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Post 25 Feb 2016, 11:22 am

I see Cameron has come out and repeated the same load of bollocks about the EU keeping down the cost of holidays today. I assume the strategy must be to keep repeating the lie often enough that people start to believe it. No explanation for how this might be though, or why, in that case, it isn't noticeably more expensive to fly to non-EU countries.

He's also made mention of the mysterious '3 million jobs' that apparently rely on EU trade. I'd be interested to see how they arrived at that figure, it seems suspicious to me. As of the last quarter there were a grand total of 31.42 million people employed in the UK. If the figure cited today by Cameron and ad nauseum by the In campaign is correct then it means that nearly 10% of all jobs in Britain are reliant on EU trade. That figure alone should make us doubtful, but when you break it down further it becomes even moreso.

17% of the workforce are in the public sector, so we can discount those right away. the pool of 'at risk' jobs is actually 26 million. It should be noted as well that a whopping 81% of all UK jobs are in the services sector. Services jobs do not usually involve a lot of exporting. Yes, the UK does trade in services with the EU, but for the most part what we export is financial services, which although very lucrative do not employ many people. So that's 21 million jobs in the service sector, with maybe a few tens of thousands of which involved in any way with exports to the EU. Construction, agriculture and energy/water supply accounts for another 10% of jobs, or 2.6 million. Granted, much of these people, especially in the energy sector, are employed by European firms,but this hardly counts as trade with the EU, we don't sell energy abroad. Some agricultural produce is no doubt sold in Europe, but not a huge amount and in any case agriculture is only 1% of the labour force. What we're left with then is manufacturing, which accounts for 9% of the labour force, or 2.3 million people. To arrive at a figure of 3 million jobs dependent on EU trade we have to make the heroic assumption that either a very large proportion of our service sector jobs are heavily involved in export, which is frankly absurd, or that near enough all of our manufacturing jobs are. This is also somewhat questionable, especially when you consider that only 11% of all UK businesses do any kind of exporting at all.

I honestly don't know where this 3 million jobs figure is supposed to come from, but it seems like a load of old bollocks to me.
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Post 25 Feb 2016, 1:31 pm

Some public sector jobs are EU related. Eg: those who disburse CAP payments alongside UK agricultural subsidies.
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Post 25 Feb 2016, 1:42 pm

Very few of them though, and those people would not just be sacked if we were to leave the EU, they'd be reassigned. Besides which, we're going to need to replace the CAP with our own agricultural subsidies.
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Post 25 Feb 2016, 1:51 pm

Sassenach wrote:Very few of them though, and those people would not just be sacked if we were to leave the EU, they'd be reassigned. Besides which, we're going to need to replace the CAP with our own agricultural subsidies.
Maybe. But there are others.

While only 11% of companies export, that does not mean 11% of jobs. I would expect that a large proportion of them are larger companies.

We do actually export services - a lot of financial services for example.

I tend to take any figures uttered by Cameron with a huge dose of salt - his figure on excess weekend deaths in the NHS is also just pulled out of a report devoid of context and caveats (and includes Monday and Friday as the weekend).

So I also doubt the 3 million. But there are jobs at risk.
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Post 25 Feb 2016, 2:17 pm

While you're obviously right to be wary of anything Cameron says, in this case he's just repeating a stat that's been floating around for a few years. Nick Clegg used to use it all the time in an equally cavalier fashion (no great recommendation of course...).

I suspect it can only work if you count anybody who works in the transportation or hospitality sectors as being involved in EU trade on account of some of their customers coming from the EU.
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Post 25 Feb 2016, 3:50 pm

Was just out in the car and Radio 4's science programme was discussing EU in/out and science. Apparently we get back more than we put in for scientific research funding, and that funding tends to be the seeding that leverages more from governments etc. And it fosters collaborative work as well.

That is an area where we could lose out in future, if we are not careful, and research can also have spin off and attracted work.

Again, it may not be significant alone, but is another area where jobs could be at risk, or less likely to be created.
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Post 27 Feb 2016, 8:43 am

The fact is that we're a net contributor to the EU budget to the tune of about £10 billion a year or thereabouts. The money that flows into science funding in the UK from EU funds is our own money. Granted, there's no guarantee that a future UK government would replicate that funding, but it's likely that they would and certainly it would be within our power to do so.

The argument that we need the EU for funding science research is just a less risible version of this one:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... haun-sheep
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Post 27 Feb 2016, 11:24 am

Well, no, it is not just about the funding, it is also the collaboration. My sister works in research and EU funding is vital (and since the Swiss referendum on immigration has become very tricky for her dept in Zurich.