Vote Leave was able to spread its lies during the referendum with the help of sympathetic newspapers. Sadly, nothing has changed. When Boris Johnson revived the £350 million lie at the weekend, his fanclub at the Telegraph and Spectator (both former employers) aided and abetted him.
The Spectator’s Steerpike columnist backed Johnson in his row with the UK’s independent statistics watchdog, writing: “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.” Steerpike was backed by Fraser Nelson, the Spectator’s editor, who tweeted: “For once, the £350m figure was used accurately.”
The problem is that this isn’t our deal with the EU. We do not “pay in” and then get the rebate back. The rebate is a discount on our membership fee that is never paid to the EU, as the UK Statistics Authority clarified last year, writing: “HM Treasury pays over the UK’s contributions after deducting the value of the rebate.”
The Telegraph committed a somewhat lesser sin. It stated twice that we send £350 million a week to the EU – first in its original front-page splash on Saturday and then in the follow-up splash the next day in the Sunday Telegraph. This is false for the same reason that the Spectator got its facts wrong: we never send £350 million a week to the EU because the rebate is never sent to Brussels.
The paper’s defence would appear to be that it was merely reporting on what Johnson had written in his article for the paper. There would, though, be two problems with such a defence. First, the foreign secretary didn’t actually write that we “send” £350 million a week to Brussels. He made a slightly different, albeit still inaccurate claim. Second, the text of the Telegraph’s articles suggested that it was a fact that we send the EU £350 million a week – not merely that this was something Johnson was claiming.
The offending section in the second paragraph of the Saturday article reads: “the Foreign Secretary restates the key demand of the Leave campaign – that £350m a week currently sent to Brussels should be redirected to fund the NHS.” Although the Telegraph mentions that the claim that we will be £350 million a week better off after leaving the EU is “controversial”, this doesn’t appear until paragraph 11.
The problem section in the Sunday Telegraph, also in the second paragraph, says Michael Gove and Priti Patel, two other Brexiters in the cabinet, are backing Johnson’s “demand that after Brexit Britain makes good on a pledge to spend some of the £350million which the UK sends to the EU on the National Health Service.” Although the paper acknowledges that the figure was criticised by the UK Statistics Authority during the referendum, a reader would have to wait until paragraph 15 to learn this.
InFacts has written to both the Spectator and the Telegraph asking for corrections.