The Lies of the Land

by Adam Macqueen

  It was recklessly ambitious. The ‘Four Freedoms’, guaranteeing the free movement of goods, capital, services and people between member states, had been a fundamental principle of the EU and its predecessor communities ever since the Treaty of Rome. They were pretty popular with the newest recruits to the club (the ones whose inhabitants were doing all that travelling westward), who were unlikely to agree to them being curtailed. This meant that Cameron had to concentrate all his persuasive powers on the single biggest hitter in the EU, German chancellor Angela Merkel. A charm offensive involving cosy chats and episodes of Midsomer Murders had failed to convince her to back him over the fiscal compact treaty, but he was convinced he stood a better chance this time around.

  Once again, he was wrong. Merkel had grown up behind the wall in East Germany, and that experience had been formative to her political character in the same way Britain’s island status has shaped generations of UK politicians. She was constitutionally incapable of putting up barriers where none needed to exist. ‘Germany will not tamper with the fundamental principles of free movement in the EU,’ she announced at a summit that same month, and just like that, the central plank of Cameron’s negotiations was kicked away.34 He tried pushing for what he called an ‘emergency brake’ – a temporary curb on the number of EU migrants the UK was obliged to admit – but Merkel wouldn’t back that either, and no one in Whitehall could actually suggest any way of making it work. He was left with a mishmash of proposals about access to benefits that read like a weak compromise – for the very good reason that it was a weak compromise. Taking no for an answer was, it seems, an option after all.

  ‘£4,300 a year: Cost to UK Families if Britain leaves the EU.’

  HM Government poster, unveiled by George Osborne, 18 April 2016

  A cynic is supposedly a person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer from 2010 until his ignominious sacking in 2016, often came across as a man who didn’t have any values at all but could slap a price on anything.

  As one of the key figures of the Remain campaign, Osborne relentlessly concentrated on the numbers. In vain did Labour activist Will Straw, the supposed boss of the cross-party ‘Stronger In’ coalition, protest that making it all about money might work for the Tory audience Osborne was used to, but it wouldn’t have the universal appeal that was needed to ensure they topped 50 per cent. Campaign analysts warned that people did not – could not – translate highfalutin concerns about the economy into an understanding of the direct impact on their own lives, say, in the cost of their shopping or whether or not they had a job. But it made no difference. Osborne’s ‘views were disseminated – it seemed at times – on tablets of stone,’ wrote Tim Shipman in All Out War, his account of the campaigns.35 ‘Osborne was totally open about his plan: it was to follow exactly the same playbook… that had led to victory in the Scottish referendum and given the Conservatives their surprise majority in the general election the year before. The first leg of the strategy was to publish reports by the Treasury on the risks of leaving the EU.’36

  These reports, unveiled early in the referendum campaign, did indeed look terrifying. One was two hundred pages of drastic figures like a 6.2 per cent drop in GDP, a ‘black hole’ of between £36 billion and £45 billion in public finances and rises in the basic tax rate of either 8p or 10p in the pound. It would be ‘the most extraordinary self-inflicted wound’ which would leave us all ‘permanently poorer’.37 And we’d be poorer by a specific amount, as emblazoned on the officious poster in front of which Osborne posed to deliver his report: ‘£4,300 a year: Cost to UK Families if Britain leaves the EU’.38

  But hang on a second: was every single family going to lose exactly that much? Both the ones with six kids, and the ones with no kids at all? The same shortfall for Sir Alan and Lady Sugar and a single mum on benefits? Obviously not. The amount was apparently for an ‘average household’ – whatever that might be – but it swiftly emerged that Osborne’s boffins had reached this sum by taking the (estimated) total loss of GDP by 2030 and dividing it by the number of households which existed in the UK… in 2015. Even without the temporal inconsistencies, the sum was meaningless. ‘The government is confusing GDP per household with household income,’ noted the BBC’s ‘Reality Check’ service, which was shaking down every statistic from each side of the referendum. ‘GDP is currently about £1.8tn a year – if you divide that by 27 million households you get £66,666. But average household income is about £44,000. They are clearly not the same thing.’39 Leave campaigners, who had successfully managed to rebrand any warnings of possible consequences from Brexit as ‘Project Fear’ and ‘talking down Britain’, now gleefully rebranded the Treasury document as ‘George’s dodgy dossier’.40 ‘Our point is that people will be considerably worse off, and we simply changed it into something more understandable,’ huffed Craig Oliver, chief spin doctor for both Downing Street and the Remain campaign.41 That they had also changed it into something risibly meaningless seemed to have passed him by.

