to the Government, Gove, Gisela, Steve Baker and others say:
When we leave the EU we will be able to take back control of the billions of pounds of taxpayers' money we send to Brussels each year. We will be able to decide how we spend that money rather than EU bureaucrats. The OBR has revealed that the British people will get back over £10 billion net a year once we leave the EU. We believe that this Brexit dividend should be spent on our priorities – the most important of which is our NHS.
Thus we see, the "revelations" concerning the supposed savings come variously from the Autumn Statement or the Office of Budget Responsibility. Referring to the latter, we need to turn to page 160 for the relevant detail, which we see in Box 4.4. Headed: "External views on the possible scope of Brexit negotiations", this says:
The UK currently makes a substantial net financial contribution to the activities of the European Union. This contribution may not be eliminated entirely when we leave the EU, as some non-member countries choose to contribute to the EU financially in exchange – for example – for preferential access to the single market or funding for university research. Commentators also expect the EU to argue that the UK will have an ongoing responsibility for some EU liabilities.

The size and scope of any ongoing financial flows between the UK and EU will depend on the outcome of the negotiations over our future relationship. Neither the UK Government nor the EU have set out their negotiating positions.

As we know neither the Government's negotiating stance, nor its chances of success, we have not attempted to predict what the outcome of the negotiations will be and therefore what the financial flows will look like after we leave. As described in paragraphs 4.130 to 4.131, we have instead made the fiscally neutral assumption that any reduction in the net expenditure transfers that we would make to the EU if we remained a member will be recycled into other domestic spending – either to compensate private or public sector recipients for the loss of EU funding or to meet other spending priorities.
Alongside paragraphs 4.130 to 4.131, we see Table 4.27, reproduced here:


This has the actual "non-forecast", with the three financial years from 2019-2020 showing: "Assumed domestic spending in lieu of EU transfers”. The sums amount respectively to £13.0, £13.4 and £13.9 billion.

Turning to the Autumn Statement, we can go to page 59 for exactly the same figures, with the accompanying footnote, which states:
As we do not have sufficient detail about the Government's negotiation preferences, or the chances of achieving them, we are not able to make forecast how spending will be affected after the UK leaves the EU. We therefore make the fiscally neutral assumption that any reduction in transfers to the EU would be recycled into extra domestic spending.
In other words, both sources, in very similar terms, explicitly refrain from making any forecasts on savings or otherwise, and adopt the "fiscally neutral assumption" that there will be no savings – purely for accountancy purposes.

The savings thus claimed by Gove et al are, therefore, fictitious. No credible assessment of the Autumn Statement of the OBR report could in any way sustain the claims that, as the Express puts it: "Britain set for £32 billion bonus after quitting the EU". In fact, using either source to assert this in such a bald fashion is an outright lie.

Claims of this nature make liars of Mr Gove – who is now pocketing £150,000 a year from The Times - and his colleagues. They also reflect a dismal media which is content to feed its readers with a diet of lies. And yet – to judge by the Guido comments - there are plenty of gullible souls willing to believe this guff, despite the ready availability of the original reports on the internet.

By the end of the day, though, one can almost guarantee that other media sources will have climbed on the coprophagic bandwagon, compounding the lies of Mr Gove and his fellow travellers, misleading the public as they so often do. That is the nature of our media, on which our democracy is supposed to rely. We need better than this.