Hacker News Reader

Comment by a_humean | Hacker News Reader

Except the leave campaigns lied and/or mislead about the consequnces of leaving or their own intentions for the exit negotiations and post-brexit policies for everything from single market access, fishing rights, to net immigration reductions.

View on HN

Citation needed.

The claim that Brexit would redirect 350m/week to the NHS was a particularly egregious example.

https://archive.ph/D2Yq4

Did that not happen? [0] shows an increase of £47bn on the department of health and social care from 2019-2020 and 2020-2021. That's £900m/week. If you compare to post-covid years then it's more like an increase of £28b or £540m/week. From the article linked in your comment, it seems to make a overly large "smoking gun" out of the fact that a referendum campaign website changed their website to reflect the fact that the referendum was now over.

[0] https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/nhs-delivery-and-w...

Nope. The 350 million was supposed to be from money saved from not being in the EU.

How can you say it's not? Money is fungible.

No it didn’t, inflation alone is a poor adjustment for health spending when the populations keeps increasing. Thus explaining the net increase every year from 2010 to 2019.

There’s many ways to calculate what that expenditure should be but looking at the most recent pre Brexit numbers, 2018 was 150.7B, 2019 was 158.3B. Extrapolate that trend and 2023 would be 7.6 * 4 + 158.3B ~= 188.7, where the real number is projected at 186.7B.

PS: That link only specifies 2020 and 2021 as seeing COVID specific spending but the UK health system was still being slammed in 2022 while also trying to catch up on delayed procedures etc. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/

The DH&SC isn't the NHS. How much of that money went from DH&SC to the NHS, vs to Tory pals selling defective PPE? Or private hospitals?

that did happen

NHS Funding Act 2020

The Big Red Bus is difficult to miss.

The Big Red Bus wasn't a signed contract. It was a statement of possibilities that the UK could spend their savings on. And it looks like the NHS budget went up by that amount anyway.

If "signed contract" is your requirement then we can agree that no politician has ever lied in their campaign promises, because they don't make them signed contracts... that seems irrelevant?

The lie was that we save that much by leaving the EU, the fact that our health service was underfunded and has had budget increases in line with inflation and population growth doesn't change that it was a lie - we could've (and would have) increased NHS spending regardless of the Brexit vote.

The big red bus was a lie in a crucial way: the £350M per week they were talking about (from our contributions to the EU) could not have been funded the way the bus slogan claimed.

Because the net contribution to the EU was (significantly!) less than £350M.

It wasn't a suggestion to spend more money on the NHS. It was a suggestion to spend the money they claimed we gave the EU every week.

So it was actually a lie on a bus.

The figure was closer to £250M (after the rebate), but when they were given the amicable opportunity to restate the original claim around the correct figure, they doubled down on the £350M lie.

See my other reply about Turkey being "set to join" the EU.

Turkey has never been "set to join" the EU. They'd like to join, sure.

There are significant criteria they would need to fill to join, and everyone knows they won't do it any time soon; they were going backwards on some at the time of the campaign and are arguably further back eight years on.

If Turkey met all the criteria they'd be a perfectly viable member of the EU. But then if I had the physiology, brains, feathers, gait and quack of a duck, I'd be a duck.

> There are significant criteria they would need to fill to join, and everyone knows they won't do it any time soon; they were going backwards on some at the time of the campaign and are arguably further back eight years on.

https://neighbourhood-enlargement.ec.europa.eu/enlargement-p...

"On 13 December 1999 the Helsinki European Council adopted the Commission proposal to grant Turkey the status of an applicant for EU membership."

Coming up on 24 years ... and counting. Great job, everyone involved.

It actually goes back further than that -- they wanted to join the EEC in '87.

36 years. This is actually higher than the median age of Turkey's population.

Sorry, I don't need to provide citations for the non-stop BS peddled for years and years in UK politics or list all of the policy positions of the last 5 conservative governments we have enjoyed for the past 8 years.

It sounds like most of what you've listed, especially immigration reductions, are in the general sense things that the government now has the power to change, it just chooses not to. I'd put complaints about post-brexit policies at the government's feet rather than the leave campaign. That's not to say that prominent leave campaigners didn't mislead people with certain statements, but I also remember the Cameron-Osborne remain campaign saying that merely voting to leave would instantly plunge the country into a huge recession. People like Nick Clegg also dismissed and scoffed at (IMO) legitimate concerns from the leave side, like saying that the prospect of an EU army was a conspiracy theory, when in fact there have since been lots of higher-ups in the EU pushing for this.

Sorry, I just assumed that if the leaders of the main leave campaign were to shortly become the government then they might share some responsibility. Apparently Johnson, Gove, Cummings and Sunak have no responsibilities for the things said and done for their cause in 2016. My bad.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com