The politics of ignoring knowledge

Simon Tilford has a post where he explores the roots of Brexit in a kind of UK exceptionalism. He argues that “the underlying reason [for the Brexit vote] is the hubris and ignorance of much of the British elite, not just the eurosceptics among it”. I want to expand on that. I do not think this ignorance and hubris is confined to the UK’s role in the world. It also extends to an attitude to knowledge of all kinds, and I suspect it is possible to date when this began to the revolutionary zeal of the right under Thatcher.

The Thatcher government that gained power in 1979 were going to do away with what they saw as Keynesian nonsense, and run the economy using money supply targets. Treasury civil servants produced a forecast that said their policy would lead to a recession, and this turned out to be what happened. The forecast when it was made was dismissed by the politicians in government as the product of outdated civil service advice reflecting a failed consensus.**

It is of course the prerogative of politicians to reject a consensus, particularly if there is a reasonable minority of experts who think the consensus is wrong. It is what happened next that was the problem. Monetarism was a monumental and predictable failure, but Conservative politicians and their supporters spent considerable effort and resources turning this failure into a triumph of Thatcher over an establishment civil service and academic economists. One example is the letter from 364 economists objecting to a deflationary fiscal policy in the 1981 budget. The right, and in particular the IEA, have successfully cultivated a belief that this letter was wrong when in fact it was right. The recovery (using the term as it should be used) was delayed by over a year by the 1981 budget. More generally the view was that social scientists or civil servants were probably antagonistic to the neoliberal project and could safely be ignored. They were, in Thatcher’s words, not one of us. [1]

The reality was that the Thatcher and later Major governments did subsequently often take note of what experts were saying, but the myth on the right prevailed. Before the Conservatives regained power in 2010, they thought very little of going against the advice of the majority of economists over austerity, although to be fair they were later supported in this by senior civil servants and the governor of the Bank of England. Policy based evidence replaced evidenced based policy. But this was the relatively sane wing of the party, as we discovered during the referendum campaign.

We know the EU referendum campaign largely ignored experts, whether they were economists, lawyers or experts in international relations. What I think surprised many is that the Leavers fantasy was not just a device to obtain votes, but actually reflected what the Brexiteers believed. Since the referendum the government has clung to the fantasy, and ignored or dismissed all the advice it was getting from its civil servants. (In two cases dismissed meant sacking or resignation.) As Steven Bullock says, the EU side are in despair that the UK has yet to work out a realistic position on many issues. Because large parts of the UK public, relying on the right wing press for their news, still believe in the fantasy, some in the main opposition party think their best strategy is to ape their opponents.

As a result, we are in a strange bifurcated world. One part consists of pretty well anyone who knows anything about the economics, politics or legal aspects of Brexit. They realise how hard Brexit will be, know how much damage it could do, and by and large think it will be disastrous for the UK. (Experts tend to recognise and respect knowledge in other areas.) The other part lives in a different world, the world of the media and politicians, where everyone still lives the fantasy.

In this respect, we are no different from what is happening across the Atlantic. Angus Deaton notes the tragic irony that in the year the great nobel prize winning US economist Ken Arrow dies, the Republican administration is ignoring one of his great achievements, which was to show why a simple market in healthcare will not work. The only ‘expert’ this Republican administration seems to recognise is Ayn Rand. If it is successful in replacing or sabotaging Obamacare, millions will lose coverage and thousands will die as a result. The experts (such as the CBO) who predict this are accused of inaccuracy by a White House that cannot even be bothered to check its spelling of 'inaccurately'.

May holding Trump's hand shortly after he became president was indeed symbolic. Those who justify ignoring experts often talk about them as ‘unaccountable elites’ who have ulterior motives in giving the advice they do. In reality ignoring expertise means dismissing evidence, ignoring history and experience, and eventually denying straightforward facts. It leads to the politics of barefaced lying, such as asserting that a new trade agreement can be negotiated in little over a year. [2] This disdain for knowledge is not a prerogative of the right: you can find it on the left among those who say, for example, that all social science is inherently value laden and therefore political. (Ironically often dismissing mainstream economics as a buttress of neoliberalism, the same economics that the right are so keen to discredit.) The difference is that that the knowledge dismissing right have power in the UK and US, and so we are suffering the consequences of their evidence-free politics.

