There are lies, damned lies and Boris Johnson’s weasel sums.
By no honest calculation can Britain’s net payment to the European Union be estimated as £350m a week. Nigel Farage admits it. So does the Daily Mail.
Even Johnson admits it. In his “glorious Brexit” essay in the Daily Telegraph last Friday the foreign secretary said that we would “take back control” of roughly £350m a week when we leave the EU.
A reasonable person might assume that Johnson meant that the country would have that amount of extra money to spend post-Brexit. What a “fine thing”, Johnson wrote, “if a lot of that money went to the NHS”.
In his spat with the UK Statistics Authority Johnson now says he is shocked, SHOCKED that his words should be understood in this crassly simplistic way. To suggest that he was claiming that £350m might be “available for extra public spending” is a “wilful distortion” etc. In other words, the foreign secretary’s defence amounts to an admission that the slogan on his famous Brexit campaign bus – “We send the EU £350m a week: let’s fund our NHS instead” – was bogus all along.
I will leave the politics to others. Let’s just look at the £350m figure – and the foggy reality of the EU budget.
Some Brexiteers now cheerfully admit that the figure was fake. To others, perhaps even Michael Gove, it has achieved a kind of mystical importance. The arch-Brexiteer Tim Martin, the founder of the Wetherspoons pub chain, announced on the BBC that the net payment figure was indeed £350m if you include the tariffs on goods imported to the UK from outside the EU.
Martin’s back-of-a beer-mat calculation is incorrect. Three-quarters of those trade tariffs do go to Brussels. They are, however, already included in Her Majesty’s government’s official calculation of Britain’s net and gross payments to the EU.
The European Union is broadly funded in three ways. It takes most of the tariffs charged on imports from the rest of the EU; it takes a small sliver of VAT receipts; and it takes contributions from member states based on their gross national income (GNI). The sums involved are large – but tiny compared with national government budgets. The EU spends roughly 1% of the GDP of the 28 member states – compared with between 35 and 58% spent by their governments. About 40% of EU spending goes to farm and rural subsidies, about 40% to aid to poorer regions and member states.
The system, already complex, has become cosmically unfathomable since Margaret Thatcher won an (entirely justified) rebate for Britain in the 1980s. There is now a rebate on the British rebate and varying forms of mini-rebate for five other EU states.
Such complexity is an invitation to distortion, as Johnson well knows. The foreign secretary has been misrepresenting the EU since he was reporter in Brussels for the Telegraph in the late 1980s. (Full disclosure: I was a reporter for the Telegraph in Brussels just before he was. We have never met.)
Thus Johnson now says that he is not suggesting that the UK net contribution is £350m a week. How could anyone think such a thing? He is making the extremely subtle claim that, post-Brexit, Britain will have full “control” over how it spends the roughly £350m (actually £342m in 2015-6) which Britain “sends” to Brussels. In other words, we might decide to spend the money which Brussels now spends in the UK in other ways.
This is not a subtle claim. It is a misleading statement wrapped in a lie.
First, the lie. Britain, as Johnson knows, does not “send” £350m a week to Brussels. The rebate won by Thatcher in 1984 is deducted first. This reduces our net weekly payment to around £250m (some say £275m).
When EU spending in Britain is included – on agriculture subsidies, research and grants to poorer regions – the UK net payment comes down to about £160m a week. Post-Brexit, Johnson suggests, “a lot of that money” could go elsewhere, and specifically to the NHS.
This is misleading. The government has promised to keep farm subsidies at present levels until 2020 and probably beyond (although maybe in a different form). EU regional grants, for transport and other infrastructure projects, do not go on pet schemes drawn up by Eurocrats. The EU money helps pay for projects that have long been planned at local and national level (which are then accepted by Brussels as suitable for EU support). Presumably many of those projects would continue.
That leaves a notional Brexit “bonus” of around £160m a week. It is uncertain how much of this could “go to the NHS”. The government has proposed a labyrinth of post-Brexit customs and legal institutions which would swallow up some of the savings.
Presumably Johnson fears that reasonable people would regard £160m a week as an acceptable price to pay for the benefits of EU membership. Why, otherwise, would he persist in outright lies and weaselly distortion of the figures?