PRESS RELEASE – March 2018
Ref: seua 5.2
A bright red bus emblazoned with ‘Brexit to cost £2,000 million a week’ completed a 33-stop tour of the UK in February and is scheduled to return for a second tour during April and May, East Anglia included.
Vote Leave’s claim on another, now infamous, bus that we send £350 million a week to the EU, money that would be available for the NHS after Brexit, has now been discredited by the Government’s own Brexit analysis, published very recently.
In light of this analysis, the new, crowdfunded, red bus asks the simple question,
“Brexit: Is it worth it?”
Also dubbed the “Truth Bus”, the “Is It Worth It?” bus draws attention to the huge discrepancy between what the country was told by the Vote Leave campaign in 2016 and what the Government now knows to be the likely cost to the country of even the most optimistic forecast of the damage to the economy.
Far from being a windfall for the NHS of £350 million a week, that figure amounts to a loss to the country of £2,000 million. That’s £2 billion a week, in lost GDP.
The same Government analysis shows that leaving without any trade deal, as many hard Brexiters favour, will cost even more, £3,200 million a week. That’s sixteen times the price of EU membership.
Tim Evans, one of the campaigners behind the “Is it Worth It” project explains that figures are based on Brexit with a Free Trade Agreement costing 5% of GDP after 15 years. “These shocking numbers show we would be £2,000 million a week poorer than we otherwise would be. To put this in context, that is 80% of the NHS budget across the UK. These are not our numbers – they are the Government’s numbers and we only got to see them after they were leaked to the press”, he added.
Tim joined the ‘Let’s Stay Together’ rally at the University of Suffolk in Ipswich, organised by Suffolk EU Alliance on March 24. He promoted the bus’s second tour and provided feedback on the first tour which visited 33 towns and cities from Bristol to Edinburgh and Glasgow to Dover, attracting over 100 speakers and crowds of up to 300 at each stop.
Suffolk EU Alliance spokesperson Julia Ewart said “We are looking forward to hosting the “Is It Worth It” bus in East Anglia. It is an important agricultural region with so much to lose from a bad Brexit. Consider our amazing pig and poultry farming industry. Our farmers uphold the highest animal welfare standards and, as a result, the products they put on our plates are second to none. All this has been achieved while we’ve been within the EU.
“Should we welcome into our country the flavourless, hormone and anti-biotic injected meat products, sometimes drenched in chlorine and, and some, it is claimed, fed on animal excrement? Or are our East Anglian farmers and the secondary processing agri-industries that they support worth standing up for? We think they most certainly are”.
Those interested in the details behind the numbers on the new red “Truth Bus” can find out more at www.isitworthit.org.uk.
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Further information: Tim Evans, tim.evans@btopenworld.com
Press relations contact: Richard Hare c/o suffolkeu@gmail.com
Notes for editors
- Additional photographs of the bus can be found at www.isitworthit.org.uk.
- The tour is being run by volunteer members of over 28 non-partisan local groups. 670 ordinary people raised the £16,000 cost of launching the first tour via crowdfunding.
- For national media enquiries contact Virginia Beardshaw: virginia@isitworthit.org.uk
- More information on the tour and the facts on which the campaign is based can be found at isitworthit.org.uk.
- Details of the itinerary for the second tour will be available shortly at www.isitworthit.org.uk