Why you should vote to remain in the EU

Let's start with the economy because, it's all about the economy!

The Leave Campaign have a bus that says we pay £350m a week to the EU.

We don't.

We get a rebate, that was negotiated by Margaret Thatcher, that means we pay £248m a week to the EU.

So, we actually pay £12.8 billion a year to the EU, of which we get back about £6 billion in grants to individuals and businesses. A lot of this is payments to farmers, as part of the Common Agricultural Policy. The Brexiteers have said they will continue to support the recipients of grants currently received from the EU. The EU also take £1 billion of our contribution to redistribute as International Aid, which is counted towards the UK Government's target of spending 0.7% of GDP on aid, so presumably we would spend that anyway.

So, in conclusion, we give the EU about £6 billion a year, which we don't receive back.

Still sounds like a lot of money doesn't it? This is money that the Brexiteers claim could be given to the NHS. An attractive proposition, indeed!

But it's not that simple. £6 billion a year would be soaked up by a 0.4% reduction in the economy. In simple terms, any shrinkage in the economy results in less stuff being sold, so fewer people are required to make it, so more people lose their jobs, so instead of the treasury getting money from them in taxes, they have to pay it out in benefits.

The best economic forecast says that exiting the EU would reduce the UK economy by 2%. This means that, instead of having £6 billion extra to give the NHS, we would be £24 billion out of pocket, which we would have to find from public sector cuts and tax rises. The annual budget for the NHS is about £116 billion, so we could reduce that to £92 billion?

The worst forecast, or the one the IMF published today, suggests the negative impact to the UK economy would be 5.6%. This would mean that we're £84 billion out of pocket. That would reduce the NHS annual budget from £116 billion to £32 billion. How does that sound?

Many have said that economists have got it wrong in the past, and may be wrong here. True, however, the trade figures with our EU partners are not subject to conjecture, they're published as fact, so it doesn't take a genius to work out the contraction of the available market, to calculate the figures on. The best 2% contraction estimate is based on us getting a Norway-style deal, which would still mean we pay the EU, and accept free movement, etc, so no net financial benefit. And would we get a deal? Both sides have to be willing to deal, to reach a deal, and German finance minister, Wolfgang Schauble has said he will not do any deals with the UK post-Brexit,