Wednesday 23 October 2019

Nobody move or somebody gets hurt!

From The Metro, an absolute classic of the genre:

KNIFE crime could get ‘considerably worse’ under Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal, a former minister has said.

David Lammy, who represents Tottenham in north London, said the drop in GDP that the deal would cause would ‘mean everything’ to areas with high poverty rates — and have a bigger impact ‘than the 2008 crash’.

The Labour MP (pictured) told the Commons: ‘In my constituency, just the weekend before last, two men were knifed within an inch of their lives. We would see a reduction in GDP, with a Canada-style free trade deal, of 6.7 per cent in our country. 


'In a constituency like Tottenham, it means everything. It means that the knife crime I’m worried about could get considerably worse. I don’t want the south side of Chicago in Tottenham.’

I strongly suspect that a lot of people who voted Leave did so to thumb their noses at drivel like this.

'Remain' would probably have won if the Remain campaign had stuck to simply emphasising the positives of being an EU member (of which there are many); glossing over the negatives (of which there are just as many); and not wasting most of their energy on trying to scare people into thinking that the world would come to an end if they voted Leave (when it was quite clear that the world would carry on pretty much as normal, Leave or Remain).

The Leave campaign also have made some pretty outrageous claims, but they weren't so stupid as to claim that we'd all catch super-gonorrhea if we voted Remain.That would just have devalued their more plausible stuff.

5 comments:

benj said...

Deadweight costs of poor tax choices cause lower GDP.

Would Lammy like to tell us how many people Labour tax choices have "murdered"* in total?

*https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/tory-austerity-deaths-study-report-people-die-social-care-government-policy-a8057306.html

Mark Wadsworth said...

BJ, "vote YPP and save thousands of lives". Good slogan!

benj said...

"vote YPP and save thousands of lives".

Fred Harrison would approve.

Tim Almond said...

I think a lot of the serious remainers are snobs who think the public are total idiots. Tim Shipman's really good book on Brexit detailed how focus groups reported that they thought Project Fear was lies.

I also suspect that most remainers actually don't really understand the EU. They have an amorphous idea of it as a good thing, but they don't understand things like the single market or customs union. If they did, they could have really pushed (and stuck with) tariffs and reducing delays

Mark Wadsworth said...

TS, after a few weeks, surely the wavering voters, who decided it, must have been sick and tired of Project Fear and voted "Leave" just to stick up two fingers?

Nobody really understands anything as complex as the EU and regulations and trade deals, that's not the point, it's all generalisations, best guesses and basic principles.