“Refugees Welcome” – two cyclists are creating the world’s biggest piece of GPS art in charity ride across southern England

Jenova20 wrote:

Rendel Harris wrote:

Just curious, are you actually interested in cycling at all or do you just come here to bang on about Brexit?

I'd be quite happy if people just moved on. Unfortunately the left is largely intolerant of others and incapable of this, just like how they protest for years after losing Democratic elections here and in the US.

Comedy. Genius.

Rich_cb wrote:

The funding announced by May will deliver an extra £394 million per week to the NHS from 2023/24 onwards. The vast majority of the Financial Settlement (Divorce Bill) will have been paid by 2023/24. Up until this point the UK will still be contributing to the EU budget. From 2023/24 onwards there will, when these payments largely cease, be additional monies available to the UK government to spend. This will not cover the entire cost of May's pledge but will cover the majority. The £350m bus claim is therefore not entirely true but nor is it entirely false. There were far bigger lies told during the referendum, it baffles me why there is this ongoing obsession with a simple bus advert. https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainers/brexit-deal-financi...

An advert which didn't even state that all of that money would go to the NHS. Remainers are unable to understand basic facts. It's been 5 years of pointing out to them that saying you can do something, is not the same as saying you will do something.

If the bus had stated how many biscuits that money could pay for would Remainers still be complaining that the Gov hasn't bought £350m of biscuits yet? I'm astounded at the stupidity of these people...And they'll still be arguing over this in 5 years from the look of it because they're petty vindictive children.

Jenova20 wrote:

An advert which didn't even state that all of that money would go to the NHS. Remainers are unable to understand basic facts. It's been 5 years of pointing out to them that saying you can do something, is not the same as saying you will do something.

If the bus had stated how many biscuits that money could pay for would Remainers still be complaining that the Gov hasn't bought £350m of biscuits yet? I'm astounded at the stupidity of these people...And they'll still be arguing over this in 5 years from the look of it because they're petty vindictive children.

Oh get over it - you won, and this is now all on you 

I agree that the advert was aspirational rather than a promise.

I'm continually amazed by how much attention such an insignificant advert continues to attract!

Rich_cb wrote:

I agree that the advert was aspirational rather than a promise. I'm continually amazed by how much attention such an insignificant advert continues to attract!

"an insignificant advert"

Significance is all about context.

In the context of a referendum in which both sides spent millions on advertising how is a simple bus advert anything but insignificant?

The simple advert Labour Isn't Working was credited by multiple people for winning the Election in 79. So was that an insignificant advert?

The bus was a simple advert but if it persuaded 2-3% of people to change their vote then how is it insignificant? Cummings has even said all the research pointed to it winning it for them, especially with Johnson throwing his full lying personna behind it. 

So yes, keep on claiming it is insignificant on the amount of money spent on it if you want to use that as your reasoning. But don't belittle the effect it had at the time. 

Is there any evidence that the bus persuaded that many people to vote Leave?

1979 was a different world in terms of media. 3 tv channels. No internet. A poster was far more significant then.

Rich_cb wrote:

Is there any evidence that the bus persuaded that many people to vote Leave?

From the Before Times in 2018: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/vote-leave-brexit-lies-eu-pay-money-remain-poll-boris-johnson-a8603646.html

Quote:

A new study by King’s College London of attitudes to Brexit found that 42 per cent of people who had heard of the claim still believe it is true, while just 36 per cent thought it was false and 22 per cent were unsure.

The research, conducted with the help of pollster Ipsos MORI, shows that sustained criticism of the false claim by the UK Statistics Authority and others has had little effect, with perceptions mostly unchanged since before the referendum.

The sustained belief also comes despite the government having shown no sign of spending the supposed £350m extra a week on the NHS, as the advertisements controversially suggested.

The official Vote Leave campaign put the claim on the side of a big red bus and ran it in targeted internet adverts aimed at swing voters, turning the Brexit vote into a referendum on austerity.

The former boss of the Vote Leave campaign, Dominic Cummings, admitted after the referendum that “all our research and the close result strongly suggests” that Remain would have won without the advert.

“It was clearly the most effective argument, not only with the crucial swing [vote] but with almost every demographic,” he said in 2017.

I think the report is available here: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/policy-institute/research-analysis/the-publics-brexit-misperceptions

And here's a graph

Firstly, thank you for the graph!

Secondly, I was more looking for evidence that it had actually persuaded that many people to change their vote.

Interestingly, I read a (very) long piece by Cummings in the Spectator yesterday in which he credited a lot of the success of the £350m claim to the fact that it caused so many arguments, he seemed to be claiming that they used the gross figure deliberately to cause a fuss and effectively get free advertising.

