The Guardian fails to practise what it preaches in the EU debate

Oh dear. Over the weekend, the Guardian ran an editorial on the EU referendum entitled ‘this campaign must show more respect for both facts and voters’. In the article — published on Saturday — the paper criticised the Vote Leave campaign for ‘recklessness’. They called on the Brexit camp to put an end to ‘deceptions’ such as the claim that we send the EU £350m a week:

‘It is now more than a fortnight since Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage began chugging around Britain in search of photo opportunities in their Vote Leave campaign battle bus. From day one in Truro, the bright red double-decker, which was built in Poland by a German company, has been festooned with a slogan which, to put it politely, may deceive those who see it. “We send the EU £350m a week,” the slogan reads. “Let’s fund our NHS instead.”

Back in April, the head of the UK Statistics Authority, Sir Andrew Dilnot, had already censured the £350m a week claim as “potentially misleading”, after a complaint from the Liberal Democrat MP Norman Lamb.