Robert Kimbell is a Brexit fanatic, Ukipper and Twitter celebrity. He's regularly lauded as an economics expert by the hard right, but in this article I'm going to expose the cynical cherry-picking trick he keeps using to create utterly misleading EU-bad narratives.
A quick browse through Kimbell's Twitter feed reveals his extreme Brexit bias, with links to fanatically right-wing Brexit propaganda sites like Westmonster and Brexit Central strewn amongst links to the pro-Brexit right-wing corporate media (Daily Mail, Express, Telegraph, S*n) and Retweets of numerous hard-Brexit celebrities and commentators.
Kimbell's favourite Twitter trick is to pick a country in the EU that has fallen down the global GDP ranking a little bit since their entry to the EU, and then compare them to a random country from the developing world that has risen slightly in the global GDP ranking over the same period (see screenshots).
Beware of crude GDP figures
Anyone with a bit of basic economic nous understands that relying on crude GDP figures is a surefire way of creating misleading economic narratives.
Take the talk of the so-called Tory "economic recovery" between 2010-2015 that helped them win their unexpected majority at the 2015 General Election.
It is true that the UK's GDP grew a bit between 2010 and 2015, but what the Tories omitted to mention was that nearly all of that economic growth was generated by the rising population caused by Theresa May's all-time record breaking increases in the net immigration rate.
Between 2010 and 2015 our economy was only really growing because of the all-time high levels of immigration, with the amount of economic activity per person (GDP per capita) remaining well below the level it was before the economic crisis.
Reworking the crude GDP con for Brexiteering
Kimbell's approach is that if the Tories could win a General Election by pushing a shockingly misleading crude GDP narrative, he can use the same trick to make the ongoing Brexit shambles look like a fantastic idea.
Thus he's repeatedly used comparisons of crude GDP figures on Twitter to make EU countries look like failures compared to growing economies in the developing world.
I'll go through five examples of him using this trick to show how utterly misleading his little anti-EU propaganda tropes are.
Hungary vs Bangladesh
Since Hungary joined the EU in 2004 it has fallen from 44th to 58th in the global GDP ranking. In the same time Bangladesh has risen from 57th to 46th.
What Kimbell has omitted to mention is that Bangladesh has a population of 163 million people (the 8th most populous country on earth), while Hungary has a population of 9.8 million (the 92nd most populous).
A look at the International Monetary Fund's GDP per capita figures reveal that Hungary is the 45th most prosperous country per person ($27,482), while Bangladesh is 139th ($3,891 per person).
Additionally, since 2004 the GDP per capita in Hungary has increased by over $4,000 per person (more than the entire current GDP per capita of Bangladesh), while GDP per capita in Bangladesh has increased by less than $1,400 per person.
The idea that Bangladesh is now surpassing Hungary thanks to the failure of the EU is based on a crude statistical trick that completely ignores the fact that the population of Bangladesh is over 16 times the size of Hungary, and has in fact grown by over 20 million (double the population of Hungary) since Hungary joined the EU just 13 years ago!
Luxembourg vs Oman
Since 1960 Luxembourg it has fallen from 55th to 76th in the global GDP ranking. In the same time Oman has risen from 97th to 75th.
What Kimbell has omitted to mention is that Oman has a population of 4.6 million people (the 125th most populous country on earth), while Luxembourg has a population of below 600,000 (the 166th most populous).
The question shouldn't be why has Luxemburg fallen behind Oman, but why has it taken Oman so long to catch up given their population is over seven times the size, and the large oil and natural gas reserves they've been exploiting for decades.
The International Monetary Fund's GDP per capita figures reveal that Luxembourg is the 2nd most prosperous country per person ($104,003), while Oman is 21st ($46,698 per person).
Omitting to mention the fact that Oman has a population seven times the size of Luxembourg, the fossil fuel bonanza that has fuelled Oman's climb up the GDP rankings, and the fact that the people of Luxembourg are actually the 2nd most prosperous on earth to create an EU-bad narrative are all indications of the lengths Brexiteers will go to in order to con people into supporting Brexit.
Austria vs Nigeria
Since Austria joined the EU in 1995 it has fallen from 21st to 28th in the global GDP ranking. In the same time Nigeria has risen from 57th to 27th.
Again Kimbell is using the same trick of ignoring population growth, ignoring GDP per capita, and ignoring a huge fossil fuel bonanza going on in the cherry-picked developing nation. Here are some of the stats.
Austria has a population of 8.8 million (the 96th most populous nation). Nigeria has a population of 193.5 million (the 7th most populous).
A look at the International Monetary Fund's GDP per capita figures reveal that Austria is the 19th most prosperous country per person ($48,005), while Nigeria is 126th ($5,942 per person).
Nigeria has a population over 20 times the size of Austria's, yet they've only just climbed to one place ahead of them in the crude GDP statistics, and the amount of economic activity per person in Nigeria is one eighth of the amount per person in Austria.
In fact, since 1995 the population of Nigeria has grown by 85 million people, so in order to surpass Austria by one place in the crude GDP rankings, Nigeria has had to increase its population by over 9 times the total population of Austria!