[1] Sir Keith Joseph tried to abolish the Social Science Research Council.

[2] It seems finally that the government has accepted a reality that was obvious months ago to those who listened to experts. 

**Postscript 21/07/17 As Sasha Clarkson reminds me, one of that group now spends his time denying climate change.

Is evidence based policy left wing?

The answer in principle is of course not. In practice, not so clear. This is something I talked about back in October 2013, and there are no signs that things are getting better. Alex Marsh makes the same point in the context of the latest budget. This antagonism to ‘unhelpful’ evidence is out there in plain sight for all to see in the UK government’s current attempt to deny academics in receipt of public funding the ability to talk about the policy implications of their work. I talked about this in terms of the misuse of the term ‘public money’ a few weeks ago, but it is also a pretty direct attempt to suppress unhelpful advice. (Note that ministers have the power under this proposed legislation to revoke this ban in individual cases, presumably when evidence is ‘helpful’ - to them.)

Of course we are not talking about a hostility to evidence based policy by everyone on the right on all occasions. In a THE article by Ben Goldacre, where he also highlights the dangers of the government’s proposed legislation, he details the extent to which he is talking to ministers about evidence based policy. But that interest does not seem to extend to big macro decisions. I was reminded in reading this about what I regard as a triumph of evidence based policy making in my own area: the UK Treasury analysis of Euro entry in 2003. (Disclaimer: my little contribution is the fourth one down in the picture of the reports.) Why didn’t this government do something similar for both the Scottish referendum and the EU referendum?

Everytime I mention the 2003 exercise someone responds that it was just a smokescreen for a power play between Brown and Blair. I think this is an overly cynical view, a view that evidence never changes anyone’s mind. Ramsden’s own view is that the civil service, using the evidence, “ultimately persuaded both the Chancellor and in particular the Prime Minister that it wasn't right to join." It was also the right decision. With both recent referendums we have seen proponents of change putting out documents suggesting that change will not be economically damaging, when most evidence shows pretty clearly that it will be. With the EU referendum in particular, would it not have been better if the government had asked the Treasury to do a similar exercise to 2003, using outside experts where appropriate to provide or validate the technical analysis?

Ben Goldacre’s piece reminded me of my own recent place on John McDonnell’s Economic Advisory Council (EAC). From Ben’s tweets I knew that he was not the greatest fan of this government, and in particular their current treatment of junior doctors, so I asked him whether he had received any negative comments from doctors or others about him giving advice to the government. I was not surprised to hear he had not. Who could object to him taking the opportunity to argue for better use of data and trials in medicine and elsewhere with people who just might do something about it?

It is a shame that some people did not take the same view when I agreed to be on the EAC. I would lose credibility as a macroeconomist, I was told. When McDonnell did his U-turn about supporting the fiscal charter, some suggested this reflected badly on me, even though he had turned in the direction I thought was correct! One charge in particular was levelled at the time. We were being used to make the leadership look respectable, but our advice would in practice be ignored. A couple of weeks ago Labour adopted a fiscal rule which is based on my own work with Jonathan Portes, and in particular by a presentation I made to the group. Mariana Mazzucato’s own work has also featured strongly in Labour party speeches, with good reason.

At the end of the day, policy makers need to look at evidence. If they do not we need strong mechanisms that allow them to be confronted by this evidence. Policy makers that make space for evidence and take decisions based on it need to be congratulated for this, rather than being told their efforts were just a smokescreen. They should be congratulated because letting evidence in often involves a risk: not just to the policy maker’s priors or preferences but also for scrutiny of past actions. Equally we should regard policymakers who knowingly ignore evidence with great suspicion, and those that try to deliberately keep evidence out of the public domain should be condemned.