  But the chancellor wouldn’t learn either. Two months later, just days from the vote, Osborne was back with more prophecies of doom, this time in the form of an ‘emergency budget’ that he claimed he would be forced to implement one week after a Leave vote, to plug a £30 billion ‘black hole’ which would apparently instantly open up in the nation’s finances.42

  In the intervening period, pollsters for the Remain campaign had found that the £4,300 number had fallen on stony ground because it had a ‘spurious specificity’.43 Despite his poor reception, Osborne was ready to barrage the public with yet another set of ridiculously precise numbers. He would have no choice, he said, but to put basic income tax up by 2p in the pound, raise the higher rate by 3p, and also raise inheritance tax – the last having totemic significance for the chancellor as he had turned it into a battle ground with Gordon Brown in the 2010 General Election. Alcohol and petrol prices would rise by 5 per cent. Budgets for policing and transport would be cut by 5 per cent, and spending on the NHS, previously ring-fenced, would have to be ‘slashed’. All other manifesto commitments would also be abandoned. A full £15 billion would have to come out of government spending as a whole, because we would quite simply not be able to ‘afford the size of the public services we have at the moment’.44 In the Commons, his neighbour and closest political ally David Cameron joined in the finger-wagging: ‘Nobody wants to have an emergency Budget. Nobody wants to have cuts in public services. Nobody wants to have tax increases…. We can avoid all of this by voting Remain next week.’45

  It sounded like a threat, and that was exactly how the opposition portrayed it: not a proposed emergency budget but a proposed punishment budget. The Leave team were able to get their retaliation in early, because they had signed up to the mailing list for Stronger In’s embargoed press releases. So, when Osborne unveiled his plans during the 8:10 a.m. interview slot on Radio 4’s Today programme on 15 June 2016, he had already heard them being shot down – on the preceding news bulletin. No fewer than fifty-seven of his party’s backbenchers had scrambled together to sign a round-robin letter saying they would refuse to vote for such a budget in the event of Brexit. As the day wore on, eight more names were added to the list, and leaders of other parties, including Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn, piled in to say they wouldn’t support it either.

  When Britain voted to leave the EU on 23 June, the supermassive black hole that the chancellor had forecast failed to open up. On 27 June, three days after his BFF David Cameron announced he would be moving out of the house next door, Osborne broke cover. He told the country that the vote ‘will have an impact on the economy and our public finances…. Given the delay in triggering Article 50 and the Prime Minister’s decision to hand over to a successor, it is sensible that decisions on what that action should consist of should wait… for the new Prime Minister to be in place.’46

  It will be a long time before we know exactly what the consequenc
es of actual Brexit, as opposed to the vote for Brexit, will be. I suppose it’s possible that in 2030 we’ll all find ourselves staring dumbly at a deficit of precisely £4,300 in our joint bank accounts. But the immediate aftermath turned out not to be such a dire emergency after all.

  ‘We send the EU £350 million a week let’s fund our NHS instead’

  Slogan, Vote Leave campaign battle buses, 11 May 2016

  The bus – probably the most famous red bus since the one Cliff Richard jumped on board for his Summer Holiday – was unveiled by Brexit’s biggest hitter, Boris Johnson. He descended its steps for the first time in Truro while brandishing a Cornish pasty, a foodstuff that – ironically – owes its protected geographical indication status as one of the best of British products to Brussels bureaucrats. Over the next six weeks every other significant figure in the Vote Leave campaign – Michael Gove, Iain Duncan Smith, Gisela Stuart, Douglas Carswell, Andrea Leadsom, Priti Patel and a host of other members of Her Majesty’s Government – made a point of positioning themselves in front of the unmissable white-on-red slogan. There was a second version of the message too, for those incapable of dividing by seven: ‘We send the EU £50 million a day. Let’s fund our NHS instead.’47