If that's true (and I'm always sceptical of explanations after the fact) it is quite genius in Machiavellian sort of way.

I guess that'd be tricky to get an accurate figure for as you'd be asking people to remember their decision process and accurately weight what influenced them. It'd be like determining which particular advert persuaded people to buy Nescafe over Douwe Egberts coffee when in reality there's lots of subconscious cues that people aren't especially aware of (e.g. product placement on shelves; perceived quality of packaging etc). Instead you survey people about their opinions on aspects of the brands.

Cummings is obviously very skilled in number crunching and media influencing, but he does seem to be a moral vaccuum. On the one hand I liked his plan to disrupt government/civil service to modernise them, but on the other hand he also seemed very much like an evil dictator in how he tried to run things.

I feel much the same way about Cummings.

He has some good ideas but his ego and his disdain for the political machinations of Westminster combine to make him toxic and, ironically, to prevent his ideas being implemented.

hawkinspeter]</p>

<p>

[quote

wrote:

The sustained belief also comes despite the government having shown no sign of spending the supposed £350m extra a week on the NHS, as the advertisements controversially suggested.

That statement is bullshit, and it's already been disproved multiple times in this thread, with Remainers refusing to acknowledge reality.

Jenova20 wrote:

That statement is bullshit, and it's already been disproved multiple times in this thread, with Remainers refusing to acknowledge reality.

I wonder if you suffer from poor reading comprehension?

That statement was from an article in The Independent from 2018. If you're going to call bullshit on it, then I'd expect to see some evidence to the contrary.

In fairness to Jenova there have been links provided in this thread showing £394m extra for the NHS from 2023/24 which is when our contributions to the EU largely end. The contributions will be approximately £250m/week until that point.

I perhaps would have phrased my objections more politely though.

Yes, but to criticise an article that I specifically stated was from 2018 for not taking the future into account seems bizarre.

The evidence I'd like to see Jenova20 produce is the extra funding given or announced before that article was printed as I do not believe it to be inaccurate (subject to any evidence that it was indeed bullshit).

Ok, I see your point, that is fair comment.

On the Left Vs Right thing the Economist recently did a feature on the threat to democracy from the Left. They included the main article on their podcast.

https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9yc3MuYWNhc3QuY29tL3RoZWVjb25...

Summary: Elements on the left do represent a threat to US democracy but the threat from the Right is far greater.

Again, I'm not convinced that left-v-right categorisation is that useful (sorry, I very rarely listen to podcasts, so I'll just use your summary). It'd be better to compare e.g. rich vs poor as that'd likely highlight significant differences in behaviour. I'd guess that rich people end up doing a lot more harm to the environment than the poor and conversely, the poor are more likely to violently protest.

Similarly with Brexit, it wasn't just a left vs right vote as plenty of Labour supporters were Brexiters too. It's more insightful to look at economic, educational and geographic distributions of voters such as investigated here: https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/brexit-vote-explained-poverty-low-skills-and-lack-opportunities

(and another chart for good luck)

Rich_cb wrote:

In fairness to Jenova there have been links provided in this thread showing £394m extra for the NHS from 2023/24 which is when our contributions to the EU largely end. The contributions will be approximately £250m/week until that point. I perhaps would have phrased my objections more politely though.

Theresa May has already honoured the pledge when she was Prime Minister. 2023 spending is in addition, but the pledge made by Remainers was already met under the May government. There's a link I provided, which Hawkinspeter has replied too already, with these links below, showing that the NHS will be getting around £600 million a week extra by 2023...This will now be even higher as Boris just chucked billions more at it.

https://fullfact.org/health/nhs-england-394-million-more/ (link is external)
https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-the-nhs-funding-boost-... (link is external)
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/nhs-funding-bill-enters-parliament (link is external)

But isn't that money going to the NHS now because Johnson raised NI/taxes, not because he suddenly had lots of loose change sloshing around because we're working on becoming an offshore tax haven because we're not in the EU?

As I mentioned, Cummings is adamant it did and he is a very structured numbers / data man so I suspect he does know his stuff on this and has the data to back it up. Of course now he is out of the Government and an enemy of Johnson, I expect he is persona non gratia for convincing you. 

He wrote: "Leave won because 1) three big forces [the immigration crisis, the 2008 financial crisis and the euro crisis] created conditions in which the contest was competitive, AND 2) Vote Leave exploited the situation imperfectly but effectively, AND 3) Cameron/Osborne made big mistakes. If just one of these had been different, it is very likely IN would have won."

