17:23 Wednesday 25th May 2016
BBC Radio Cambridgeshire
CHRIS MANN: There’s been a mixed response to a report from an economic think-tank suggesting that quitting the European Union could cause two more years of austerity. The Institute for Fiscal Studies accepts that savings would be made if the British people voted to leave in next month’s referendum, but its boss Paul Johnson says that the benefits would be offset with the economy set to shrink.
PAUL JOHNSON: The immediate effect of leaving the EU would be that the Government would have an extra £8 billion or so to spend, money that currently goes to the European Union. But it wouldn’t take very much at all to change in the economy to lose that very quickly, and our best estimate is actually you’d lose quite a lot more than that £8 billion, because the economy would grow less quickly than otherwise.
CHRIS MANN: But the Leader of the UK Independence Party Nigel Farage is questioning the impartiality of the organisation.
NIGEL FARAGE: They take in millions of pounds of money from the European Union. So once again, it’s the same old game, it’s taxpayers’ money being used to tell us what we should think, and what you should do. And frankly the scale of this now is outrageous. The Government and all their friends, taxpayer funded friends, are frankly cheating.
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