There are no easy answers to the EU question

People — nice people, members of the public, concerned voters — keep coming up to me saying, ‘We want to hear the arguments about the EU referendum.’ It sounds a strange thing to want because, since the last years of Margaret Thatcher’s government, the arguments have rarely been out of the news for a week, and jolly boring they often are. But what such people go on to say is that they seek the objective facts and cannot get them from either side in the campaign. They would like some useful fact sheet which answers all their questions.

Well, from time to time, papers like the Telegraph and the Times do contain short investigations of claims made about many of the issues involved, but the truth is that it isn’t easy. One’s judgment of the facts is bound to be affected by one’s view of the EU.