Spectator gets involved

An item in the Spectator (or rather its blog) -- an unrepentant piece by a Leaver, one Brendan O'Neill,  on the Geat Bus Slogan Debate. I say unrepentant -- it could have been written by me!

It claims:

1  Hardly anyone voted Brexit because of the bus slogan: 'The idea that that bus swung the referendum, that it duped the voting hordes, has become one of the great, and nasty, myths of the Brexit era'.

2. Johnson actually said in his Telegraph article that:

leaving the EU will give us more control over ‘roughly’ £350m a week, and it would be good ‘if a lot of that money went on the NHS...he didn’t say leaving the EU would boost NHS coffers by a tidy £350m a week. He said it would give us say-so over a certain amount of money, and we could choose to spend that money on health if we like.

3. Remainer media, including the Staggers, rendered that as a' one-line summary of Boris’s comments — leaving the EU would ‘result in £350m a week for the NHS [but this ] is directly contradicted by his actual comments' 

4. I have to get balanced here myself and say that the Boris comment is NOT exactly a direct contradiction of the Staggers summary --but it is a different emphasis, still, of course, a bit of spin. The blogger is right to say:

I know standards are slipping in the media, but journalists surely understand the word ‘if’? It’s a conjunction that signals something will happen if something else happens first. In this case if we make a choice to spend that wad of EU-released cash on the NHS. ‘If’ is not ‘it will result in’; ‘if’ is ‘it might result in...Even the bus, which I think was naff, didn’t make a cast-iron cash promise.

4.And

It’s remarkable that the kind of people who usually insist that public spending be well-aimed and used to assist the less well-off can be so cavalier about our pumping of 200 million a week into the EU. This Brussels black-hole suck on British cash will remind many Leavers why they voted against the EU: they see it as a distant, uncaring, filthy-rich oligarchy. Some people, I fear, don’t appreciate how ridiculous they sound to the struggling, everyday Brexiteer when they scoff: ‘Actually, I think you’ll find we only give the EU £200m a week…’

5. Finally:

The reason [Remainer media]  elevate this bus above all else, above all the other BS both Leave and Remain spouted last year, is because they genuinely think it turned voters. That it dazzled our little minds. That it duped the throng. It is so deeply patronising. And it is also a lie.. . Some people obsess over this bus because they cannot face the truth: huge numbers of people voted against the EU, not because they want more hospital beds, but because they wanted to upturn the arrogant establishment and revolt against politics as we know it.