The imaginary world of small state people

“In the end, you are either a big-state person, or a small-state person, and what big-state people hate about austerity is that its primary purpose is to shrink the size of government spending.”

So said Jeremy Warner (assistant editor of the UK’s Daily Telegraph) last year. Jeremy is a small state person, and I think many other small state people think like this. But the statement is wrong. There are a large number of people - I suspect the vast majority - who do not have any prior view about the size of the state.

In many ways the bipolar view harks back to a bygone age, where - at least in Europe - there actually was a large constituency on the left that wanted a large state as a matter of principle. In the UK that constituency lost all its influence with Margaret Thatcher and New Labour, and it has also lost its influence in the rest of Europe. However this decline in the influence of big state people on the left was matched by a rise to power on the right of those who want a small state as a matter of principle. George Osborne’s plan for the UK over the next few years is the apotheosis of this neoliberal view.

I think I’m like the majority of people in not having any fixed ideological position about whether the state should be large or small. The state is clearly good at doing some things, and bad at doing others. In between there is a large and diverse set of activities which may or may not be better achieved through state direction or control, and they really need to be looked at item by item on their merits.

My first major problem with small state people is that they are not prepared to look at these items on their merits. Instead they have a blanket ideological distaste for all things to do with government. The evidence that government is ‘always the problem’ is just not there. The idea that private sector activity is always welfare enhancing and is best left alone was blown out of the water by the financial crisis. My second major difficulty with many small state people, like George Osborne, is that they are using fear of a debt crisis (a possibility which for the UK and US is non-existent) to achieve their ends. This is political deceit on a grand scale. My third major problem follows from the second: reducing government spending during a liquidity trap recession does real harm. It wastes resources on a huge scale.

For the UK, the OBR estimates - conservatively - that austerity reduced GDP by 1% in 2010/11, and by a further 1% in 2011/12, so GDP was 2% below what it could have been in 2011/12. As there has been no offsetting fiscal stimulus in later years, and because monetary policy has been constrained by the zero lower bound, this waste of resources will not necessarily be eliminated in subsequent years. So the cumulative cost of 2010 austerity could easily exceed 5% of GDP. That is a colossal sum to waste. The estimated numbers in the Eurozone, where the austerity squeeze continues, are even worse - nearer 10% territory and counting. As I argue in this new short piece for the Economist, the fact that Osborne risks doing the same thing again from 2015 onwards is a sufficient reason not to give him the chance.

Which brings me to a final problem I have with small state people, which is their disregard for the evidence. It is true that most people are bad at acknowledging counter evidence, but those with an ideological conviction are worse than most. A common theme among small state people following Osborne’s Autumn Statement is to ask what all the fuss is about. In his rant at the BBC, Osborne says “I would have thought the BBC would have learned from the last four years that its totally hyperbolic coverage of spending cuts has not been matched by what has actually happened. I had all that when I was interviewed four years ago and has the world fallen in? No it has not.” He remembers it well, because he tried to intimidate the BBC back then as well. The claim of hyperbole is nonsense of course, as Tony Yates sets out, but I want to focus on the ‘world fallen in’ point.

Here is Janan Ganesh in the FT making the same claim in spades:

“[Osborne] has also made the spending cuts he promised without the country turning into a medieval wasteland. This is a deeper intellectual wound to the left than we currently understand; it will change the terms of debate about the proper size of the state long after Mr Osborne has gone.”

