Our Chancellor George Osborne outlined the problem that’ll never arise. But, just in case it did arise, his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron offered a promising solution.
The problem according to George is that Brexit will cost every British family £4,300 per year for any foreseeable future. It has to be said that, though George is an accomplished liar, he still has a lot to learn.
When you lie verbally, George, you can say any old thing. You may, for example, suggest that Brexit will make every British man impotent and every British woman promiscuous. Or that continental policemen will be ordered to shoot on sight anyone with beer on his breath who calls them ‘mate’.
But if you lie numerically, avoid round numbers. The more precise the numbers you quote, the more believable they’ll be. So it was a mistake to say that we’d be £4,300 poorer every year: the two zeroes at the end bespeak slapdash calculations.
How much better it would have been had you used a more precise numeral, such as £4,297.63. The way you put it also sounds as if you made no allowances for the inflation rate. It’s negligible now, but it’s likely to go up sooner or later, isn’t it George?
So you should have specified that Brexit will cost each potentially despondent British family £4,297.63 as a down payment, which sum will then grow… no, let’s put it more officially, it will be subject to an annual incremental upward augmentation at 2.74 per cent over the inflation rate.
That would have worked a treat, George, and no one would even think to question the mental processes by which you arrived at £4,300. But the way you put it, even our innumerate victims of comprehensive education are beginning to smell a rat.
The rodent still isn’t as big as it would have been had you refrained from putting a number on the imminent disaster altogether. Had you said “Brexit will cost every family a whole lot of dosh”, the rat would be the size of an average golden retriever. This way it’s still manageable.
Anyway, not to worry. The referendum is still a couple of months away… no, 66 days away (precise numbers do carry more weight). You’ll be able to get your act together and lie with much greater credibility – or rather with a 26.8 per cent increase in credibility.
However, should George’s darker prediction turn out to be right in principle, if not in every detail, Manny (the name by which Finance Minister Emmanuel Macron likes to be known to his friends) has charted a straight thoroughfare to economic salvation.
Should Britain be insane enough to abandon the celestial economic benefits of EU membership, said Manny, she’ll end up like Jersey. As an erstwhile New York resident, I was tempted to ask ‘Which exit?’, but then I realised Manny was talking about the Channel island, not the American state.
As a current resident of France (under six months a year, Mr Taxman, in case you’re wondering), I was tempted to ask Manny to pinpoint the benefits more accurately, with the kind of precision I recommended to George.
For the economy over which Manny presides provides a less than convincing illustration. Not to cut too fine a point, it’s a basket case, with a soul-destroying unemployment rate (25 per cent for young people), negligible growth that only politesse prevents one from calling stagnation, the single currency suffocating exports, unsupportable social costs made catastrophic by uncontrollable migration (to get much worse, now Schengen has been extended to Turkey), constant strikes and riots – you name it.
As to Britain becoming like Jersey, is that a threat or a promise, Manny? You mean we, like Jersey, will have a maximum tax rate of 20 per cent, as opposed to 45 per cent we have now or 75 per cent in some countries that’ll remain nameless (restent anonymes)?
By injecting new energy into the economy, that measure alone will shave quite a few pounds off the putative (in reality nonexistent) cost of Brexit. Why, if taxes were just 20 per cent, tops, people would no longer annoy Dave by looking for offshore shelters. Here, Dave, have your 20 per cent and choke on it, would be the common reaction.
And would we, like Jersey, become an international tax haven, albeit on a vastly greater scale? That would elevate the City of London from its present position of global financial dominance to that of global financial monopoly.
A parallel raft of corporate tax breaks would act as a powerful magnet to foreign investment, which, according to both George and Manny, would disappear the second after we vote Leave. Manny didn’t mention this Jersey-like measure, but it was definitely in the back of his mind.
Also, are we going to have Jersey-like social tranquillity, unlike in some countries one could mention (Manny knows one very well)? Strict residence requirements? Negligible crime rate?
Anyway, I thank Manny from the bottom of my heart (je le remercie de tout coeur). What a lovely idea, being more like Jersey and less like, well, France.