We are well past mere fake news with this report in The Sun based on a report by the Centre for Brexit Studies (CBS), who appear increasingly panicky about having to extend the transition period. There are lies, damned lies and lies so enormous they can be seen from outer space. These are the ones the CBS deal in. Their report is a fantasy woven out of a tissue of lies - although it is hardly surprising because the Chairman of CBS is none other than John Longworth.
For anyone not familiar with Mr Longworth he was head of the British Chambers of Commerce before they fired him for going freelance and pushing his own views ahead of the 2016 referendum rather than the BCC's. I suppose they thought paying him to work for himself didn't seem to offer good value.
To describe him as a nutjob is to insult nutjobs. And for all this fantasy stuff he relies on this report largely based on the work of discredited economist Patrick Minford. The report has a foreword written by Owen Paterson, a man who would struggle to know his a**e from his elbow if it was explained very-slowly in words of one syllable by a leading anatomist with the help of a pointing stick.
The report (and The Sun and The Telegraph and probably others too) claims extending the transition period would cost Britain £380 billion at least. Longworth in The Sun goes even further:
"Centre chairman John Longworth said: 'We just cannot afford to extend the transition period. It will cost us about £400billion at least, quite likely much more'."
And even this total breathtaking fantasy is made to look reasonable by another excerpt from the report (page 30) which is quoted gleefully by The Sun:
"It can be seen in the table that the total costs of a two-year delay (assuming that the benefits of Brexit can be accrued immediate aferwards) would be on the order of £380 billion and, if the extension leads to the permanent loss of Brexit, the cost becomes some £4.6 trillion."
This is twice Britain's GDP and is the complete reverse of what 99 per cent of reputable economists, including The Treasury, The IMF, the OECD and dozens of others, believe will happen. Brexit will SHRINK the British economy, extending the transition will SAVE money.
We are living in a madhouse when this sort of stuff appears in mainstream news media. The shocking thing is that some people will actually believe there is a grain of truth in it. There is not.
The report contains so many factual errors and what ifs that the scenario they end up describing is so remote it makes the invention tomorrow morning of a time machine by my neighbour look like a certainty - and he's not even working on it!
What if we become embroiled in the next Multi-Annual Financial Framework? (zero risk), what if Italy goes bankrupt? (infinitesimal), what if it defaults on its debt? (zero risk) and from these it build sand builds a pyramid of piffle (to borrow Johnson's own phrase), the pinnacle of which is then splashed across the pages of national newspapers.
Gove himself the other day put it at between £10 and £20 billion and he probably thought that was an exaggeration (it is) and as far as he could push the credulity boundary. But he didn't realise quite how unambitious even he is in the lying stakes. Longworth is 20 or 40 times the liar that Gove is.
All this may seem funny but we must not underestimate how sick these people are or how dangerous they can be to our country and its economy and the lives and livelihoods of every one of us.
A day of reckoning will come for Paterson, Minford and Longworth and when the people realise what lies they were told and how men like these three, gulled ordinary men and women into voting and supporting what will be seen by historian as the greatest and costliest foreign policy mistake in world history, their anger will be uncontrollable.
