To be honest Yaffle I'm past caring about the lies - it's beyond irrelevant now.
Remain lied.
Brexit lied.
Everyone on each side called them out at the time for all those lies. So really, what purpose does it serve now apart from nerr, nerr nerr to point out something that everyone knew anyway like it was some sort of surprise?
Politicians lie - pretty much most of the time everyday. In other news it turns out that bears do in fact do "number 2s" in the woods!
Who knew?!
Sorry but I don't think this should pass unchallenged. In my view, the leave campaign conducted a far more dishonest campaign than remain, but obviously I may be biased as I was a remain supporter, so perhaps you could list out some of the lies that you saw on each side and we can assess them?
In a sense, using the word "lies" is a lie in itself - most official politicians rarely tell outright lies. What they do is tell you things that are "truthful lies". This involves using data and statistics, but twisting them in such a way as to invite the wrong conclusion.
Remain campaign were in some cases probably using worse case scenario or, arguably, exaggerating their case. However, I didn't see many cases where what they said was completely untrue or unlikely to happen, or trying to state the opposite of what the real facts were.
Leave campaign were distorting data in a massively more dishonest way in order to imply the exact opposite of what was really the case. To me, that is much worse than simply exaggerating the effect or simplifying it in order to make it understandable.
Examples:
Remain -
Treasury forecast about the potential impact of Brexit, George Osbourne translates the potential economic losses into an amount per person - yes this is misleading in that an economist would say you can't divide a GDP loss by the population and conclude that each person will be £137/month or whatever worse off. However, I strongly suspect if you go back and read the full speech that Osbourne made in context, you will find that it was put differently to the headlines that were created by Leave, and although you can't make such conclusion, you can reasonably conclude that a major hit to overall GDP will result in many people being worse off in real terms, so although the number itself is questionable, it is still inviting you to make an arguably correct conclusion.
(also, given that petrol and other things are already going up, in the long run it might turn out he was no far off
)
Leaving EU will start WW3 - this is, strangely enough, an outright lie (contrary to what I said above), but the lie was by the leave campaign. Cameron never even said this, but the leave campaign managed to make everyone think that he did. What he did do was point out that if the EU splits up, it is not likely to increase harmony, peace and stability in the world.
LEAVE:
We send 350m per week to Europe - highly misleading. They can say it's not a lie, because technically the invoice from Europe, before taking into account rebates and everything that comes back the other way, is 350m per week. However, note that it says "we send" rather than "the gross amount of our EU membership" - invites us to think that we are sending that amount.
We challenged the EU 72 times and lost ever time - another nice clever one which invites you to make the complete opposite conclusion to the truth. All this means is that we lost 72 out of 2400 votes. I won a PVP battle in ED 72 times therefore I am a fantastic PVP player (I won't mention that I lost 2400 battles). However, from a very distorted viewpoint the leave politician can say this statement is true. Every time we voted on the losing side, we lost (well duh!)
75% of UK law came from the EU - again, if you look at the data in a certain massively distorted way, you can claim that this is true, but, it is utterly and completely misleading of the real situation for a number of reasons. It invites you to believe that the EU is the UK government making UK law and this was complete nonsense. It also ignores the fact that the vast majority of these laws would probably be put in place anyway regardless whether we are in the EU or not.
I could go on, but as I said above, I may be biased so I would invite you to come up with the lies that you think the remain side told? I also suspect - and we will have to wait for long term analysis on this - that the way the "balanced" media has reported each campaign was unintentionally helpful to the leave side.
Now when we come to the unofficial word of mouth campaign, which I suspect is where a some of the decisions were made, I have seen real and total lies circulating around. One example - there's a post that's been going around on facebook with a huge list of factories that were closed in the UK and production moved to another country. Each one is followed by the phrase "with EU grant". The list is complete fabrication as none of the companies received an EU grant to move their facility from one country to another, some of the things on the list are made up, and the sites which did close would have happened anyway whether we were in the EU or not. This is a real lie. However if you follow through social media, you will find this post (and many others like it) repeated and shared all around, usually with nobody challenging it. Therefore people read the first few lines of it and believe that it's true. They actually believe that the EU is paying large companies to close factories in the UK and move the factory to (for example) Turkey (not even in the EU). I kid you not.
The unfortunate thing about it is that the massive reduction in UK manufacturing sites is driven by globalization and happening in most rich countries, and even if you think it's a bad thing, it is the UK government that should be entirely blamed - it is nothing whatsoever to do with the EU.
I've seen plenty of other examples of such lies circulating around social media and going unchallenged. The number of laws governing cabbages in the EU for example - there are no such laws.
Bottom line - the EU has been made a scapegoat for many things which have absolutely nothing to do with being in the EU or not, and therefore those things will not be changed once we have left.
