To Joseph Goebbels is attributed the remark that ‘if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually believe it’. In fact the Nazi propagandist-in-chief never said this; but the phrase has stuck because it encapsulates the most unscrupulous aspect of political campaigning methods down to the present day.
However, in Britain the public now have the valuable antidote of the Freedom of Information Act — the reform which (make of this what you will) Tony Blair now says is the measure he most regrets introducing.
Last Friday, it helped nail the Liberal Democrat chief secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander — who, along with David Cameron, Nick Clegg and George Osborne, is a member of the ‘quad’ at the apex of the Tory-Lib Dem coalition.
Back at the end of June, at the height of the row over the appointment of Jean-Claude Juncker to the presidency of the European Commission, Alexander asserted in a speech (which he helpfully leaked in advance) that ‘over three million jobs’ were at stake if Britain left the EU. He attributed this to ‘the latest Treasury analysis’, adding: ‘That is the measure of the risk that isolationists would have us take.’ ...
... There, most unsatisfactorily, the matter would have rested, were it not for the fact that the Open Europe think-tank on June 26 submitted a request under the Freedom of Information Act for release of the ‘latest Treasury analysis’ purportedly demonstrating the risk to ‘over three million jobs’. And now, the best part of two months later, the ‘Information Rights Unit’ of Her Majesty’s Treasury has responded.
It admits that ‘the full source’ of Alexander’s claim is a Treasury assessment done in... 2003. So much for the Lib Dem Cabinet Minister’s assertion that this is hot news of imminent employment disaster in the event of Britain’s exit from the EU.
Even more devastatingly, the official response to Open Europe’s FOI request goes on to point out that this 11-year-old research ‘is not an estimate of the impact of EU membership on employment’. All it did was to suggest — in a very rudimentary piece of analysis — that approximately three million jobs were involved in our trade with the EU. Dominic Lawson.
