Until that point, NatWest had been “scrambling behind the sofa” to find capital, but now it is in better financial shape than many comparable European banks and has been able to expand. Remain appear to be telling the truth, Leave don’t.Davies has been chair of NatWest for seven years and the turning point in the bank’s fortunes, he says, was paying a $4.9bn (£3.6bn) fine to the US authorities in 2018 for its role in the sub-prime mortgage crisis. I’ve checked quite a lot of that evidence, and it all seems to be reliable. Remain claim that Brexit would be bad for the country, and they’ve presented evidence to support that claim. So Which Way Should You Vote?īased purely on which side’s arguments are actually true, and which side’s aren’t, you should vote Remain. Having dug deep into their campaign, I’ve actually emerged more impressed than when I started.
IM PRO BREXIT FULL
I was expecting both sides - as many people have claimed - to be equally full of it.īut Remain seems to have played it pretty straight, and presented solid, well-founded claims. And that’s the same review whose conclusion almost all credible external sources agreed with. The worst I was able to prove was that one point in a 90-page review seemed to lack backup evidence. Their studies tally with independent studies of the same things, and sometimes they’re using independent studies rather than anything they control.I could rarely pick any holes in their logic.Their backup studies are detailed and provide sources and reasoning.I’m about as much of a fan of the current UK government as I am of bowel cancer.īut every claim of theirs I’ve checked - even the ones that had pro-Remain friends shouting about how over the top and ridiculous they were has turned out to be more or less sound. Personally I intensely dislike both Cameron and Osborne. Remain’s campaign has been criticised for being dull, being negative, and being led by people who are thoroughly disliked.Īll of those claims are entirely reasonable. I haven’t had time to fact-check every single Leave claim, and some, like the claim that leaving “will make Britain Great again”, aren’t possible to fact-check.īut every single Leave claim I’ve checked has turned out not to be exaggeration, not to be well-meaning misunderstanding, but to be obviously false. In other words, Leave’s statement is absolutely untrue, and that’s proved by an article they themselves use as “proof” of their untrue statement.
The GMC, which registers doctors and licenses them to work, has been able to check EU medics’ English since last summer…
IM PRO BREXIT FREE
As just one example, the Vote Leave website claimsīecause of free movement laws, the UK cannot test every EU doctor operating in the UK for whether they can speak EnglishĪs proof, they link to an article in the Guardian about a horrible accident thanks to a doctor not understanding English. I haven’t had time to post all the mini-fact-checks I’ve found. Just today I discovered that the European Commission’s role in legislation is actually far more balanced than I thought.Īnd the Leave campaign lie a lot more. The more I investigate the EU, the more I find out it’s fairer and better set up than the UK’s government. They lie about the state of democracy in the EU. I still have found absolutely no support whatsoever for the figures that are confidently quoted here. They lie about the business case for Leave. I’d love to say “they’re misinformed”, or “they exaggerate”, but they don’t. They lie about how much money we spend on the EU. Leave’s ReliabilityĪt every single turn, I found that the Leave campaign’s arguments were founded on lies. Unfortunately, “well, at the end of the day both sides have a good point” is not what I found.
And if that happens I’d much rather be saying “well, at the end of the day both sides have a good point” than “oh god, oh god, we’re in real trouble now”. Why? Because the country might vote for Leave. However, I really hoped to find that my initial impressions of Leave were wildly wrong, and I was hoping they had very strong arguments. I came into this leaning cautiously to Remain. You care about who’s telling the truth, who isn’t, and who you should vote for. It has been surprisingly interesting, in some ways. ( Here are all the posts I wrote as a result.
I’ve treated myself to a fun Google search for the accounts of pro-Remain activists to check that they’re not biased. I’ve hacked through academic analyses of the EU when I really should have been promoting my Virtual Reality game. I’ve read 90-page government reports on my way to a wedding. I’ve now spent the last three weeks fact-checking every detail on Brexit that I possibly could.