In the same period GDP per capita in Austria has grown by over $10,000 per person, an increase of almost double the current total GDP per capita in Nigeria!
The idea that wealthy Austria is somehow being held back by the EU because their economy has fallen one place behind a poverty stricken developing nation country with over 20x the population is exactly the kind of hopelessly delusional drivel that hard-right Brexiters thrive on.
Slovenia vs Angola
When Slovenia joined the EU in 2004 it had the 65th biggest economy, now it's 85th. In the same period Angola has risen from 81st to 63rd.
It's exactly the same trick again.
In 2005 (one year after Slovenia joined the EU) Angola had a population of 16.5 million, now it has a population of 28.4 million (48th in the world). In the same period the population of Slovenia has changed from 2.00 million to 2.06 million (146th).
One country has almost doubled its population in the period, whilst the other has remained almost completely static. Is it any wonder that a country which now has a population eight times the size of the other has edged above them in the crude GDP ranking?
A look at the much more informative GDP per capita rankings paints a very much less misleading picture. According the the IMF, Slovenia are 37th in the world at £32,085 per person, while Angola are 120th at $6,844 per person.
The effort to attack the EU by painting Slovenia as some kind of failing dump and Angola as a thriving success story based solely on crude GDP figures is clearly the work of a person who takes their audience as a pack of absolutely gullible idiots.
Malta vs Zambia
Kimbell asserts that Malta has fallen from 124 to 132 in the crude GDP rankings, while Zambia has climbed from 126 to 107.
Between 2004 and the present the population of Malta has increased slightly from 401,000 to 437,000. In the same period the population of Zambia has increased from 11.4 million to 16.4 million.
In 2004 Zambia had a population over 28 times the size of Malta, and now it has a population over 37 times the size of Malta. It's not a surprise that the Zambian economy is now bigger than the Maltese economy at all. What is surprising is that they were still behind the tiny island of Malta just 13 years ago.
Let's compare the GDP per capita of failing Malta and booming Zambia:
Zambia are 140th in the world with $3,880 in economic activity per person per year. Malta are 28th with $39,834.
Only the most agenda driven fanatic could try to paint wealthy and stable Malta as some kind of failing economic basket case compared to poverty stricken Zambia, which has less than a tenth of the economic activity per person as the former-British colony in the Mediterranean.
Beware of Brexiter statistics
I'm sure most of us remember the disgraceful £350 million for the NHS lies promoted by the Vote Leave mob, but it's still worth remembering that these same dishonest Brexiteers are still out there programming people with warped narratives, cherry-picked statistics, and downright lies in order to con them into continuing to support the hard-right anti-democratic Tory Brexit shambles.
The really sad thing is that the UK education system has failed so spectacularly that huge numbers of people have not been equipped with the critical thinking skills to even see through such crude and manipulative statistical cherry-picking.
What to do about people who have been let down by the education system and left with such weak critical thinking skills that they don't even question such ludicrously cherry-picked stats is a question for another time, but what to do about Robert Kimbell and his ilk is easy: Call them out on their shockingly deceptive idiot fodder whenever we see them spewing it.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
Two of the most commonly occurring arguments in the Tory tribalist arsenal are the cherry-picking of economic statistics to make it look like the Tories have done a good job of managing the economy, and the fearmongering about Labour and mass immigration.
In this article I'm going to show that not only are these arguments completely wrong-headed, but that they're also mutually exclusive.
The fake economic recovery
If the Tories have done such a wonderful job of recovering the economy how is it possible that UK workers have suffered the worst wage collapse anywhere in the developed world except crisis stricken Greece?
If the Tories have done such a fantabulous job of making the country richer, why are they still shutting down hospitals, gutting local government spending, laying off police and other emergency service workers, slashing the education budget, systematically impoverishing disabled people, and condemning yet another 250,000 children to poverty with their cuts to the child welfare budget and in-work benefits?
The answer of course is that the economy isn't actually growing in real terms at all, but that they've created a fake economic recovery by measuring their success by increases in GDP (a measure of total economic activity) whilst letting record numbers of immigrants into the country under Theresa May's watch at the Home Office.
Theresa May's immigration record
In 2010 Theresa May promised to reduce net migration to below 100,000, but what she actually managed to achieve as Home Secretary was the biggest migration inflow in history, with the annual rate peaking at over 300,000 several times.
In November 2015 immigration reached an all time record high of 336,000, meaning Theresa May was missing her arbitrary target by an astounding 236%! Amazingly the right-wing anti-immigration mob adore her because she regularly spouts a load of divisive anti-migrant rhetoric, and they clearly enjoy Theresa May's immigrant bashing so much they allow themselves to forget that she's actually let in more immigrants than any Labour Home Secretary ever did!
GDP per capita
It's absolutely obvious that the UK economy would be seen to be growing more quickly than other developed economies if their population is increasing at a much faster rate due to the huge migration influx that happened under Theresa May's watch at the Home Office.
