The six tricks Mark Carney used to cook up his ‘Brexit costs you £900’ figure

Mr S has always been a great admirer of creative accounting: the tricks our politicians use to dress up 50p as £1. It’s not lying, per se. All the techniques need to be valid. But their effect is to mislead. Ed Balls was the great master of this dark art, George Osborne his less-subtle apprentice. Now Mark Carney is stepping in, claiming that the Brexit vote has somehow made people £900 a year worse off.

How can he conjure up this figure, given that his doom-laden projections for the No vote have all been disproven? By using financial spin. A combination of language and statistical skills to “give an appearance of solidity to pure wind,” as Orwell said of political language. Here’s how the financial version is done.

1. Verbal alchemy: the “relative fall” trick. If X has risen, and it suits your political purpose to say that X is in decline, what to do? Compare whatever it is that’s rising against something that is rising even faster.