Boris Johnson, someone not previously identified as having an interest in healthcare, will forever be remembered for standing beside a large red bus promising an extra £350 million per week for the NHS. This, the British public was promised, would be available only if they would vote to leave the European Union. Given the obvious problems that the NHS was facing, many people found this an attractive argument, with some of the main backers of Brexit regarding it as their winning argument.
There was, of course, one small problem. It wasn’t true. This was pointed out to Mr Johnson at the time by the chair of the UK Statistics Authority, who wrote in April 2016 that “The continued use of a gross figure in contexts that imply it is a net figure is misleading and undermines trust in official statistics.” Undeterred, Mr Johnson, by now Foreign Secretary, repeated the claim in September 2017, leading to a further rebuke by the new chair of the Statistics Authority, who wrote “I am surprised and disappointed that you have chosen to repeat the figure of £350 million per week… It is a clear misuse of official statistics.” And in January 2018 he repeated it yet again. The main criticism at the time was that this figure took no account of the rebates that the United Kingdom receives on its gross contributions or the money that is returned to the country through European Union programmes. It was possible to take these into account, and the resulting figure was far smaller than that claimed. Yet, as others pointed out, even that took no account of the damage that would be done to the British economy as a consequence of disruption of trading arrangements with the remaining European Union.
blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2018/04/19/martin-mckee-they-promised-us-350-million-a-week-for-the-nhs-the-reality-will-be-very-different/
When he was a journalist Boris Johnson was sacked from The Times for lying. Would the "average UK citizen" ever get away with telling such blatant lies?