The only sensible way to measure the UK's relative economic performance under these circumstances is to measure performance using GDP per capita (the total amount of economic activity divided by the actual population).
When we look at the GDP per capita figures, it's clear that the UK isn't recovering at all, in fact it's suffered a lost decade where the amount of economic activity per person has actually slumped after the figures are adjusted for inflation.
In 2007 the amount of economic activity per person in the UK was $49,950 in current US dollars, by 2015 it had slumped to $43,930 [source]. Since the vote for Brexit the pound has lost about 15% of its value against the dollar, meaning another slump in per capita GDP is on the cards once the 2016 figures have been calculated.
Tory sympathisers will obviously believe anything
The evidence is absolutely clear that the UK has been getting poorer under Tory misrule, but that it's been offset by the mass immigration that happened under Theresa May's watch at the Home Office. The only reason the economy looked like it was growing was that the population was growing so quickly due to Theresa May's wave of mass immigration.
It just goes to show how the forelock-tugging Tory tribalist is willing to believe anything their lords and masters tell them.
They ignore the wealth of evidence that the country is getting poorer (the shrinking wages, the incessant Tory cuts and the still ballooning national debt) in order to celebrate crude out-of-context GDP figures that only look reasonably good due to mass immigration.
Then they believe the right-wing press that Labour is responsible for mass immigration when it's actually their beloved Theresa May who let in more immigrants than anyone else, which is the only reason the crude GDP figures they're wildly celebrating over look any good at all.
Just imagine the level of blustering under-informed party political tribalism it would take to argue that the Tories' mass immigration-boosted GDP figures are a measure of Tory economic success, whilst simultaneously decrying Labour for supposedly being in favour of mass immigration!
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
The Tories are always harping on about their "economic recovery". Aside from all of the smears, fearmongering and divide and conquer tactics in the right-wing press, this endlessly repeated recovery narrative was the keystone of their re-election campaign.
I've detailed how they used distorted figures, revisionism and out-of-context big numbers to support this recovery narrative in a previous post, so I won't go into that too much in this one. This one is about something called per capita GDP.
I know a lot of people struggle with economics stuff, it's totally understandable given that the vast majority of our state schools do not teach economics to their students. This means that the 93% of us who go to state schools are very unlikely to get training in the economic basics, whilst the 7% of children with parents wealthy enough to send them to private school are almost certain to learn about economic issues. Whether you want to believe that this is a deliberate conspiracy to keep the general public in a state of economic ignorance is really up to you, all I'm saying is that I understand why so many people find economic stuff difficult to understand.
Per capita GDP is an economic indicator that tells us the economic activity of a country divided by it's population, which gives us a measure of how much economic activity there is per person in the economy.
What a lot of people fail to realise is that the the UK GDP per capita is still significantly lower than it was before the global financial sector insolvency crisis of 2008 (see graph). This means that if the economic activity is divided equally among all of us, then our share is significantly smaller than it was back in 2008.
The reason that people fail to realise this is twofold. One is that the mainstream media abjectly fail to hold George Osborne and the Tories to account for the failure of their economic plans. For example, when the Tories completely failed to eliminate the budget deficit as they promised back in 2010, journalists didn't challenge them about this failure, they instead allowed the Tories to completely reframe this abject failure as a success by constantly repeating "we've cut the deficit by a third" rather than forcing them to admit that they'd missed their actual target by two thirds. Thus most economics journalists are very unlikely to confront the Tories with damning statistics like the per capita GDP figures.
The second failure is that of the Labour Party, which also failed to challenge the Tory recovery narrative with anything. No facts, no evidence, no appealing and easy to remember counter-narrative, nothing. All they offered their supporters was a desperately dispiriting prescription of austerity-lite, which makes the cardinal mistake of accepting the premise of the other party (that the austerity con is even necessary in the first place).
What Labour should have been pointing out is that even after five years of grueling Tory austerity, on average we are all still significantly poorer than we were before the reckless gambling of the banks crashed the economy. But they didn't say that, they essentially said that they want to do exactly the same thing as the Tories, but just not be quite as mean about it!
Another factor to consider is that the tiny super-rich minority massively increased their share of the national wealth, in fact the wealthiest 1,000 families actually doubled their wealth.
Now think about it this way, if there is still significantly less economic activity per person than there was before the economic crisis, and the very richest people in society have massively increased their share of the wealth, what does that mean for the rest of us?
The fact is that the majority of us are worse off than we were before, not least due to the fact that the Tories oversaw the longest sustained period of falling wages since records began.
Millions of people voted Tory in 2015 because they imagined that they would get a bit richer, but the evidence is absolutely clear that for the last five years the Tories have been overseeing a prolonged economic stagnation (the slowest post-crisis recovery on record) in which the extremely rich got much richer and the rest of us got poorer.
Adolf Hitler once said that "if you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed", and as much of an unspeakably evil tyrant he was, he was right. Millions of people voted Tory because they believed the big lie that austerity is good for them and that the economy has recovered, when the actual economic evidence says that it's not and it hasn't.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
