Of course, we all remember Gerard Batten's report of last week on the costs of the EU. We do, that is. (I obviously do as I was running around with Robert Oulds trying to get people to write about it ....after Gerard's done all that work it's worth trying to get a bit of coverage.)
And of course we'd all be thrilled if all the newspapers wrote up the report, name checked Gerard, mentioned UKIP and so on. Which, sadly, of course they don't. But that's only one side of this whole political game. Sure, we want our party to win, we want our party to get lots of publicity.
But we also want to get our message across. Yes, of course it's better if the message and the party are linked but getting just the message across is still a win.
All of which is a lead up to this column in The Sun. What should we be doing about the current financial and economic problems? What's the very first suggestion for concrete action?
Let’s have a referendum on leaving the EU (saving: �65billion a year).
No, they don't mention us or Gerard. But in only a week that figure that he calculated has become a generally accepted fact in Britain's largest selling daily newspaper.
We'll accept that as a victory for getting the message across I think?
3 comments:
That's a triumph, well done.
It strikes me that Gerard undercooked it, he always takes the lower range of estimates etc, but hey.
Hi, At the Bruges Group conference on Saturday last I heard Gerards excellent presentation on EU costs. He said that the response from the Treasury and Europhiles etc were that he had got his sums wrong! I suggested afterwards that the true value of all our cash budgetary payments should be calculated at todays values. I have done this and come up with an answer of £500 BILLION. This is a colossal amount but I believe this figure truly reflects the total value of the loss of investment in the UK. I have used published figures of inflation and interest since 1973 and was given the budgetary figures by the Treasury some years ago. The result when calculated professionally is UNARGUABLE because it would rely on published and well known figures. For example the interest rate under Harold Bloody Wilson was over 15%! The total figure suggested would be more useful in bringing peoples minds to bear on how much the EU is costing the UK taxpayer. Please help me to get this amount defined professionally. Regards. Jerry
Of course whenever they complain about Batten's figures the Treasury claim that they are wrong, and every year we say, well OK then tell us the real figure. And every year they respond that it would be too expensive to calculate.
So a denial without of course any evidence to back it.
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