And another?

Rather a loud article in Saturday's DT from our Foreign Secretary, in which he explains about how we are about to sock it to all those Europeans. And that part of that socking is going to be getting our £350m a week back and giving it to the NHS.

This number has been the subject of much abuse in the past. Now our Foreign Secretary, whatever one might think of him, is no fool. Would he persist with a number which many people think is quite wrong?

Aware that European finance is tricky and perhaps no place for amateurs, I wade in regardless, ask the people at National Statistics about it and very quickly download a couple of spreadsheets.

The story that I get is that we currently pay the Europeans about £20b a year, of which we get about £10b a year back. Series GCSM and BLZS for readers who want to check for themselves. Which suggests to me that our Foreign Secretary is using the gross figure, rather than the net figure, despite this last seeming rather more appropriate. I do not pretend to have read his article with any care, but I saw neither the word gross nor the word net. Nor any recognition that we might be in some way be committed to contributing to forward budgets that we have agreed to in the past.

Furthermore, to keep things in proportion, our gross contribution is about 1% of our national income and our net contribution is rather less than we spend on aid to developing countries, although rather to my surprise I failed to find this last number on the usually excellent national statistics site and had to ask google instead.

And even furthermore, maybe given the poverty in some parts of the EU, we should be glad to be doing something about it. And apart from being a good thing in itself, less poverty for them translates into less pain for us. As we are going to find out in spades if we fail in Africa.

PS: I might add that I was sorry to hear allegations the other day to the effect that our Foreign Secretary is a closet user of Grecian 2000. One might have thought that his expensive education would have propelled him onto a higher plane.