Fruitcake or loony? Nigel Farage and UKIP get a kicking on Have I Got News For You (video)

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Facts matter.

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts” Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan If you want to know the objective facts about the EU, you can download the Regents report here: The UK & Europe: Costs, Benefits, Options Regents Report 2013. this is what The Observer said about the report back in November:

Subtitled The Regent’s Report 2013, the 237-page document is going to be useful to all sides if we do have to go through what I myself regard as an unnecessary and time-wasting referendum on our membership of the European Union.

For a group of authors who are largely pro-European – and some, even now, pro-eurozone – they have produced a remarkably balanced document, with the emphasis on – wait for it – facts. There is plenty of acknowledgement of the tiresome aspects of the EU, and among a plethora of statistics, some obvious ones stand out.

These will not be new to students of the EU, but you can be sure they will not be highlighted by the anti-Europe brigade – many of whom have very nice houses in France, Spain, Italy and other parts of the EU. Suffice it to repeat here that, for all the fuss made by the anti-European press and Ukip, the entire “Brussels budget” amounts to 1% of EU gross domestic product.

Confusion can be worse confounded when it comes to facts. With economic statistics, we are often talking about estimates rather than facts. I have never found any evidence that Keynes made the remark often attributed to him: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

The explanation is simple: Keynes was far too intelligent to believe that facts could change. Facts are facts. Circumstances can change, and new information or more refined calculation can alter previous estimates.

William Keegan writing in The Observer 3 November 2013