Boris Johnson's Europe report is unreliable and 'impossible to trust' say critic

Boris Johnson's Europe report is unreliable and 'impossible to trust' say critics from the right

Press quote (The Guardian)
28 August 2014

[Johnson and Lyons] might have hoped for warmer words from John Springford, senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform. Springford wrote that the CER would support some of the changes Johnson and Lyons favour, but systematically rebuts their claims about the difference those changes would make.

He cites research suggesting that, for example, completing the single market would make practically no difference to British GDP, that EU rules on employment (including the “totemic” working time directive) have done little to prevent Britain having a highly flexible labour market, and that the UK’s own measures to regulate banks have cost banks more money than the EU’s. Springfield adds:

"A detailed and fair-minded appraisal of the macroeconomic consequences of these reforms might undermine the entire argument, and they are not available to the reader of Lyons’s report. The economic forecasts were provided by the Volterra consultancy, but the appendix does not tell the reader the method by which Volterra arrived at their figures."

Kapow. Springford began his piece by describing Johnson as just the latest protagonist in the Europe debate to indulge in so-called “policy-based evidence making” - a smartass euphemism for using weak or cherry-picked stats to support the case you want to make.