FALSE £350 MILLION PER WEEK CLAIM WON THE REFERENDUM

Dominic Cummins, one of the "masterminds" behind the leave campaign has written a piece for The Independent (HERE) where he claims the £350m a week figure swung the result in their favour. This doesn't surprise me but it has many people up in arms.

It is shocking that a claim which leave insisted was accurate although all mention of it is now forgotten and Nigel Farage has admitted he thought it was a mistake is now said to have been decisive in winning the referendum. 

GOVE DOUBLES DOWN ON NHS PLEDGE

In an amazing display of hubris Michael Gove (HERE) he claimed the £350m a week figure was robust and argued it could not yet be proved true or false because the UK had not yet left the EU. “The money is there and it’s for the government to decide how to spend it once we leave,” he said.

This is the man who has been claiming for months that all the economists (or rather the majority and especially those who argued remain) have been proved wrong. Note, not that their claims have yet to be proved true or false, but that they were wrong, full stop.  I cannot wait for the day he is confronted with all the lies and hypocrisy.  

Mr Gove is a dangerous simpleton. He looks as if he knows what he's talking about when patently he does not and this is what makes him dangerous. He now says his earlier remarks about experts were "unfairly quoted" and he been referring only to a “sub-class” of economists and pollsters.

“In the now notorious comment that I made..the point I made is not that all experts are wrong, that’s manifestly nonsense – expert engineers, expert doctors, expert physicists" are now it seems OK.

WORKING CLASS WILL PAY AGAIN

May in her closing conference speech this week said the working class paid the price for the financial crash in 2008-9. The tragedy is that it is they who will pay for Brexit as well.

Many of those who voted leave seemed to believe we will somehow be better off separating ourselves from our largest export market where there are no trade barriers.  They voted (apparently) as a protest at their own lives but leaving will only make matters worse.  No one has had the courage to explain this yet and perhaps they won't be able to until economic reality arrives in a year or two.

BREXITEERS CRAZY ESSAYS

Ian Duncan Smith's Centre for Social Justice has published what they say is a plan for Brexit although it is titled the Brexit Essay Collection (HERE). Contributors included IDS himself and Peter Lilley but the best one is by John Redwood.  Twitter users are scathing about the whole thing describing it as laughable and blind stupidity (HERE).

It is indeed laughably stupid.  Mr Redwood's action plan for Bexit is (literally) this:

1. Offer talks on trade and tariffs if they wish to change anything, saying we are happy to offer them no change to current arrangements.

2. In other words, we stay in the Single Market as now, without freedom of movement and the contributions.

3. The advantage we have on trading is that we are happy with the status quo, so they are the ones with a problem if they wish to change it.

4. This reverses the presumption of many commentators that the UK needs to negotiate with the rest of the EU and is the supplicant.

In other words, unilaterally withdraw from freedom of movement, refuse to pay contributions then say we are now happy with the (new) status quo and if YOU refuse it will all be your fault.  This from a grown man!  It is all reminiscent of the old union barons that he used to criticise.

And they all claim to know why people voted leave, all different reasons but no one apparently voted leave to get an extra £350 million a week for the NHS - their main campaign bus slogan!

MAY BACKS AWAY FROM KEY BREXIT PLEDGES

The Guardian are reporting that Theresa May in a TV interview (HERE) is backing away from pledges to introduce an Australian points based immigration system as well as refusing to commit to £100m per week extra for the NHS (not even the £350m BoJo promised).

Leave campaigners and voters seem quite relaxed about it all but I wonder how they will feel in a few years when not only has every pledge been broken but none of the perceived benefits have materialised and actually, the economy is doing significantly worse, the jobless total is rising and the balance of payments grows ever wider.

WE STILL DON'T KNOW WHAT WE VOTED FOR

It's amazing that after two months there is still disagreement about why we voted the way we did. I read that we voted leave to regain control of our borders (Farage et al). Some people (Bojo and Daniel Hannan for example) think it was all about sovereignty.  Now Jeremy Warner in The Telegraph (HERE) is telling us it was all about free trade.

He says Theresa May should reassure the G20 when she meets them later this week that Britain voted "for the advancement of free trade, not against it".

