Boris Johnson - Indictment for Misconduct in Public Office

EarthRod

It says "We send the EU £350 million a week". The problem lies in the word 'send'.

Sonic67

Nope. We do send the EU £350 million. Then we get a rebate.

weaviemx5

Fella is fine, I was just a bit confused where Corbyn came into a discussion about Johnson :0).

Pointing out that one politician changes his priorities, according to his own career goals, doesn’t mean that I think others don’t do the same.

EarthRod

This thread is developing rapidly.

It would seem the amount is not the problem, it's the word 'send' which causes the amount to be incorrect.

raduv1

Yup have to admit Conservative and Labour are chucking votes at Nigel , I've always called him a supreme opportunist,  well he does not even need to try the way the main two are eating themselves apart .

TBH I love it .

weaviemx5

You’ve agreed with the post above that says the problem is the word “send” (..because we don’t) then say that we “send” £350m?

Sonic67

Note.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/prime-minister-hopeful-boris-johnson-to-appear-in-court-over-allegations-he-lied-in-the-brexit-campaign/2019/05/29/21654760-8200-11e9-933d-7501070ee669_story.html?utm_term=.4d3f3ffcda2a

Michael Gove, another contender for prime minister, embraced the figure as well, saying in an April 2016 speech: “If we left the E.U., we would take back control over 19 billion pounds which we currently hand over every year — about 350 million pounds each and every week.”

The legal harassment of Boris Johnson reeks of Remainer despotism

Proper procedures should of course be followed when campaigning, but this sustained legal harassment of people simply for having had the temerity to campaign to leave the EU is outrageous. It is truly the conduct of anti-democratic authoritarian regimes the world over.

Will David Cameron then be arrested for having said he would trigger Article 50 immediately following the election? Will George Osborne be taken to court for claiming a vote to leave would mean an emergency budget raising taxes and accompanied by interest rate hikes?

How much jail time will there be for the civil servants that drafted that leaflet sent to every home saying: “This is your decision. The government will implement what you decide”? If pro-Brexit people can face criminal charges for things they said in political campaigns, why can’t anti-Brexit people?

It shouldn’t matter to this discussion, but it’s also quite wrong to claim that the “£350 million sent to Brussels” claim was a lie. It was not the figure I favoured using during the referendum campaign, but it definitely was not a lie, for many reasons.

The most straightforward of these is that that was indeed approximately the UK’s gross contribution to the EU budget. It just was. Saying “Ah, but we get a rebate” misses a fundamental point: the rebate is paid to the UK by the member states, not by the EU. The EU does not give us a discount on our membership fee; rather the member states pay us something in return.

If I send Fred £350 million per week, and then Jane and Eliza send me £100 million per week, that does not change the fact that I send Fred £350 million per week. It does mean that saying “I send Fred £350 million per week” is not the whole story, but it is not a lie.

Second, the £350 million claim is not a lie because in fact even when one takes the wider context into account, it’s roughly the correct amount. Critics of the figure say it neglects the rebate. But that criticism neglects the supposed accumulated “liabilities” that we’ve become aware of as the “divorce bill”. A little over half the £40 billion or so “divorce bill” takes that form. If we spread £23 billion in such “liabilities” over five years and add the weekly sum of that to the £250 million or so weekly sum, net of the rebate, then we come to about £340 million per week “sent to Brussels” as an overall net figure.

So it’s just wrong to call the £350 million figure a lie. It is not a “lie” in any sense. It is not a lie in that it was the literal amount, and it’s not a lie in that it was the overall amount once one took everything into consideration. If we had stayed in the EU long enough, that would have been roughly the actual overall net weekly figure we would have sent to the EU in respect of the years Boris and Vote Leave referred to.

EarthRod

Maybe what should have been written on the bus:

"We allocate the EU £350 million per week"

Isn't hindsight wonderful?

weaviemx5

So Michael Gove chose to use the same gross figure during campaigning, shocker.

“The UK Statistics Authority has said the EU membership fee figure of £19 billion a year, or £350 million a week, is "not an amount of money that the UK pays to the EU each year".

Since then, the new chair of the Authority described use of the figure by the Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, as “a clear misuse of official statistics”

https://www.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Letter-from-Sir-Andrew-Dilnot-to-Dominic-Cummings.pdf

raduv1

Politics crosses the divide , that's the saying , I believe . As such it would also cross the disscussion.  

I've made my feelings felt on Boris , it's on the thread , if the discussion is to just stone him to death for point scoring , so be it.