Last weekend, just days before British Prime Minister Theresa May delivered her landmark Brexit speech in Florence, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson published a 4,000-word article for the right-wing The Daily Telegraph newspaper, setting out his “vision for a bold, thriving Britain enabled by Brexit”. The article was widely seen as an effort on his part to kick-start the Conservative Party’s leadership campaign by pitching himself as the person to deliver a “hard Brexit” (leaving the single market and ending free movement). Significantly, he brought up a pledge that had been made by the ‘leave’ campaign last year ahead of the referendum — that leaving the EU would free up an additional £350 million a week to spend on National Health Service (NHS). “Once we have settled our accounts, we will take back control of roughly £350 million per week,” he wrote in The Telegraph piece.
The £350 million pledge has since last year’s referendum come to epitomise the divisions in Britain. It was plastered across buses and billboards by the Leave campaign, with many on the Remain side believing it had been crucial to swinging of the vote in favour of Brexit. After the referendum, the figure was swiftly abandoned by many Brexiters (it even disappeared from campaign websites). “On behalf of the communities we represent, we will keep asking, where is the £350 million for the NHS that was promised,” wrote a group of Labour MPs last September, calling on the Leave campaign to “either admit it was a lie and apologise to their voters or justify it and explain when it is coming”.
‘Clear misuse’
While Mr. Johnson’s intervention provoked criticism from his own party, the most strident censure came from the statistics regulator, the U.K. Statistics Authority, whose head expressed surprise and disappointment over the “clear misuse of statistics”. “It also assumes that payment to the U.K. by the EU, including, for example, for the support of agricultural research, will not be made by the U.K. government when we leave,” admonished Sir David Norgrove, in a letter to the Foreign Secretary made public by the organisation, as is its custom when it comes to disputed figures.
While interpretations of statistics by governments or Opposition parties have been questioned for long — either by official bodies or unofficial critics — it has attained greater salience in the highly-charged politics of Brexit Britain. In July, the statistics agency was forced to intervene in the debate on international students, warning about the way the government had been gathering data. The agency said that the numbers on which the government had based its contention that large number of students were overstaying did not provide a “complete and coherent picture of former student emigration”. Data based on exit checks showed the actual figures to be far lower than what the government had been estimating. Also, earlier this year, the authority had to chastise the government over its use of statistics on homelessness, which had wrongly been used to claim that the figures had fallen by half.
However, the statistics body is far from the only one to frankly speak out. Earlier this year, the head of NHS England made headlines after publicly questioning government’s claims that the NHS had received more than it had asked for in funding. Following last week’s terrorist attack at Parsons Green station and government assurances over more police on the streets, the Metropolitan Police Federation issued a reminder that with cuts, there were no “extra” police officers to call on. “Only same ones working longer shifts and having their days off cancelled.”
(Vidya Ram works for The Hindu and is based in London)
