From Killing the “3 Million Jobs” Whopper for Good
Luke Stanley Research Assistant Get Britain Out On 18 August 2014 12:41
We’ve heard it a hundred times or more. The myth our exit from the EU will cost Britain 3 million jobs is repeated over and over again. The claim’s supporters range from deceitful Europhile politicians such as Nick Clegg to the ordinary members of the Great British Public they succeed in duping. At long last, however, the Treasury has spoken out and put this lie to bed once and for all.
Civil servants at the Treasury have now dismissed the 3 million jobs claim by arguing the methodology was 10 years old and imprecise, rendering its conclusions entirely inaccurate. In fact, the myth is based entirely on a 1999 report by the National Institute for Economic and Social Research (NIESR) that 3.2 million jobs were “associated” with exports to goods and services to the EU.
There is also the Rotterdam effect. If a UK company has an order for say Brazil it is packed into a transit container, loaded onto a container ship. If that ship stops off in Rotterdam to collect more containers for Brazil the UK gov counts that as exports to the EU.
It should be noted that “after 40years of membership, less than – 5%of UK companies directly export to the EU yet all are forced to bear burden of its regulations,”
In other words this invention is based on the assumption that the £269 billion the rest of the EU exports to Britain would drop to zero overnight if we left the EU! This is something a GCSE Economics student – although clearly not a Lib Dem Cabinet Minister – could tell you is wrong. The Director of the NIESER at the time, Martin Weale, himself has dismissed the 3 million job loss propaganda as “pure Goebbels”.
Our trade with the EU would clearly not disappear overnight. With the rest of the EU exporting far more to Britain than we do to them, a free trade agreement with Britain is much more in their interest than it is ours. Besides, the EU has free trade agreements with countries like the Faroe Islands, San Marino and Palestine. Why on earth would the Brussels bureaucracy spite themselves by cutting off trade with Britain? We can’t see Germany stopping the trade of BMWs etc to Britain – can you?
Far from the lies about losing jobs by leaving the EU, employment in Britain would benefit in the long-term from a Brexit. We would go from the lethargic and lacklustre EU approach to forming our own global trade agreements. As an independent country we would make our own free trade agreements with countries like China, India and the USA in half the time. Our exports would boom, our balance of trade would be restored and employment would swell.
None of this is possible whilst we remain members of the European Union of course. With the Europhiles having to resort to such duplicitous means to scare the Great British Public into wanting to stay in, it is clear we are winning the argument. The Treasury finally killing this twisted perversion of the facts is a vital step towards the day we Get Britain Out of the EU.