EU referendum: Osborne attacks leave campaigners for failing to provide post-Brexit facts
George Osborne has defended the Treasury’s calculations on the impact of leaving the European Union and attacked leave campaigners for trotting out misinformation about the benefits of Brexit.
"Every credible international institution has supported the claims we’ve made,” Osborne told MPs on the Treasury Select Committee this afternoon, as he confirmed he will be dishing out plenty more numbers before the vote on 23 June.
Analysis by the chancellor’s own department published last month found that the UK’s economy would be the equivalent of £4,300 per household smaller by 2030 in the event of Brexit, although Andrew Tyrie, chair of the TSC accused Osborne of "over-egging" the claims.
“There is a vast gulf of difference between [the Treasury’s] claims and the completely specious claims about how much we were to save if we were to leave the EU," Osborne responded.
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“You have a small number of individuals, long associated with the campaign to leave, on one side of the argument. [But] if you look at the sheer weight of opinion, it is overwhelmingly the case that those who look at the case for leaving the EU say it would make the country poorer and the individuals in that country poorer.”
Fellow Conservatives including Steve Baker and Jacob Rees-Mogg – both of who would like to leave the EU – joined Tyrie in expressing their own doubts over the forecasts put forward by the Treasury about how Britian would fare after Brexit.
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Writing for City A.M., Ryan Bourne, a member of the Economists for Brexit group said there were serious questions which needed to be asked over the Treasury's methodology which attempts to calculate the value of EU membership in terms of how open an economy is and how much investment it can attract.
The chancellor was also criticised by independent observers for stating that Brexit could lead to a "balance of payments crisis".
"Either he was being very lazy in his language or he was trying to provoke tensions," Raoul Ruparel, co-director of think tank Open Europe said.
"He went too far, it's hard to see how a country that has a free floating currency and has debt denominated in its own currency can have a really proper balance of payments crisis."
Addressing questions over how monetary policy would develop in the aftermath of a vote to Leave, Osborne said that it would be a "challenging time" for the Bank of England to balance the different forces pulling at the Uk economy. The chancellor's analysis has suggested interest rates would go up in the event of Brexit to counter rising inflation brought on by currency instability.
Osborne said the Treasury was currently conducting analysis into the potential short-term effects of Brexit, which will include a forecast of how wages would perform outside of the EU and the hit to house prices, in analysis which is certain to provoke uproar.
However, Ruparel said he was "sceptical of how credible a quanitative assessment of the short-term effects can be" as Brexit was too "unprecedented an event" to come up with any kind of reliable model or forecast.
Osborne also attacked the majority of the campaigners who want to leave the EU for failing to provide details about what a post-Brexit UK would look like.
“We have had absolutely nothing from the Leave campaign about what immigration policy or regulatory policy we would have,” he said, addressing the claim that leaving would allow Britain to control its borders and strip back red tape.
The chancellor pointed out that on key areas such as maternity rights, new financial regulations and capital requirements along with energy policy, the UK has gone further than EU requirements and there is little sign that parliament would be willing to repeal those rules, so he could not understand what claims that the UK economy would do better after Brexit were based on.