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.
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.