This again highlights the problem. No one knows what Brexit means - except Mrs May perhaps who thinks it means, well .. Brexit. There you have it. What a shambles. There are bound to be tears when 80% of the population find out what Brexit means for them.

Those who voted because they thought migrants were driving down wages will be ecstatic to know that they will now be competing in world markets with folks from India (Per capita annual income about $1500).  No doubt Mr Warner will be able to explain all that easily down at The Dog & Duck.

Vote Leave Watch campaign launched to keep an eye on all the promises made

Some MPs and others have launched a campaign called Vote Leave Watch to hold pro-leave politicians to account for all the promises made during the campaign (HERE).  This is precisely what I intended when launching this blog.  It is clear to me that not everybody was taken in by the massive exaggerations and even outright lies, and many would have voted to leave come what may.

However, we are talking about a couple of percent of votes who, had they voted the other way, would have changed the result. If the lies influenced them, they should be exposed.

And as the economic and political problems begin to accumulate surely more people will realise what a huge mistake it was.  Also, as I have said before, as older people die and younger, pro Europe voters grow up, we will inevitably see a majority for rejoining.  Incidentally a new paper the New European is coming out and I've ordered a copy.

Vote Leave's Road Map for Brexit turns out to be just as wrong as all their other claims

Cambridge University's Faculty of Law, Centre for European Legal Studies CEL), had a look at Vote Leave's "Road Map" of Brexit which talked about avoiding Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty (HERE) and concludes that like much of Vote Leaves thinking, it was wrong.  Article 50 is undoubtedly the only legal means of withdrawal.

But why do they want to avoid the process of leaving set out in the Lisbon Treaty anyway?  The reason is obvious, it gives the EU the whip hand in any negotiations.

Vote Leave also claimed we could withdraw by May 2020 but CEL's Working Paper No 3 casts doubt on this timetable as well and says the only credible solution to this would be by using a "minimal" Swiss style agreement to achieve a settlement quickly and adding further agreements later.  But as CEL points out this may not be what the EU wants and I have read that the EU do not want any more Swiss style agreements because of serious problems with the present one.

Vote Leave mysteriously wipe own their website - are they destroying the evidence?

The Vote Leave website has been mysteriously wiped it is being reported in The Washington Post (HERE). There is some speculation that it's being done to hide the evidence and prevent those sceptical of the many promises and commitments given from uncovering them.

However, the Post has apparently got an archived copy of the website that you can find (HERE) if you want to check in a year or two precisely how many of the promises like the one below have been kept or not.

The whole world knows we were lied to during the referendum campaign

The whole world knows we were lied to by the Leave campaign in the EU referendum. In the European parliament Guy Verhofstadt, a dutch MEP and former prime minister (HERE) told Nigel Farage they had all seen the "lies" about the £350m that did not exist.

Now the Washington Post is telling its readers the Brexit leaders are beginning to "walk back" from their promises (HERE).  I didn't realise how the foreign press had covered the EU referendum until now. It looks as if we, or at least many of those who voted leave, are the last to see that we were lied to and duped.

The terrible thing about this is that many, perhaps even most, of the leave supporters will not care. Ian Duncan Smith claimed he personally never said that £350m would go to the NHS although the press have pictures of him in front of the bus proclaiming this uneqivocally to the entire nation. Daniel Hannan didn't think anyone had been led to believe immigration was going to come down.  Worse are those people on the leave side who are now condemning racist attacks but failed to condemn UKIPs refugee poster with Nazi undertones, at the time, presumably because it was to their advantage.

The parliamentarian Edmund Burke once said, "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do [and say] nothing".  They knew the campaign was lying to the British people but remained silent.  Shame on them.  

The £350m per week saving was always an illusion - in every possible way

The widely derided figure of saving £350 million a week by leaving the EU was always an exaggeration.  But even the net figure of perhaps £120m per week needs to put into perspective in two ways.

Firstly, as Paul Johnson of the IFS said yesterday, the British government lost many years (not weeks!) of EU contributions by the amount the share prices of RBS and Lloyds, banks part owned by the taxpayer, fell during yesterday's market mayhem alone!  In other words the £350m a week is actually more like a rounding error in the public finances.