  But whichever way you looked at the sums, we sent the EU nothing like that much money. According to the Office for National Statistics, the gross figure which the UK contributed to the EU was £19 billion a year, but thanks to the rebate which Mrs Thatcher negotiated in 1984 – something anti-EU campaigners were usually only too happy to bang on about – we only actually sent £15 billion.48 (The name is misleading, as it wasn’t so much a rebate as money that never got, er, ‘bated’ in the first place.) Since we were also one of the twenty-eight countries that the EU spent its budget on, in the form of regional funds, farm subsidies, academic grants and the like, plenty of money also flowed back in the opposite direction. So the actual sum which Britain handed over to the EU, never to be seen again, was more like £11 billion – or around £250 million a week.49 But Dominic Cummings, the ruthless and bloody-minded head of the official Vote Leave campaign, publicized the bigger figure – and continued to do so even after the UK Statistics Authority said it was ‘misleading and undermines trust’.50 Even former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell, notorious for his bullheaded determination in pushing his own version of reality on the public, was gobsmacked: ‘I can’t remember campaigns where you mount the campaign based on a lie, and then when it’s exposed, you just keep going’.51 But that is exactly what Cummings did.

  When he was hauled in front of the parliamentary Treasury committee to account for his figures on 20 April 2016, Cummings refused to concede any ground. ‘Yes, that is debited from the UK…. That is exactly what the ONS [Office for National Statistics] says,’ he sneered when it was pointed out that much of the cash never left our shores. ‘If you do not like that then you should argue with the ONS, not with me.’52

  No less an authority than Prime Minister David Cameron had described Cummings, a former special adviser to the education secretary, as a ‘career psychopath’.53 In the words of Steve Baker, a pro-Leave Tory MP, ‘If you don’t care about what collateral damage you sustain, he’s the weapon of choice. He operates with the minimum of civilised restraint. He is a barbarian. Dominic has undoubted mastery of leadership and strategy and political warfare. But he will not let himself be held to account by anybody.’54

  It was the same with that NHS logo, which appeared like an official stamp on the bus’s side. The health secretary had already dispatched a letter to the Vote Leave campaign threatening legal action after they used it on leaflets without permission, but a Vote Leave colleague told journalist Tim Shipman that Cummings was ‘literally jumping around saying, “We’re going to use the NHS logo and they’re going to hate it!” ’55 The Remain campaigners were utterly outplayed. Their official pollster, Andrew Cooper, briefed his colleagues very early on that ‘in a world where almost no facts are known and nothing sticks, a surprising number of people think it costs £350 million a week to stay in the EU and this money could be spent elsewhere if we left.’56 His boss Craig Oliver despaired: ‘This is absurd – does it mean I can make something up that suits me and assert it?’57

  The answer to Oliver’s question appeared to be yes, if you did it with enough chutzpah. That May Boris Johnson went to an aluminium processing plant to be filmed feeding an enormous cheque for £350 million into a furnace; when Sky News presented him with an identical one the following October and asked if he would sign it over to the NHS, he tutted that they were ‘doing a pointless stunt’.58

  Perhaps the weirdest thing about the whole affair is that the real figure was equally shocking: £250 million is still a stonking amount of money by any normal person’s standards. It is considerably more than the highest jackpot ever won on the National Lottery (a mere £161 million). For all the protests from the Institute for Fiscal Studies that it represents less than a percentage point of GDP, both it and Cummings’ preferred gross sum are the sort of numbers which register only as ‘a hell of a lot of money’. It’s not just those of us who don’t have to count up anything higher than our monthly pay packet that are afflicted by this problem, by the way. I once had a conversation with a cabinet minister who was charged with giving collective approval to the sort of eleventy-billion-pound headline announcements Gordon Brown liked to throw around as chancellor. She confessed that she and her colleagues found it all but impossible to get a proper grasp of the sums they were discussing. Even Cummings, hauled in front of the parliamentary committee, got his billions and millions muddled up at one point. Ultimately, this is exactly what the Vote Leave boss had counted on: that ongoing confusions about figures in the hundreds of millions would only serve to repeatedly emphasize that a hell of a lot of money – specifically our money – went to Europe. Everyone else, whether they liked it or not, played along with his game.