With both Osborne and Ganesh the intended meaning is that cuts have been achieved at relatively little cost. They clearly hope this idea will become received wisdom in the media. But is it true? Take the one area that Osborne has earmarked for further cuts: welfare. [1] The argument that the cuts made so far to welfare have been achieved without significant costs flies in the face of the evidence. The number of food banks in the UK has grown massively over the last five years. The Trussell Trust estimate that more than half of their clients were receiving food because of benefit delays, sanctions, and financial difficulties relating to the bedroom tax and abolition of council tax relief. As James Harrison relates in this excellent long article, the government simply denies the evidence. The Economist notes: “Welfare reform was intended to be one of the big achievements of the coalition government. But almost all of the radical ideas promised are turning out to be duds.” These are duds that create real misery. Now maybe this is all just teething problems, but the prima facie evidence is hardly that cuts have been achieved at little cost.

So how can small state people have the audacity to claim otherwise? Perhaps it reflects the power of an ideology that its protagonists want to see no evil. Perhaps it is because those hurt by austerity somehow do not count. But the claim that Osborne’s cuts have been such a success that they will cause a “deeper intellectual wound to the left than we currently understand” is simply delusional. These are fantasy ideas from those living in an imaginary world, while in reality the policies they support do serious harm.

[1] I choose welfare only as an example. It does not appear to be an isolated one. Here is an account of Chris Grayling, prisons and the Howard League, or see Alex Marsh on the UK justice system more generally. Or think of those who suffered from flooding as the government cut back money for flood prevention, while the government still pretends there were no cuts.

Policy Based Evidence Making

I had not heard this corruption of ‘evidence based policy making’ until I read this post by John Springford discussing the Gerard Lyons (economic advisor to London Mayor Boris Johnson) report on the costs and benefits of the UK leaving the EU. The idea is very simple. Policy makers know a policy is right, not because of any evidence, but because they just know it is right. However they feel that they need to create the impression that their policy is evidence based, if only because those who oppose the policy keep quoting evidence. So they go about concocting some evidence that supports their policy.

So how do people (including journalists) who are not experts tell whether evidence is genuine or manufactured? There is no foolproof way of doing this, but here are some indicators that should make you at least suspicious that you are looking at policy based evidence making.

1) Who commissioned the research? The reasons for suspicion here are obvious, but this - like all the indicators discussed here - is not always decisive on its own. For example the UK government in 2003 commissioned extensive research on its 5 tests for joining the EU, but that evidence showed no sign of bias in favour of the eventual decision. In that particular case none of the following indicators were present.

2) Who did the research? I know I’ll get it in the neck for saying this, but if the analysis is done by academics you can be relatively confident that the analysis is of a reasonable quality and not overtly biased. In contrast, work commissioned from, say, an economic consultancy is less trustworthy. This follows from the incentives either group faces. 

What about work done in house by a ‘think-tank’? Not all think tanks are the same, of course. Some that are sometimes called this are really more like branches of academia: in economics UK examples are the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) or the National Institute (NIESR), and Brookings is the obvious US example. They have longstanding reputations for producing unbiased and objective analysis. There are others that are more political, with clear sympathies to the left or right (or for a stance on a particular issue), but that alone does not preclude quality analysis that can be fairly objective. An indicator that I have found useful in practice is whether the think tank is open about its funding sources (i.e. a variant of (1).) If it is not, what are they trying to hide?

3) Where do key numbers come from? If numbers come from some model or analysis that is not included in the report or is unpublished you should be suspicious. See, for example, modelling the revenue raised by the bedroom tax that I discussed here. Be even more suspicious if numbers seem to have no connection to evidence of any kind, as in the case of some of the benefits assumed for Scottish independence that I discussed here.

4) Is the analysis comprehensive, or does it only consider the policy’s strong points. For example, does the analysis of a cut in taxes on petrol ignore the additional pollution, congestion and carbon costs caused by extra car usage (see this study)? If analysis is partial, are there good reasons for this (apart from getting the answer you want), and how clearly do the conclusions of the study point out the consequential bias?

A variant of this is where analysis is made to appear comprehensive by either assuming something clearly unrealistic, or by simply making up numbers. For example, a study may assume that the revenue lost from cutting a particular tax is made up by raising a lump sum tax, even though lump sum taxes do not exist. Alternatively tax cuts may be financed by unspecified spending cuts - sometimes called a ‘magic asterisk budget’.

