Fact-checking Clegg and Farage

Both Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage made some good points in the debate but both of them also rolled out a few ancient and discredited sayings which they should have known, and intelligent and open-minded observers do  know, to be at best highly misleading and at worst very unlikely.

E.g. to argue that 3 million jobs would go if Britain left the EU you have to assume no trade with the remaining EU after we left, which seems most unlikely, while the "75% of our laws are made in Brussels" claim by Viviane Reding is not taken seriously by anyone except UKIP, although the House of Commons Library's briefing which gives that figure as 7%, quoted by Nick Clegg in the debate this week, only counts primary legislation and is therefore not the full picture. The truth is somewhere in the huge area between those two numbers.

There is a good fact-check on the Open Europe blog, which pours highly-appropriate cold water on some of the wilder claims by both men, here.

Comments

Jim said…
fact checking - oh my, thats the biggest rabbit warren you will ever open. Check everything, and thats when it begins, that is how i learned the nature of the cash in my pocket, the nature of the difference between laws and legislation, it would actually take several life times i think to complete the job.

Any way to your comment, well yeah its a good link, that provides some if not all answers. Farage did come off better, I have knwon for a while he is a good showman, but he should have taken better leads, in short he should have done much better than he did. a start would be a credible exit plan from UKIP, but we will wait an eternity for that.

Clegg - well that was FUD at its best. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt
Jim said…
With regards to the number of British Laws made in the EU.

The actual figure is zero, zilch, none of them.

a little over half of all legislation comes from the EU, but that is Legislation i.e. statutes, which only apply with consent, they are not laws.

Laws come from the common law based on the inalienable rights of humans. They come from years and years of our traditions and customs, generally can be summed up as dont hurt or kill anyone else and take reasonable precautions so you dont do it by accident.

Dont take another persons property and take reasonable precautions to ensure you dont do it by accident.

Others are entitled to live in peace, respect that.

thats it, end of laws. Statutes are just silly, they even have to write them in legalese rather than english to try and fool you, they are utter tripe and dont apply to humans, only to "Persons" which are not real, they are legal fictions.
Tim said…
Still can't get that picture out of my mind; messers Benn, Foot and Powell sitting around a table in 1975 spelling out why they wanted out of the EEC; patriots through and through. God bless 'em !!!!!

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