When Boris Johnson received a sharply worded rebuke for his ‘clear misuse of official statistics’ from Sir David Norgrove, the Chair of the UK Statistics Authority, The Spectator rushed to his aid. Steerpike asked why the statistics chief had intervened when ‘every word from Boris (this time) was accurate’.
The short answer is that Norgrove intervened because Boris was wrong to say that ‘once we have settled our accounts, we will take back control of roughly £350 million per week’.
Here’s why. The Boris explanation – or, at any rate, Steerpike’s – is as follows: ‘We all know the deal with the EU: we pay in, then there’s the rebate and EU spending (farm subsidies, etc) in the UK’.
But this isn’t our deal with the EU. The rebate doesn’t leave the UK. We do not ‘pay in’ and then receive it back; it is a discount on our membership fee.
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