It fell on Ed Vaizey, the culture minister, to defend George Osborne’s dodgy EU dossier on the BBC’s Daily Politics. As you might expect, he didn’t do a very good job of it. Could he explain why the Chancellor used his new, misleading metric of “GDP per household” instead of the proper (and lower) figure of household income? No, he couldn’t. Could he explain why, if the Chancellor thinks this new GDP-per-household metric is so important, he divided 2030 income by the 2016 number of households (27m) rather than the expected number then (31m)? No. Could he name another Treasury budget, or pre-Budget report, where this GDP per household had ever been used before? No. So could he in any way justify the bizarre claim that Brexit would make everyone £4,300 worse off. You know the answer.
Of course, Mr S feels sorry for Vaizey – Osborne has just cooked up the most dishonest, least defensible document ever produced by HM Treasury. So
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