Secondly, speaking on radio 4 yesterday, a German MP, close to Mrs Merkel said we would not be given tariff free access to the single market unless we contributed to the budget as Norway does and because we wouldn't get the rebate, the amount we pay would actually go UP.  No country has tariff free access to the market as Boris was suggesting without contributing.

So, there we have it the £350m a week  saving may end up costing us money.  Money that may end up coming OUT of the NHS rather than going in.  How Boris would spin that will be interesting.

Leave campaign admit they never had a post Brexit plan

An anonymous Tory MP in favour of leaving the EU told Faisal Islam of Sky News (HERE) that there was never a plan for the post Brexit vote.  They literally had no idea of what would happen after a leave vote.

Apparently, and Mr Islam says he was not "making this up", the MP pointed to some government building and said it was the government's responsibility to have had such a plan ready.

Since the Leave campaign never clearly set out what it was they wanted and constantly changed their mind with trade arrangements ranging from those of Norway, Switzerland, Canada and Albania being suggested and dismissed by them on a daily basis and alternating between a trade deal and WTO rules it was perhaps not surprising the government had no plan.  Leave never kept to one aim for more than an hour or two. 

Corrosion and credibility in politics

During the campaign, the Justice Secretary (no less), Michael Gove said the Prime Minister's "apocalyptic warnings" on Brexit would test his credibility if they turned out to be false, as he accused Mr Cameron of having a "corrosive" impact on public life (HERE).

We learned today from Standard & Poor (HERE) that the $2.08 trillion wiped off global equity markets on Friday after the Brexit result was announced was the biggest ever daily loss, beating the Lehman Brothers collapse and 1987's Black Monday stock market crash.  So the warning was actually pretty accurate.

Since it was Mr Gove who dismissed these apocalyptic warnings as "scare mongering" whose credibility was tested?  Incidentally, this is the man, suggested as a future chancellor under BoJo, who does not believe in experts and trusts his own amateurish instincts. Whose credibility is on the line?

There are liars and there is Boris Johnson and Michael Gove

Nick Cohen has written a scathing profile of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove for the Guardian stunningly describing them as liars (read it HERE) and describing how Johnson was twice sacked for telling lies. They have a journalist's (for that is what they were) attitude to facts and experts and consider any suggestion that their opinions might be wrong as tantamount to impertinence.

These two led the official Vote Leave campaign and stubbornly defended the £350m a week going to the NHS even though the government's own statistics authority had condemned it as "misleading". From earlier posts (HERE) we can see it is now all too clear that we were lied to.

Daniel Hannan appears on Newsnight and dismisses the suggestion that immigration will reduce to tens of thousands

The second central plank of Leave’s campaign was the suggestion that getting out of the EU would reduce the level of immigration to tens of thousands. What they constantly told us was that you couldn’t get immigration down to the tens of thousands while we were in the EU with the clear implication that leaving would achieve it (otherwise why link the two points?).  

They omitted to tell us they had no intention of trying even after we left.  A small detail that perhaps escaped some of the Leave voters’ notice.  Mr Hannan said he didn’t think “anyone” thought that they would get EU immigration down to the tens of thousands. Really?  What not even one or two people down the Dog & Duck?

When the voters understand the sheer deceit that has been practised on them I fear for some of the Leave campaigners.  There is going to be real anger.

Nigel Farage admits the £350m per week for the NHS claim was “a mistake”

Almost before his victory had been properly celebrated, Mr Farage appeared on national television and in an interview with ITV’s Susanna Reid, admitted the claim that leaving the EU would free up £350 million pound a week extra for the NHS was a mistake and there were “no guarantees”. Bear in mind this was the central plank of their argument and had been robustly defended by Vote Leave throughout the campaign. I assume Mr Farage thought it had accidentally been painted in 1m high letters down the side of the Vote Leave bus. He obviously forgot to mention this during the campaign whenever the media questioned its veracity.

Today Ian Duncan Smith appeared on Sky News and in connection with the £350m figure claimed, "I never said that during the course of the election [sic]". So although both men knew the figure was untrue they didn't mention it. Remember, IDS was the person who accused the chancellor of being like pinocchio. 

I wonder what those voters for whom the £350m was an important factor think now?