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The Taxpayers’ Alliance distort numbers for their own evil political agenda
March 9th, 2009 at 01:40
The Taxpayers’ Alliance, a tedious pressure group formed by some failed Tory candidates have succeeded in getting what looks like another one of their press releases printed almost verbatim in the paper again – or at least that’s what it looks like. The Telegraph are reporting that “EU membership costs each Briton £2,000 a year” – though to give it some credibility, they’ve added “Taxpayers’ Alliance claims” to the end of the headline and included a small counter quote at the end.
Whilst I can’t dismantle the story entirely – the source material is a book and the TPA haven’t put their data online as far I can detect, what I can tell is that the Telegraph’s story certainly has some demonstrable signs of playing with the numbers and is somewhat dishonest in its portrayal of the truth.
First of all, the headline is pretty misleading, and I’m struggling to work out how they’ve derived it. It seems this figure is based on this, which is explained in the following paragraph:
However, according to a Matthew Elliott, the TPA chief executive, the total cost across the EU is £495 billion or £1,968 for every man woman and child in Europe
Obviously they’ve rounded up £1968 to £2000 to make for a neater headline – but if you do the maths, then it implies that the EU has a population of about 251,524,390 – about 251 million people. Unfortunately, this means that someone’s maths (and to be fair, it could be mine) is bad – the population of the EU is approaching 500 million. “Maybe it’s just the EU15″, I thought – EU15 being the term used to refer to EU members prior to the “Big Bang” enlargement of 2004 which brought in all of the “spongeing” Eastern Europeans. But a quick Google reveals that the EU15 population has never been that small.
In fact, the only reference to the EU having a population of 251 million I can find is a line in this document about the number of people in the EU of working age – and that isn’t “every man, woman and child”.
What bothers me most though is that even if we assume that the TPA’s numbers are correct, is the distortion in the way that it has been reported. I don’t even doubt that there’s a lot of waste and mismanagement in the EU – they have two separate Parliaments and a high-speed rail line linking them for Christ’s sake, but what is happening is that it is being reported in such a needlessly emotive way that it is misleading.
Obviously from the perspective of the individual, paying £2,000 for anything sounds like a lot of money, but this not only tries to create the misleading impression that it’s £2,000 from each of our pockets (obviously though, higher earners pay more tax) It would be wrong to view it as £2,000 out of an annual salaries of the general public though – the EU isn’t just a big bucket, it’s £2000 worth of economic activity. That £2000 is going to be spent back into the European economy, and is constituted not just by income tax, but by every other sort of government income – such as VAT and fuel duty (sorry, “steal tax” in the TPA vernacular) and corporation tax. And £2000 per person viewed a percentage of a GDP of about £1 trillion suddenly doesn’t seem like so much.
Even the £4.1bn in 2007-9 going to Europe that the TPA moans about as a percentage of the UK government budget doesn’t seem like very much when you consider that for 2007-08, the UK government budget was £519,229,000,000 – the EU contribution making up 0.79% of it.
And when you don’t cloud things with the near-meaningless figure of £2,000 per person, it makes the EU seem a lot more reasonable – and though more difficult to calculate, it’s a shame the article doesn’t include any of the benefits of us paying into the EU and retaining our membership of the bloc – such as the immeasurable economic benefits of being part of the free trade area, our ability to participate in the market and so on and so fourth.
To paraphrase the comedian Chris Addison, the sad thing about “Euroscepticism” is that it contains the word “sceptic” – which implies a great philosophical tradition of inquiry and critical thought. In every other area of discourse to be a “sceptic” tends to mean that you’ve actually thought about it.
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