Murphy's Law

The Guardian today has flagged up a speech to be made later at the LSE by the quisling Europe Minister, Jim Murphy. (Aside - and it must be my age showing, why must everything be reported as happening before it does, wouldn't it be an idea for the press to agree that for one day they will not report the news, in order that articles could get back into kilter with events. It would be rather good to open the paper, turn on the radio, whatever and receive the news that has happened, rather than a spun account of stuff that might happen. Too often the media swallow the spinners tales of forthcoming events only for us to discover later that so and so did not in fact say such and such at all. Of course by that time the news agenda has moved on to the next day's news that hasn't happened so no corrections are made and we are left none the wiser. But I digress).

The blithering numpty is starting his campaign to get the Constitution/Treaty ratified without reference to the people of our country. In it he makes a couple of ad hominem attacks on Eurosceptics (something that EU Referendum blog expands upon in full tilt, pointing out that the over egged complaints of many Eurosceptics allows the European institutional elite and their satraps to ignore the serious ones).

I will however look at the substance of Mr Murphy's claims,

"We rely heavy on membership of the EU single market of 480m consumers," he is expected to say. "More than 3m British jobs ... and 60% of our trade would be
directly affected. Foreign direct investment would also be hit".

Which is not what his Lord Malloch-Brown said on December 18th,

My Lords, we believe that 3 million jobs in the UK are linked directly and indirectly to the export of goods and services to the EU.

The difference is subtle but there. You see they are making the plainly ridiculous assumption that leaving the EU would mean that the countries of the EU would stop trading with us. Plainly mad, as the balance of payments for the third quarter of 2007 is the national statistics office puts it,

"A deficit of £11.8 billion was recorded with the EU compared with a deficit of £10.9 billion in the previous quarter".

What is also interesting is that Murphy has increased the amount of trade the Government believes is predicated on membership of the EU to be 60%. This is 5% more than only last month, (Malloch Brown again) ,

"Britain's trade with the European Union has grown from just over 40 per cent of
our total trade in 1973 when we joined to around 55 per cent today".

So by my maths we have £165 billion in credits and £185 billion in debits making a total trade of £340 billion, 5% of which is £17 billion. Thus what Murphy is claiming here is a £17 billion increase in trade with the EU in the last month.

I wonder what psychedelic hat he pulled that particular statistic from?

Then he makes a further claim,

"Nor would we get any regional funding from the EU (which totalled £10bn between 2000 and 2006)."

The the hell does he think that money comes from, Malta? That is our money which is given back to us, or at least some of it is given back to us.

The fellow tells us he wants a "mature debate", but if this his starter for 10 then he better do better than that. A collection of obfuscation, playground attacks and inventive statistics is not what I would describe as a "mature" starting point.

I see he has a page on his website called 'Politics for kids' well quite.