I can't resist. We're three days out, other people have started weighing in with their thoughts, and I've found this whole campaign so appalling, I don't think I can let it finish without a small rantette. I was going to start Thursday but it felt wrong. However, that it's truncated is probably a blessing - I'll only have a chance to do a handful of these, to everyone's relief. I'll aim to keep the most important things.
So let's start with numbers (I'll come back to democracy and identity another time), because I think of all the dreadful things, numeracy has been one of the most dreadful. I know this isn't news - I've discussed before how politicians can't do basic calculations and that the electorate doesn't know how to interpret counting. Nor is this a partisan point, Remain have been guilty of absurd hyperbole, though their basic trajectory is I think right. Leave have been cleverer and have used numbers better, but in a fundamentally misleading manner. It's good politics in the short term, in the long term it fuels expectations that cannot be met.
Let's start with the most infamous - the £350m a week to the EU claim. Everyone who reads knows this is a meaningless number, though it's emblazoned on every Leave bus. It's been attacked by all and sundry. We've spent what feels like a month talking about it, yet the majority of people still believe it to be true. I am entirely prepared to have a debate about the real number, but this is impossible if people cannot grasp addition, and campaigners have no qualms about manipulating that. I'm tempted to blame Leave for using it. I really blame the electorate for falling for it.
That said, however it's cut, the number is still big. The net number is £100m+ a week, £8.5bn a year. People keep asserting that's a big number. But the world is really big, even the UK is pretty big, Our GDP is £1.8 trillion; government spending is around £600bn; the NHS alone is over £100bn. So the number is less than 0.5% of GDP and only just over 1% of government spending. Even if you don't believe Sir John Major that the NHS is as safe as a hamster with a python under prominent Leavers, £8bn won't solve it. More importantly, it's irrelevant anyway. Nobody thinks Brexit will be neutral on the economy, and it would be fantastical if they did: either erecting barriers to our main markets hammers the economy (I include to this view), or in the future, the UK as a open trading nation booms as the Singapore of Europe (I do not incline to this view, but it doesn't matter), as soon as that impact is 0.5%, then the £8bn has vanished. And all this is before we talk currency. If you are weighing up the economic consequences of leaving, don't even bother to talk about the payment, talk about growth - not for nothing is compound interest the most powerful force in the world.
Finally, the most important number: immigration, announced at the end of May as a net 330k. For most people, Brexit is really a debate about immigration. I spent an evening with ex-colleagues last week where the Brexiteers all talked a good game about everything else, but they're a minority in their own campaign and the country. The only thing that's moved the polls is immigration. I would note that 1) 330k isn't actually that many people. It's easy to talk about a the size of city it represents, but we have a lot of small cities. It's 0.5% of population, the same increase as from our natural birth rate. High, sure, but neither unprecedentedly so nor impossible to manage. People who think Britain is full need to spend more time in Wales. And 2) Half of it is not from the EU. Where we can cut migration as we wish, we are not doing so. It's curious that we thus think the whole thing is out of control. This isn't to deny that there may be localised impacts, but it is now and will be in the future much smaller than people think. This is clear from the perception research: people think the EU-born population (including, I presume, me) is three times larger than it is. There's a positive and a negative case to be made around immigration. They both start with counting. We haven't got there yet.
Democracy tomorrow
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