5) What is the counterfactual? By which I mean, what is the policy compared to? Is the counterfactual realistic? An example might be an analysis of the macroeconomic impact of austerity. It would be unrealistic to compare austerity with a policy where the path for debt was unsustainable. Equally it would be pointless to look at the costs and benefits of delaying austerity if constraints on monetary policy are ignored. (Delaying austerity until after the liquidity trap is over is useful because its impact on output can be offset by easier monetary policy.)

Any further suggestions on how to spot policy based evidence making? 

Anti-intellectualism

The question in the title of this post - What Are Academics Good For? - was meant to be rhetorical. I took it for granted that as a collective academic economists did know rather more about economic policy than business leaders or city economists, and the point of my post was to ask why this often appeared not to be recognised by some journalists or some politicians. I included some quotes from a journalist suggesting otherwise because I found them rather shocking.

It serves me right of course. What I got almost universally in comments was a discussion of all things wrong with academic economists. Even the estimable Chris Dillow joined in. So what I should have done first is establish what academic economists are good for, and then complained about those who do not recognise this. But better to do things in the wrong order than not at all.

First a point on scope that I did make but is worth repeating. When it comes to short term macro forecasting, you are no better off asking academic economists. In fact you may be worse off, because most academics spend very little time looking at the latest indicators. The best macro forecasts, whoever makes them, are only marginally better than intelligent guesswork - this is a well established fact.

One area where academics typically have expertise relative to other people is on issues involving economic policy - for macroeconomics, for example, on issues involving monetary and fiscal policy. Issues like whether austerity is expansionary or contractionary. I took this for granted because academics spend a large amount of their time doing research on these issues. Much of this research involves assessing evidence. They do this in a highly competitive environment, constantly subject to peer review. In addition, they often compete for research grants, where the opinions of end users (like the Bank of England) can matter a lot.

Of course there are things that could be improved within academia, and as Chris notes I have not been shy of giving some of my own opinions about where this might be. But since economics first started being studied, we have accumulated a substantial body of knowledge which policymakers have found useful. Policymakers should never take advice uncritically, but they should and do treat academic advice as a bit more than just another opinion.

What evidence do I have for this claim? First, a lot of the time politicians and their civil servants do seek out and make use of this knowledge. Indeed I ventured that the previous UK government might have represented a high point in the influence of academic economics generally, including macro. I described the evaluation of the 5 tests over whether the UK should join the Euro as an exemplar of how the interaction between academics and policymakers should work.

You could also look at central banks. When it comes to issues of how best to conduct monetary policy, central banks predominantly look to academics (mainstream rather than heterodox) for ideas and analysis, rather than city economists or business leaders. The analysis they use in house is often based on techniques initially established by academics, and they hire new PhDs to undertake that analysis.

If you are not convinced by any of that, have a look at the simple test I described in that recent post. The assertion that the 2013 UK recovery validates 2010 austerity is not a complex issue or a matter of judgement – it’s a simple mistake. Most academics understood that, but only half of city economists did.

So that is why I found those quotes from a well known journalist shocking. As I suggested in that post, I think it reflects an anti-intellectual theme that affects other subjects as well. You will find this kind of thing on both sides of the political spectrum, although for whatever reason it seems to be more influential on the right than the left right now. I got sent today some correspondence about austerity involving an MP, where the MP said this. “You may come at this from an academic viewpoint - I come at it from a real world viewpoint and as someone who has worked in a sector where you have to earn money before you can spend it.” That statement is so wrong for many reasons, but it also illustrates a damaging contempt for academic knowledge.

The decline of evidence based policy

There is a brief description of Cartwright and Hardie’s book ‘Evidence-based policy: a practical guide to doing it better’ on Amazon. It starts: “Over the last twenty or so years, it has become standard to require policy makers to base their recommendations on evidence. That is now uncontroversial to the point of triviality--of course, policy should be based on the facts.”

