Jacob Rees-Mogg has stepped up his attack on the Treasury, accusing civil servants in the department of producing a Brexit report that is "fundamentally wrong".

The leading Tory Brexiteer, who was involved in a scuffle with protesters at a university event on Friday, was speaking about an internal Government assessment made public earlier this week.

Activists push Rees-Mogg in scuffle

The assessment suggested the options for a post-Brexit trade deal with the EU would all leave Britain worse off.

Mr Rees-Mogg had earlier said that the Treasury's economic modelling was "clearly politically influenced" and that they were "fiddling the figures" in the report.

On Saturday afternoon, he told Sky News: "With these forecasts it all depends on the information you put in in the first place.


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"They put in assumptions that lead to their conclusions, so they are determined by the measures they put in, and those measures, I think, are fundamentally wrong.

"But you need to remember that (former chancellor) George Osborne thought the Treasury used to fiddle the figures.

"That's why he set up the Office for Budget Responsibility - because he felt that the Treasury under Gordon Brown's chancellorship and prime ministership just invented the forecasts to meet the political needs of their political masters.

"I'm afraid I think the same thing is happening again.

"This isn't new, it's fairly traditional."

Dave Penman, the general secretary of the FDA - the union which represents civil service leaders - called Mr Rees-Mogg's claims "reckless", and said the Brexiteer was "incapable of understanding how the civil service works, because he has no sense of public service".

Mr Penman went on: "He can't understand that civil servants can put aside their political beliefs to act in the public interest.

"Basically, he's got to put up or shut up. If he's going to make these sort of accusations against the civil service, he's got to produce some evidence. And it's about time the Prime Minister and ministers in the Cabinet came out and defended the civil service, too."

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A Treasury spokesman said: "Both Treasury ministers and officials are working hard to deliver the best Brexit deal for Britain.

"The Prime Minister and the Chancellor have said repeatedly that we will be leaving both the single market and the customs union.

"Any suggestion to the contrary is simply false."

Mr Rees-Mogg has said that any deal that keeps the UK in a common customs area with the European Union would be unacceptable and that this would prevent the UK from striking free trade deals with other countries.

His words came after Prime Minister Theresa May, on her final day of a visit to China, appeared to leave open the possibility of some sort of customs arrangement with the EU.