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Thread: When will people realise that with this GATT Article XXIV row we're simply re-running the Vote Leave playbook from the 2016 referendum? Cast your minds back to 2016, when the main thing infuriating fact checkers was the £350m on the side of the Vote Leave bus 1/
That claim was essentially bogus - but with enough truth that disproving it involved explanation. Yes £350m was the gross contribution but we get back abt half of it in various forms. Vote Leave gambled that people would pay less attention to the explanation than the thrust... 2/
...that We Send Money To Europe And Could Spend It On The NHS Instead. The wonky details of whether you should really use the gross or net figure were secondary to that gut sense that Britain should, guess what, Take Back Control 3/
Vote Leave chief Dominic Cummings subsequently admitted that the £350m was designed "to provoke people into argument". By infuriating the fact checkers he actually got the bus into the press MORE than if he'd used a net figure dominiccummings.com/2017/01/09/on-… 4/ 
The playbook: provoke fact-checkers into dissecting the numbers, provoke interviewers into challenging campaigners on the numbers. Meanwhile every provocation means more coverage of a topic that will galvanise voters, where the passion & the broad thrust trumps decimal places 5/
Now consider GATT Article 24 row. Why do hard Brexiters continually cite it? They know (or should know) that in reality the clause won't mean UK can have reciprocal zero tariffs w/ EU even after we've left with no deal. They know it only kicks in if there IS a deal & EU agrees 6/
But as with £350m, this isn't about reality. It's about having a plausible claim with at least a fragment of truth in it (in THEORY Art24 allows u to suspend tariffs subject to the conditions above). And that provokes people into talking about it & gets it onto the bulletins 7/
Lo & behold every interviewer is asking Boris Johnson et al abt Art24, thinking they've snookered him. But they've been snookered themselves: every time they namecheck Art24 (even to correct it) it gives impression there might be a way the UK could smoothly leave EU w/o deal 8/
The £350m wasn't really abt the £350m. It was about sovereignty. GATT Art24 isn't really abt the process of leaving; it's the idea that there's a higher court in the world than the EU, that the UK will be protected if it leaves. It's abt defusing the scary prospects of no deal 9/
What we have here is a loophole in journalism. Our obsession with the minute details of these dubious claims means we rarely stand back and question whether in effect all this fact checking might actually be reinforcing the impression of the erroneous claim we seek to correct 10/