My immediate reaction is to say ‘unless that policy involves the macroeconomics of fiscal policy’, but once you see one area where evidence is ignored, you begin to see many more. Here are just two that I have read about over the last few weeks, courtesy of the UK government. They can better be described as ‘emotion-based policy’, or ‘election-based policy’, and I fear they may now be the rule rather than the exception.

The first involves what is generally known as the ‘bedroom tax’. The policy reduces the housing benefit payable to tenants deemed to be under-occupying their homes. This policy has undoubtedly caused considerable hardship to many of those affected, but it also saves public money. So crucial in any assessment of the desirability of the policy is how much money it saves. Getting such an estimate is complex, because it will depend on a lot of factors, like whether individuals move in response to losing benefit, where they move to, and so on. The UK’s Department of Work and Pensions has a model that calculated savings of £480m in 2013/14, an estimated it published in June 2012.

So the first thing to do in trying to assess the realism of the £480m figure is to look at the model. We cannot do that, as it is not published. However, Rebecca Tunstall of the Centre for Housing Policy at the University of York has managed to obtain some spreadsheets, using Freedom of Information requests. In a report, she looks at some of the assumptions behind the department’s calculations. Many look very questionable, and as Alex Marsh observes here, there seems to be a pattern - the questionable assumptions tend to overestimate the savings involved. The calculations also ignore some of the other financial costs and consequences that an overall assessment of the policy should take into account. Alex Marsh suspects that allowing for these, and taking into account the evidence we are now getting about how people are responding, the savings created by the policy could disappear completely.

If policy was evidence-based, then either the government would be disputing in detail Professor Tunstall’s analysis, or rethinking the policy. Neither are likely to happen for one simple reason. The policy was never evidence based. It was instead inspired by the tabloid led attack on welfare recipients, and the idea that it was unjust that ‘hard working taxpayers’ should fund a spare room for benefit recipients. Here for example is Stephen Glover writing in the Daily Mail: “The notion that many families not on welfare don’t have the luxury of a spare room, and may have to have one or two people in every bedroom, is foreign to the head-in-the-clouds types that proliferate at the BBC.” Now that feeling of unfairness is real enough, but it is not based on evidence either about what impact the policy might have, or whether it will actually save any money.

The second example is the recent ‘clampdown’ announced by the UK Home Secretary on ‘health tourism’. Among the measures included in the government's new immigration bill is a £200 charge on all temporary migrants for using the NHS and a requirement for GPs to check the migration status of new patients. Both policies are aimed at preventing migrants travelling to the UK to seek free healthcare. Conservatives has been particularly keen to attack ‘health tourists’ from other EU countries, thereby clocking two election sensitive issues among potential UKIP voters: migration and the EU.

So what evidence does the UK government have on the scale of this EU health tourism? The answer is that it has none. A classified document had the following very telling phrase: "we consider that these questions place too much emphasis on quantitative evidence". So considerable extra costs are going to be imposed on GPs and other parts of the NHS to help deal with a problem which may be trivial.

However the European Commission has succeeded in getting some evidence on ‘benefit tourism’, which it recently published. As Jonathan Portes reports, approximately 4% of those claiming unemployment benefit (job seekers allowance) in the UK are EU migrants, although they represent well over 5% of those in work. More generally, as the Commission says: “Mobile EU citizens are less likely to receive disability and unemployment benefits in most countries studied.” For much the same reason, the proportional demands made by EU migrants on the UK health service are likely to be less than the native population. They may also choose to avoid the NHS, for a variety of reasons.

Which you might think is a bit embarrassing for a government that is about to create a whole raft of additional bureaucratic costs to deal with this ‘problem’. Well not embarrassing if you read the Daily Telegraph or Daily Mail. Their reading of the Commission report was that it showed “more than 600,000 unemployed European Union migrants are living in Britain at a cost of £1.5 billion to the NHS alone”. Only one slight problem - the true number is 38,000. So how did the Daily Telegraph manage to inflate the true number by a factor of 15? Because they ‘confused’ unemployed with non-employed, where the latter include students (of which there are many), retired people, carers and others with family responsibilities. As Richard Exell says: “Our government may be chumps when it comes to evidence-based policy making, but they can always rely on world-class distortion to see them through.” The report remains on the Telegraph’s website, uncorrected.