  As for the idea of handing over all the cash to the NHS, that was a cynical piggyback on an institution often regarded as our ‘national religion’: the proposal didn’t even make it as far as the small print. Vote Leave had also made promises to safeguard various groups, such as scientists and farmers, who were funded by the EU. If they took their ‘fair’ share of the supposed £350 million jackpot, there was clearly no way the full sum could also be given to the health service. Besides, Vote Leave were not in any position to make funding guarantees: ‘we have not given a specific and detailed budget because it is not our role to,’ Cummings shrugged.59 They were not the government.

  But the Leave campaign did contain a lot of familiar faces from the government, and that was enough to convince some – perhaps many – people. ‘I would go mad if this money doesn’t go into the NHS, I will go mad,’ fretted a Sunderland voter called Shirley Bain to the Guardian a few weeks after the referendum vote. ‘I want to be assured that this money – because that’s why I voted to come out.’60 When in March 2017 pro-Remain Labour MP Chuka Umunna generously presented the government with an opportunity to write the £350 million a year guarantee for the NHS into the legislation for their Brexit negotiations, Theresa May, who at least nominally supported Remain before transforming herself into the hardest of hard Brexiteers, declined to take him up on it.61

  Even those who tried to keep on top of the details often found themselves in a muddle about exactly who was saying what. You could find plenty of otherwise clued-up Remain voters complaining post-referendum about Nigel Farage’s disowning of the £350 million pledge. For once the UKIP leader was telling the truth – as the key frontman of rival campaign group Leave.EU, he had had nothing to do with the bus, preferring to focus his own publicity campaign on out-and-out racism instead. When Farage had chosen to throw around figures for the UK’s ‘membership fee’ – as he did in his televised debate with Nick Clegg in April 2014 – he had made up a different figure, rounding up to ‘£55 million a day’.62 Arron Banks, Farage’s friend and funder, knew the score. ‘It was taking an Ame
rican-style media approach,’ he told journalists as, on the other side of the Atlantic, Donald Trump closed in on the Republican nomination for US president. ‘What they said early on was “facts don’t work” and that’s it. The Remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact, fact. It just doesn’t work. You have got to connect with people emotionally. It’s the Trump success.’63

  Three days after the referendum result, former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith, a man who has always taken a creative approach to both numbers and reality, was asked about his commitment to the £350 million pledge. ‘I never said that during the course of the election,’ he declared.64 Most news reports of his denial were illustrated with photographs of him giving interviews during the campaign standing in front of a very familiar vehicle. The letters behind his head were nearly as big as he was: ‘We send the EU £350 million a week. Let’s fund our NHS instead.’

  ‘Turkey (population 76 million) is joining the EU’

  Vote Leave poster, 22 May 2016

  Subtle it was not. The image was of a European passport forming an open door, through which a trail of footprints – not just immigrants, but dirty immigrants! – was marching.65 There was nothing to explain why it would be so terrible for Turkey to become a member of the EU other than the fact its people were, well, Turkish. The only possible significance of the ‘population 76 million’ parenthetical was to imply that as soon as they were able, every single one of them would be on their way here, overwhelming the country – which seemed, to be honest, a bit unlikely. For good measure the Leave campaign suggested in an accompanying briefing note that they would all be bringing weapons with them: ‘Crime is far higher in Turkey than the UK. Gun ownership is also more widespread.’66

  The biggest problem with the poster, distributed for the most part online, was that it was nonsense. Turkey was not joining the EU, in any sense of the present tense. The country had applied to join when the EU was still the EC, way back in 1987. It had had to wait a full decade before even being declared ‘eligible’ for accession discussions. Those didn’t start until 2005. And at the time of Britain’s referendum, out of thirty-five policy areas where it was necessary for Turkey to meet EU membership conditions, it qualified in a single one. Negotiations in twenty other areas – including free movement of workers, financial services, social policy and employment, and foreign, security and defence policy – had not even opened. The country’s military occupation of northern Cyprus, which it invaded in 1974, was a big issue. The European Commission, whose representatives were appointed by member governments, had noted in 2015 that Turkey was, if anything, moving backwards when it came to its application, with ‘significant backsliding’ in the past two years, notably ‘in the areas of freedom of expression and freedom of assembly’.67 A draconian crackdown by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan after the attempted coup in July 2016 sent the country further towards the back of the queue.