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AFAIK the 300M figure or whatever was deliberately misleading, being gross and not net, but not literally false. Spending that money on the NHS instead would r
by philh 10y ago
AFAIK the 300M figure or whatever was deliberately misleading, being gross and not net, but not literally false.
Spending that money on the NHS instead would require cutting spending on some of the things that the money we got back from the EU was previously going to. But it wouldn't be logically incoherent, at least not for the reason you suggest.
- ZeroGravitas 10y agoI've never understood this "gross not net" defence. "You'd save £100 pounds if you didn't buy those shoes, we could spend it on apples instead". "Actually they reduced the price, they're only £50". "Yes, but that's just net, I was talking about the gross figure" That's a logically incoherent excuse for another logically incoherent statement. If anything it makes it worse to admit you knew the figure was wrong and just used an accounting fiction instead because it was a higher number. There is no way to "instead" spend money on something else if part of that money was never spent in the first place. And as you yourself mention, a chunk of that money gets spent on stuff in Britain, (the equivalent of getting cashback on the shoe purchase that I could spend on shirts) so even if they were right about this gross stuff, they'd still be misleading even with their weasel-worded "send to" phrase. https://fullfact.org/europe/our-eu-membership-fee-55-million/ https://fullfact.org/europe/our-eu-membership-fee-55-million...
- philh 10y agoAh, I was not aware of the rebate (I probably had been at one point and had forgotten about it). I was under the impression that £350M was gross in the sense that it was the amount we actually send them, and the net figure was that minus what they send back.