I’ve included this last paragraph to make a very simple point. Some commentators tend to argue that we make too much of what happens in the media (see Chris Dillow here for example). I think this is plain wrong. Information is vital. People make judgements based on the information they receive. As one student said to me this week, they knew that the Obama stimulus package had had little impact on the US economy, because they had read this in the FT and the Economist. (For better analysis, follow the links from here.) If people have distorted information (or if those bringing a bit of reality are vilified), politicians have no incentive to base policy on actual evidence. The decline in evidence-based policy, and the declining importance of facts for much of the media, are not unrelated.  


Postscript, 20th October

If a reputable newspaper makes a mistake, it acknowledges that mistake. Another kind of newspaper, it seems, can try shouting down those who pointed out the mistake. That was what the Daily Mail did over its attempt to slur Ralph Miliband as the ‘man who hated Britain’. So today we find the Telegraph doing the same over its reporting that “more than 600,000 unemployed European Union migrants are living in Britain”. Rather than admit that it got that wrong, it instead tries to pretend that it is in fact battling some kind of great conspiracy emanating from Brussels.

The lead article on its website today (19 October) by it chief reporter Robert Mendick could not be a better illustration of the points I made in the last paragraph of my post. The article’s first paragraph says

“The [Commission] study — whose details were first disclosed in The Telegraph — showed that more than 600,000 “non-active” EU migrants were living in the UK at a possible cost to the NHS alone of £1.5 billion a year.”

Here is the opening paragraph by the same reporter in the original (12 October) piece:

“More than 600,000 unemployed European Union migrants are living in Britain at a cost of £1.5 billion to the NHS alone, according to an EU report.”

Virtually identical – except for the little details of replacing unemployed with non-active (the writer puts non-active in quotes, apparently unable to translate this into ordinary language, like students, housewives, retired people), and the insertion of ‘possible’ before cost. No acknowledgement of these changes, but instead an attempt to manufacture another story, the ‘developments’ of which are

(a) some politicians did not like the conclusion of the Commission report. (No, really?)

(b) quotes from an academic at Oxford who says that “There is no problem with the numbers [in the report]. The issue is the interpretation of those numbers.” (Heady stuff!)

(c) the paper has found out that the “independent consultancies who wrote the report were awarded EU contracts worth more than £70 million over six years.” (Ah, the plot thickens.)

(d) a BBC report which attempted to reflect the facts had been accused as being unbalanced by a Conservative minister. (My god, this is serious.)

Then we have: “Evidence of mounting public concern in the EU’s biggest economies over migration emerged in a poll yesterday which showed that the introduction of restrictions on EU migrants’ rights is backed by 83 per cent of Britons..” I wonder where people are getting their information from!

And then there are attempts to discredit opponents. The European commissioner in charge of the department that published the study is quoted in a paragraph that begins: “Mr Andor, a socialist, said: ...”. Later on we have: “It also emerged that one of the main supporters of the report ... was in receipt of more than £600,000 of EU funding for the year ending March 2012 for his think tank.“  Yes, that is Jonathan Portes, director of the National Institute, which has been doing – shock, horror - research funded by the Commission. As Portes points out in the article, it has also been doing research funded by the UK government, but clearly the Commission has managed to exert its evil influence on Mr Portes where the UK government has failed. How can that be? The article helpfully informs us that he was a “former senior economics adviser to the last Labour government “. He was actually a civil servant working under both governments (he has an interesting account of his role advising Norma Lamont in 1992 here), but I guess that is another one of those little details, like the difference between ‘unemployed’ and ‘non-active’.