PODCAST: Listen to James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss George Osborne’s performance:
In a feisty interview with Andrew Neil, George Osborne has just declared that Turkey is not going to become a member of the EU. Osborne said that ‘Turkey has gone backwards’ since 2010 when David Cameron voiced his enthusiastic support for it joining the EU. He then went on to say, ‘Is it going to be a member of the European Union? No, it is not’.
I suspect that Osborne’s intervention won’t end the Turkish issue in this referendum campaign. It is, after all, still official government policy that Turkey should join the EU at some point. But the fact that Osborne went this far in this interview is a sign of how keen the Remain side are to get this issue out of the EU referendum debate.
Osborne was unapologetic about emphasising the risks of leaving. He said that ‘there is a lot to be scared about’ in leaving the EU. However, he came off second best in an attempt to defend the Treasury’s £4,300 figure as Andrew Neil highlighted the Treasury select committee’s criticism of the number.
In an attempt to subvert Vote Leave’s message, Osborne warned that if the UK left the EU, ‘we lose control’. But Andrew Neil highlighted one of the main problems for the Remain campaign when he responded to George Osborne, by citing the ratings agency Fitch. Why would you want to listen to people who got their rating of RBS’s debts so wrong, he asked. It is a real problem for Remain that so many of the economic authorities it is citing had their reputation badly damaged by their failure to foresee the 2008 financial crash.
As Cameron did yesterday, Osborne tried to frame this referendum as the mainstream v Farage, saying he didn’t want ‘Farage’s vision of Britain’ which he called ‘mean’ and ‘divisive’. But the problem for Osborne and Remain is that Boris Johnson is the most recognisable face on the Leave side, and he is a very different politician from Farage, and seen differently too.
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