'The Brexit side won because of lies' - what utter bullshit

Like a giant game of 'Wack-a-Mole' they just keep popping up with another threat or lie to scare people

No real point in going back over what happened on June 23rd: The fact is we won the referendum and the UK will now leave the EU. Thank God for all of us old, thick bigots and racists eh? Or to put it another way, thank God for sensible, clued-up people who have, once again, saved the terminally stupid, hope not soap, rent a march idiots from themselves, for the good of everyone in this great country.

Having gone to bed on June 23rd, depressed, at 11pm with a Remain victory quoted by the bookies at 10 to 1 on, I woke at 4am to find the odds exactly reversed and described this event as feeling like all my Christmases as a kid rolled into one.

After 30 years' of anti EU campaigning I am, I think, allowed to savour the moment although, had Remain won the vote, I would have been extremely pissed off but I would have accepted the verdict and moved on. Unlike these fucking idiot deniers who think we'll have another referendum or that Theresa will stall the invocation of Article 50 and Brexit won't happen. Of course it will.

However one issue does still keep coming up on twitter and, rather than having to go through the entire argument, 140 character message by 140 character message, I thought I'd put down my thoughts in a single short blog.

The issue being the lies that were peddled by both sides during the campaign. The Remain side spokespeople took great offence at the lies that were told by the Brexit campaigners, saying what a monstrous liberty it was.

Why are they doing this? Because they know, full-well, that the reality is that if the Brexit side did tell any lies, they were as nothing - mere fibs - compared to the utter - and continuous - falsehoods and blatant, monstrous and massive lies being told every day by the remain camp. You think I exaggerate? Read on.

Just as Mr Bliar made it a tactic to shout loudest about the issues he was weakest on - so as to nullify the impact of his failure - that is exactly what the Remain camp did by suggesting that Brexit lies were much worse than the Remain ones - which, of course is utter bullshit.

Not sure about this? OK, here's an exercise for you. I'll give you, let's say, ten of the big lies told by the Remain side. All you have to do is provide me with the ten equally massive lies that the Brexit side told and we'll then know the answer to the question as to which side was telling not only the most lies, but the most ridiculous and outrageous lies. Here goes:

1. Brexit will cause a new war to erupt in Europe.

2. Brexit will cause economic meltdown in the UK - a DIY recession with mass unemployment.

3. Brexit will lead to massive trade sanctions against UK industry by the EU.

4. Brexit will mean that major international businesses and countries will not want to trade with or invest in the UK.

5. Turkey will not be joining the EU for at least 900 years.

6. The EU will not seek to create a Europe-wide army

7. We will be able to control immigration into the UK without leaving the EU.

8. We will be much more vulnerable to terrorism if we leave the EU.

9. There will have to be an emergency budget with a further £30bn of austerity cuts in the UK and each family will be £4,300 a year worse off.

The Treasury told Remain campaigners not to use this spurious research - they turned it into a campaign poster

10. We're campaigning to stay in a 'reformed' EU - i.e. the EU has been substantially reformed by Dave's renegotiations.

OK your turn. Good luck.

Just as a starting point you should be aware that the £350 million a week claim by Brexit was confirmed as being the budget figure for the UK but that the net figure (according to the BBC's own fact check website) was £271 million a week. So this was a bit of a moot point - whether it was a lie is debatable, but obviously £271m/wk remains a significant amount of money and this level of lie (even if I concede that you are allowed to label it as such), is clearly not of anything like the same magnitude as any of the nine falsehoods already outlined.

And the second point you should bear in mind is that the official Vote Leave campaign said that the £350m/wk could be invested in UK infrastructure like the NHS. It did not say, ever during that campaign, that £350m/wk would be spent on the NHS every week if we were to leave. So that obviously cannot be construed as a lie.

The third one - (these are the main issues outlined as 'lies' by Remain as far as I am aware - but of course you are going to convince me otherwise with your ten examples) is that taking back control (voting to Leave) would mean cutting immigration, pretty much to zero. Er, no. Controlling our borders would allow us to cut immigration if we want to - there is no way to do so if we remained in the EU because of its free movement of people stance - but taking control means just that. We can now control the numbers who come in and, critically, where they come from - so we're no longer discriminating against the potential immigration of people from outside the EU (the Commonwealth for example) but instead operating a much fairer system on a world-wide scale and not just on a protectionist EU level.

We may well want to reduce the numbers of migrants coming into the UK from the 300k that is the current annual figure, but we may not: We may decide that high levels of immigration are needed and a good thing for the UK economy - but the deal is that now we have control we can control the numbers and know what numbers we're dealing with so that we can plan to provide the levels of infrastructure - healthcare, education, housing etc - that will be needed to meet the needs of all UK citizens not just immigrants but everyone. That's the key point.

And whilst it may be true that significant numbers of people voted Leave because they want to see reduced numbers of migrants coming into the UK - and this may well happen - the main issue was regaining control of our borders so that we the people of the UK can decide on this in a democratic way.

OK just taking those obvious ones out of the mix - they're either not lies at all, or a deliberate misconstruing of what was claimed or said by the Leave side - off you go and good luck. I look forward to reading the ten other major issues that were the subject of Brexit lies that were of the same magnitude as war or recession or loss of global trade or mass unemployment. Take your time.

Thanks for reading.