"Pundits and MPs kept saying ‘why isn’t Leave arguing about the economy and living standards’. They did not realise that for millions of people, £350m/NHS was about the economy and living standards – that's why it was so effective. It was clearly the most effective argument not only with the crucial swing fifth but with almost every demographic. Even with UKIP voters it was level-pegging with immigration. Would we have won without immigration? No. Would we have won without £350m/NHS? All our research and the close result strongly suggests No."

"If Boris, Gove, and Gisela had not supported us and picked up the baseball bat marked 'Turkey/NHS/£350 million' with five weeks to go, then 650,000 votes might have been lost."

I actually read that article yesterday, he oscillates from the quotes you've provided to sentences like this:

"These three big forces had global impact and had much more effect on people who pay a normal amount of attention to politics than every speech, article, pamphlet and ‘campaign’ about the EU over 15 years, the sum total of which had almost no discernible effect."

I'm sceptical of Cummings take the £350m claim because he is essentially crediting his approach for the victory but I will accept that he is very data driven so may well have the polling etc to back that claim up.

My favourite bit of the very long article was this:

"The official bill of EU membership is £350 million per week – let’s spend our money on our priorities like the NHS instead.’ (Sometimes we said ‘we send the EU £350m’ to provoke people into argument. This worked much better than I thought it would."

If that's true, and again I'm sceptical of claims after the fact, it's quite hilarious that all the outraged remainers repeating the £350m claim ad nauseam were doing exactly what Cummings wanted them too!

If we take Cummings at his word then it's likely that using the net figure of £250m/week would have been just as impactful on those exposed to it but without the remainer outrage associated with the £350m claim it would never have received so much attention.

Jenova20 wrote:

brooksby wrote:

Cough-cough - £350 million per week for the NHS...

That pledge was met by Theresa May if you missed it, to the tune of £600 million a week (second citation), and Boris is handing the NHS even more from 2023. This is on top of the Covid funding, and in addition to the extra funding to clear the backlog. Proving my point - Remainers don't like facts.

• https://fullfact.org/health/nhs-england-394-million-more/
• https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-the-nhs-funding-boost-...
• https://www.gov.uk/government/news/nhs-funding-bill-enters-parliament

I think you're missing the point. the £350 million per week was advertised (on the side of a bus) as a key benefit of leaving the EU. However, those links you provided are clear that the extra money is not as a benefit of Brexit (from your 2nd link):

Quote:

But this week’s announcement – according to Mrs May – will see the NHS better off to the tune of £600 million a week in real terms by 2023-24.

That’s more than double the more accurate £234 million sum, so it’s hard to see how this can be wholly funded by what we save on EU membership fees by leaving the trade bloc.

And either way, the money we could have saved has already been earmarked to cover the costs of leaving.

The divorce bill – the severance fee that the UK has agreed to pay the EU in order to leave the trade bloc – is expected to cost Britain about £40 billion.

Jenova20 wrote:

and Boris is handing the NHS even more from 2023.

I was under the impression that Johnson had pledged to pay extra money to the NHS that the Govt were raising by increasing NI contributions?

That's for social care. This wasn't anticipated when Brexit campaigning was happening.

And in response to Hawkinspeter I stated that the £350m has more than been delivered. I'm not bothered where the money is coming from. It wasn't a promise that it would be given in the first place. It was a statement of what could be done.

Jenova20 wrote:

... I stated that the £350m has more than been delivered. I'm not bothered where the money is coming from. It wasn't a promise that it would be given in the first place. It was a statement of what could be done.

Those are such weaselly words.  Utter horlicks.

brooksby wrote:

Jenova20 wrote:

... I stated that the £350m has more than been delivered. I'm not bothered where the money is coming from. It wasn't a promise that it would be given in the first place. It was a statement of what could be done.

Those are such weaselly words.  Utter horlicks.

Not my fault you inferred something that wasn't said, or wrote on a large bus. You Remainers have spent years complaining and trying to hold the Government to account for a pledge Remainers made. The irony is Theresa May honoured it, and yet you're still pretending it never happened, and complaining about something else.

Again. Saying you can do something is not the same as saying you should, or will do something. Kids learn this stuff in phonics...

(removed)

Meanwhile the labour shortage caused by the flight of EU nationals is real and having precisely the impact on care homes, HGV drivers, bricklayers, plumbers, electricians etc. that those pesky experts said it would. The UK remains a nation floating away from reality while Brexiters continue to prove themselves to be sore winners. 

Can we all just stop calling Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, "Boris"?

"Boris" is a character/persona he created to seem more likeable.

We never talked about "Margaret" crushing the miners, or "John", or "Teresa".  Although, TBF, people talked about "Tony" a lot, possibly for the same reasons as "Boris"...