The Lies of the Land by Adam Macqueen

Author:Adam Macqueen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

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.

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