False equivalence is part and parcel of the Brextremist’s armoury as they deflect attention away from their dishonest behaviour.

Any criticism of the Leave campaign’s illegal activities quickly provokes a barrage of mendacity from Brexit supporters falsely claiming the Remain campaigns were equally guilty.

Cabinet Minister Misleading Sky’s Dermot Murnaghan and Wrongly Claiming The Remain Campaigns Were Equally Guilty

By far, their most common focus of complaint involves the government spending £9.3m on a leaflet sent to every home in the country prior to the referendum, a leaflet Brextremists misleadingly claim was a Remain campaign group leaflet.

This is simply classic false equivalence, where the aim is to both misinform and divert attention away from those who have committed serious crimes against the nation.

For those promoting this logical fallacy, the uncomfortable truth is that in sending that leaflet the government was simply fulfilling a legal requirement of the 2015 Referendum Act which applied a Venice Commission guideline, as contained in its ‘Code of Good Practice on Referendums‘ which states:

The best solution is for the authorities to provide voters with an explanatory report setting out not only their viewpoint or that of persons sharing it, but also the opposing viewpoint, in a balanced way.

The Venice Commission, also known as the European Commission for Democracy through Law, is the Council of Europe’s advisory body on constitutional law. The Code outlines the principles underpinning referendums and the conditions for implementing those principles including guidelines on the specific rules applicable to a referendum.

Cameron’s government fulfilled this communication requirement by sending an objective leaflet explaining the benefits of EU membership and the dangers of voting to leave the EU, as it is a government’s responsibility to highlight and protect its citizens from possible danger.

Interestingly, May’s pro-Brexit government is also objectively highlighting similar dangers when comparing our current EU membership deal with the possible alternatives.

Theresa May Highlighting That All Deals Are Economically Disastrous

Sadly, whilst the UK government clearly embraced many of the principles of the Venice Commission code, these rules, in line with the advisory status of the referendum, aren’t legally binding, so the government is unfortunately at liberty to choose to ignore another highly relevant Venice Commission rule:

Due to the absence of an official inquiry, an inquiry that would have greater powers than the regulatory body, the Leave campaign’s total overspend is yet to be fully determined, leaving the guilty parties free to mislead and misrepresent the facts on an almost industrial scale.

Misleading Information From Leave.EU

However, what has been determined, is that the impact of the Leave campaigns illegal overspend on the referendum, according to a report presented to the High Court by Professor Philip Howard of Oxford University’s Internet Institute, was “that the referendum result was the outcome of excess spending by Vote Leave and/or BeLeave.”

Thirty months after the referendum vote, and with the benefit of hindsight, perhaps it’s now time to revisit the government’s 2016 Brexit referendum leaflet in order to expose the truths, dispel the myths and lay bare the tactics that continuity Leave campaigners are still using to deceive the unwary.

Unquestionably, the UK has a unique deal with the EU. Being neither part of the Euro or Shengen areas, the UK is a sovereign nation with responsibility for its own laws, borders and monetary policy which is controlled by the nine member Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee, four of whom are appointed by the Chancellor.

In 2016, whilst Brexiteers engaged in some industrial scale lying over these matters, the reality was due to the European Union Act 2011 that was in force at the time of the vote, parliamentary sovereignty over the EU was always assured. Alas, this legislation was repealed through the vandalism of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 where we not only lost the protection of that Act but transferred an unprecedented amount of power to the executive via so called Henry VIII clauses. Someone has definitely taken back control.

Professor Michael Dougan – “If you’re a demagogue, if you’re a charlatan, if you lie big, you can win, you can win too.”

As with a loss of access to the the customs union, the loss of access to the single market would be devastating to jobs in the UK’s manufacturing sector, as the Brexiter’s chief economist, Patrick Minford, was only too pleased to explain to members of parliament.

The EU is the largest trading bloc on the planet, rather than an imaginary queue of countries attempting to leave, there’s not only a queue of countries wishing to join the EU but a long list of countries wishing to engage in trade with the bloc.

Since the 2016 vote, Japan has finalised negotiations with the EU for one of the world’s largest free trade deals covering nearly a third of the world’s GDP and 600 million people, the EU and Mercosur aim to create the world’s biggest trade bloc by 2019 whilst a deal between the EU and Singapore currently awaits ratification by the council and parliament. Put simply, for the UK, EU membership demonstrably means jobs.

