Lies,damned lies...

The latest maverick speech by B Johnson has renewed the focus on the internal Tory leadership struggles (because he did not 'authorise' the speech,and excited liberals think it is a way of reining in T May from making a really Remainy speech about the EU this week). It has also revived the Great Lie Hoohah. Johnson still claims we will not have to pay a sum amounting to £350m a week - the thing that stings Remainers most of all. The Guardian today mostly went with the leadership challenge issue

Various denunciations of the speech have ensued, with the usual internal stuff enhanced by including one from a statistician (wow!):

In a letter to to the foreign secretary, Norgrove [' the head of the UK Statistics Authority',] slapped down the use of the £350m figure, arguing: “This confuses gross and net contributions. It also assumes that payments currently made to the UK by the EU, including, for example, for the support of agriculture and scientific research, will not be paid by the UK government when we leave.”... It added: “It is a clear misuse of official statistics.”

Same old same old then. An opinion piece by the inevitable M. D'Ancona further rubbishes Johnson as a yesterday's man and mentions the Great Lie issue:

the fact [is] that the UK’s net payment to Brussels is much less (the excellent Full Fact site estimates that the actual figure is around £250m).

A mere £250m then! Peanuts. The 'excellent Full Fact site' is good though, and actually goes on with this:

In 2016 the UK government paid £13.1 billion to the EU budget, and EU spending on the UK was forecast to be £4.5 billion. So the UK’s ‘net contribution’ was estimated at about £8.6 billion.
Each year the UK gets an instant discount on its contributions to the EU—the ‘rebate’—worth almost £4 billion last year. Without it the UK would have been liable for £17 billion in contributions...

The Treasury and ONS both publish figures on the subject, but they're slightly different. The ONS also publishes other figures on contributions to EU institutions which don't include all our payments or receipts, which complicates matters....

We can be pretty sure about how much cash we put in, but it’s far harder to be sure about how much, if anything, comes back in economic benefits....The £156 million figure [a report in the Independent, apparently] is calculated after the rebate has been applied and after the ‘public sector receipts’ for that year have been subtracted. The £350 million accounted for neither of these things....Using these newer figures the amount we sent to the EU, after the rebate but before any money spent in the UK [NB accordingto EU policy, not UK policy] is counted, is £234 million per week. 

Incidentally, there is also an interesting graph showing trends over time: 

 

There is no discussion of the upward trend -- no doubt it is partly due at least to new memebers joining, all of whom have been net recipients?