Proving the wrong point by accident

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That strange fellow Nathan Gill kindly sent me a leaflet through the post this week.  Well, I say ‘sent me’, but I’m guessing that ‘he’ has gone to the enormous expense of sending this to every household in Wales.  But more of that a little later.

The leaflet purports to tell us why the single market is a poor idea, and how we voted to leave it last June, but it’s packed full of statements which are, to say the least, ‘contentious’.  It would take too long to deal with all of them here, but I’ll pick on two in particular:

He tells us categorically that “The UK Government will match £3bn subsidies [for farmers] after Brexit.”  Really?  Has that been confirmed by the government yet?  Because I rather thought that the Leave campaign had told us that all the money we send to Brussels was going to be diverted to the NHS after Brexit.  Perhaps the lettering on the side of that infamous bus was just so small that I read it incorrectly.

“Both Leave and Remain said that leaving the EU meant leaving the Single Market.”  Now, if he’d said that campaigners (i.e. some campaigners, not all campaigners) on both sides of the debate had said that, then he’d be telling the truth, albeit not the whole truth.  But claiming in a blanket fashion that both campaigns said it is a long way from the truth, because I could point to campaigners (on both sides) who said the precise opposite.  I actually agree that leaving the EU whilst remaining in the single market isn’t really leaving (BINO, it’s now apparently being called by some: Brexit In Name Only) – it’s just not what many of them said at the time.

But anyway, back to the munificence of Mr Gill and ‘his’ funding of this little leaflet.  Although the UKIP logo appears at the bottom, the main logo on the leaflet is that of the EFDD group in the European Parliament.  And my guess is that it is that group, funded by the EU itself (out of our contributions), which has paid to send this missive to around 1.3 million households in Wales.  Still, in a rather curious way, I suppose that for the EU to fund a leaflet containing what is, shall we say, ‘misleading’ information about itself does in some small way support the UKIP critique of wasteful spending of the money which we pay in by some of the politicians in the EU parliament.  I’m sure that isn’t quite what Mr Gill intended to demonstrate though.