These massive trade deals would also mean jobs for UK workers if we remained EU members. Clearly, on this evidence, since the vote, the EU has had results; we have Dr. Liam Fox, David Davis, Owen Paterson and a host of self-interested US funded lobbying groups masquerading as charitable think tanks who have delivered the square root of zero.

The country was warned that a vote to leave would crash the pound, and it did, meaning higher prices for food and other imported goods and an increase in inflation. In the 1950’s this devaluation would be balanced by a competitive advantage for our exporters, but this isn’t the 1950’s, this is the 21st century and the free movement of goods, services, capital and people is ingrained in our economy.

Brextremists who claim concerns over leaving the EU were little more than ‘project fear’ conveniently forget that following the referendum, to offset impending disaster, and prevent the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, the BoE introduced a range of measures that included an interest rate cut, a quantitative easing package of £70bn and made over £100bn available to banks to prevent the mistakes made during the great recession.

Throughout 2018, the BoE has also supported Sterling through selling large amounts of EUR and USD to defend the value of our currency. Despite all of these measures, the UK economy is now 2.25% smaller than it should be and has suffered massively from a reduction in FDI – Foreign Inward Investment – or the ‘kindness of strangers’ as BoE chief Mark Carney likes to call it.

“Studies that construct a pre-vote ‘doppelganger’ for the UK suggest that the economy was 2 to 2½ per cent smaller by mid-2018 than it would have been if the referendum had not been called. The average quarterly growth rate has slowed from 0.6 per cent between 2013 and 2015 to 0.4 per cent since the beginning of 2016, taking the UK from near the top of the G7 growth league table to near the bottom.” The NewStatesman

Worst of all is the continued attempts, by failed politicians of the Brexit persuasion, to convince the electorate that leaving the EU and surviving on WTO terms is a viable alternative to our current deal with the EU. To put this into context, most people have no idea what the implications are for our country so here’s Pascal Lamy, a former Director General of the WTO spelling out the difference between our current EU membership and those mysterious WTO terms:

Former Director General of the WTO Describes the Difference Between EU Membership and WTO Terms.

Promises of ‘taking back control’ of more jobs, of better hospitals, schools, roads and rail and of fewer immigrants were more ‘will-o’-the-wisp’ than will of the people. Promises that a deal with Europe would be the easiest in history, that we held all the cards, that the EU would come begging to the table was nothing but talk by those who Professor Dougan called demagogues, charlatans and liars.

We now know that there was no £350m, that the deal that has taken two years to negotiate is much worse than our current EU membership and will leave us poorer both financially and socially as we forgo a host of rights, freedoms and protections. Quite simply the fictitious reclamation of sovereignty and self-determination has all the integrity of a Tufton St ‘charity.’

The hope was that we could have continued access to Europol intelligence, databases and the European arrest warrant, sadly with May’s deal, experts agree we will be a greater risk from criminals and terrorists with limited access to Europol and the loss of the aforementioned European arrest warrant. Under no deal it will be significantly worse of course.

The security of our borders and the issue of immigration, that was so heavily focused upon by both Vote Leave and Leave.EU, is an even greater deception than the £350m device and all the other broken promises put together, because not only is most immigration into the UK nothing to do with the EU, we’ve always had more control over our borders than we’ve exercised; the Leave campaigns gambled on their target audience not understanding this and on June 23rd 2016 they were amply rewarded for this dishonesty:

Objectively, any cost benefit analysis reveals that the UK’s present membership deal with the EU is both cost effective and provides superior rights, benefits and protections across all nations in the union, which, if lost, will make current and future UK citizens, along with their environment, all the poorer.

By any analysis, the 2016 referendum, from its legislation through to the event itself, reveals an appalling catalogue of incompetency, collusion, conspiracy and corruption at the highest levels, events of such magnitude that only the greatest inquiry in British political history could awaken the UK’s electorate and re-establish their confidence in British democracy, along with that of our international partners, particularly those in the EU.

The government leaflet was therefore neither illegal nor was it misleading, its warnings have been far more accurate than the fantasy predictions of the Brextremist’s who have now resorted to lying about their lies.

The world is watching as the United Kingdom becomes reduced to little more than a banana republic by this national disaster; ultimately it comes down to the British people either believing reality or embracing a fantasy based on lies, misinformation and deliberate conflation promoted by those who have no interest in the wellbeing of ordinary people.

We’ll leave New Zealand Professor Robert Patman to have the final word, here he is just after the result of the 2016 referendum was announced, predicting the fiasco that is now rapidly unfurling.