We Send the EU £ 350 Million a week let’s fund our NHS instead
Dimitrios Rentzos – Esher and Walton for EU
It is well known that the slogan on the bus was a lie. I am not sure the extent of the lie is clear. It hides in fact multiple levels of lying, not just the false figure of 350 million.
Lie - Level 1: The sentence itself is false and misleading.
a. We send the EU...
While the UK was in the EU, it could not send the EU funds because it was the EU. The UK contributed to the EU budget which was spent in a way that benefited all of the EU including the UK. This is like saying “Surrey sends the UK £X per week”. Surrey cannot send the UK funds since it is part of the UK. Also, the UK always contributed to shaping the EU budget and always had a right to veto any part of the budget expenditure it did not like.
b. …£350 million…
When it comes to government budgets absolute numbers do not mean much, only percentages have a meaning. The reason they use the absolute number is for people to think “oh my god my home cost half a million imagine what we could do with so much money”. This itself is not a lie, but a misleading way to present the information. Btw the contribution of each EU country to the EU budget is around 1.1% of the country’s annual GDP with the exception of the UK who paid less due to its rebate.
Lie - Level 2: The figure itself is wrong
a. The UK’s contribution was less than £350 Million.
A lot has been said that the figure is false and exaggerated. We do not know how they made it up. One assumption is that they only calculated what the UK paid to the EU budget ignoring what it received back. Even if that is true the value is around £250M.
b. The figure ignored what the UK gets back (in direct funds).
The sentence implies that this was the cost of EU membership. Of course, you need to subtract what the UK received back in direct funds. This was around £100M per week. Meaning that the actual cost to the UK was around £150M per week.
So if we subtract the payments (£250M) to the funds received (£150) that leaves a weekly cost of £100 million per week. It is true that the UK overall contributed to the EU budget. Does this mean that if the bus said £100M instead of£ £350M, it would have been a correct statement? After all £100 million a week is still a big amount. Of course not, because you need to take into account what other benefits the UK receives.
Lie – Level 3: Hiding the direct financial benefits
This lie works in conjunction with the constant barrage of negative EU misinformation, that essentially the EU does nothing and it is a bunch of bureaucrats.
The truth is that by joining the European Union some parts of the government are performed at a European level. This not only makes the EU stronger but is also financially much more efficient for all countries involved (since the financial aspect is the topic of the bus slogan I will only concentrate on that). Some of those savings are what I will call ‘direct financial benefits’ i.e. those that can be directly measured. With the UK exiting the EU those will add a huge cost to the UK budget.
For example, since the 2016 EU referendum, the EU has arranged comprehensive trade deals with Canada and Japan. The cost to the UK budget, for the UK getting a comprehensive trade agreement with those big economies, was 0 (zero) pounds. Because it was done at a European level, the only cost was part of the UK’s contribution to the EU budget. On the other hand, we keep hearing that “The UK will be able to do its own trade deals”. Yes, but how much is that going to cost? How much will the UK state need to expand to be able to enter in constant multi-year trade negotiations? I will use an example to demonstrate the absurdness of this claim. Imagine you pay 20 pounds per month for BT Sports and that Sky sports costs £50 per month. Now you announce to your family that you will switch to Sky Sports and the family will save 20 pounds per month and have more channels because Sky has more channels. (!...!). Btw I have never heard anyone on the pro-EU membership side in any public discussion question the cost to the UK government of “doing our own deals”.
Those direct benefits can be easily calculated. i.e. what will be the cost to the UK government for having to expand to cover all the functions use to happen at a European level. They include the savings for trade deals. They include the work of various European agencies for example the European Medicines Agency. A quick search on the internet reveals that the corresponding US Medicines agency budget is around £2 billion per year. Of course, some of those are so expensive that the UK simply will not do them, for example, the Galileo space program.
Finally, according to the UK government, 60,000 employees will need to be hired just to deal with the additional customs checks. The additional cost to the UK government can be easily calculated and is huge.
Lie – Level 4: Hiding the indirect financial benefits
The main economic benefit of EU membership is the absence of any trade friction with the European countries which leads to increased trade, increased employment, and an increase in GDP. This is what I call the indirect financial benefit. But on top of that, there is the cost to business and the reduction to trade. A number of studies have shown that this will range from 20 to 30 Billion pounds per year.
Lie – Level 5: Indirect benefits for Non-UK expenditure
It is unfortunate that after 6 years of the EU as the central topic of public discussion no discussion has happened to what the EU really is and doe and how it functions. The reason that the UK received than it contributed is that a big percentage of the EU budget goes to the most underdeveloped parts of the EU. But does it mean that the UK does not benefit from it? The EU model has been extremely successful because all countries that enter the EU see a rapid increase in their GDP. That happened with the UK in the 70s but also with all other countries that entered. This is to some degree thanks to the EU funds that support those countries. And everyone benefits from that. For example, I did a 5-minute search on the Internet and found that the UK exports just to the Czech republic increased 11-fold between 2003 and 2015. Which led to a direct benefit to the UK government receipts and the UK economy as a whole.
So I make it 7 lies hidden in 13 words. It is ingenious.
An honest slogan on the bus should have been: “We contribute to the EU budget £100M a week. Let’s add an additional cost of £500M per week which will allow us to do our own trade deals eventually, and most of those trade deals will probably be worse because the UK on its own has less clout than the EU as a whole. We will fund those £500M by reducing the NHS services and by adding debt to future generations”
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