Toby on Tuesday

'Loose Change and Changeability" 

We’ve seen the “Remain” camp’s Project Fear that reached its climax with President Obama’s bullying and hectoring intervention in the Referendum debate, an intervention which will lead countless undecided voters, who object to being threatened, to support “Leave” on 23rd June.   The British people have never taken well to being browbeaten, as our history shows.   And we’ve seen its Project Falsehood, with the tawdry document worthy of Joseph Goebbels that has landed on our doormats at a cost to taxpayers of £9.3 million.   Now I want to write about Project Farce in the form of George Osborne’s and our discredited Treasury’s forecast of every household being exactly £4,328.03 a year worse off in 2030 if we dare to vote “Leave”.   It is the 3p that’s so totally brilliant and makes this great comic document part of our unique tradition of Whitehall farce.

Now, by way of background, the Treasury’s own record of forecasting and economic judgement has always been a national joke.   In 1990, it bounced Britain into joining the Exchange Rate Mechanism of the European Monetary System, driving around a million small businesses into bankruptcy and leading to Black Wednesday two years later.   Then it persuaded Gordon Brown to sell half our gold reserves for less than $300 dollars an ounce in order to buy Euros just before the gold price rose by over six times.   Its next wheeze was to try to bounce Britain into joining the Euro itself, claiming that UK trade would rise by 50% over 30 years if we did so, a blunder that only Ed Balls with his five tests prevented.   For this decision alone, history will always judge Ed Balls kindly.  And the Treasury’s gift for forecasting reached its zenith between last November when it claimed to have found £20 billion of additional spending capacity, which then mysteriously disappeared by the time of the March budget.   So to forecast everything down to the last 3p in 2030 shows a gift for humour among the Treasury’s mandarins that nobody ever knew existed.   And as our very own George Osborne has accused those who question these forecasts of being “economically illiterate”, I thought that I would try to spell out just three little variables that could cause them to veer slightly off course.

The first variable is that nobody knows exactly who the EU members will be in 2030 and this could possibly have an impact on Mr. Osborne’s predictions.   Only the other day, our cautious and “Remain” supporting Home Secretary, Theresa May, declared, “The states now negotiating to join the EU include Albania, Serbia and Turkey – countries with poor populations and serious problems with organised crime, corruption, and sometimes even terrorism.   We have to ask ourselves, is it really right that the EU should just continue to expand, conferring upon all new member states all the rights of membership?   Do we really think now is the time to contemplate a land border between the EU and countries like Iran, Iraq and Syria?”   Welcome to UKIP, Home Secretary, but then your boss the Prime Minister is hell-bent on Britain being totally absorbed into an aggressive and ever-expanding superstate called Europe!   The next variable is the full extent of the ever-expanding EU budget, to which Britain is after Germany the main contributor.   Now Mario Monti, former Prime Minister if Italy, is Chairman of the EU’s High Level Group  on Own Resources with a mandate for increasing the EU budget to deal with the eurozone crisis, the migration crisis and the terrorism crisis.   And in his own words, “The EU is going through a crisis which leads me and others for the first time to consider whether we are not heading towards disintegration.   Although the EU has developed itself historically through a process of crisis, response to the crisis, and advancement, this time around it may well not happen.”    All of which is shorthand for let’s hike that EU budget again.   And another variable is that the Treasury has forecast just 3 million new migrants arriving in Britain from the EU by 2030, when all the anecdotal evidence is that the true figure is likely to be several times greater.   But we can all sleep easy because George Osborne and his chums have calculated the figures down the the last 3p!

Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, the admirable Liam Halligan was sufficiently shocked to compare the Treasury document to George Orwell’s 1984, declaring “Those of us backing Brexit aren’t “economically illiterate”, Mr. Osborne.   This Treasury document, though, including no possible Brexit benefits, and entirely ignoring the growing prospect of another systemic eurozone crisis, is deeply disingenuous – doing a disservice to our democracy.   ‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’   That’s how George Orwell opened his dystopian masterpiece 1984, calling into question his entire faith in government.   That’s how I felt reading through this disgraceful Treasury document.”   For my part I prefer to see in it the rich tradition of British comedy, with George Osborne playing the part of Brian Rix or of Peter Sellers or even of Edmund Blackadder himself, led astray once more by the Treasury’s Baldricks and all their cunning plans!

Until next Tuesday!

Toby