Yesterday's voluminous Treasury report warning that Britons would each be £4,300 a year worse off by 2030 outside the European Union completes the Project Fear set. We've already had the International Monetary Fund, the Bank of England and big banks like Lloyds declaring that Brexit would not be in Britain's economic interests. It's deja vu all over again, as Yogi Berra would have put it.

As with the Scottish referendum campaign, there has been a concerted campaign coordinated by the UK Treasury to warn of the dangers of departing from the UK Government's chosen policy. And as with the independence referendum there are dangers in using the Treasury in this blatantly political manner. Voters might see through it for a start.
 

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The chancellor George Osborne's claim yesterday that it was now a proven “fact” Britain would be”permanently poorer” is nothing of the sort. It is a projection, and with all financial projections liable to error. Treasury forecasts are almost always wrong – look at the last budget. The truth is no-one really knows what would happen if Britain left the EU, just as no-one really knows what would happen if Scotland had left the UK.

It seems plausible to me there would at the very least be a degree of disruption resulting form leaving the EU, just as there would have been from Scotland leaving the United Kingdom. But it is very difficult to predict the economic impact of this with any accuracy. The EU may be Britain's largest trading partner, and there might be a tariff war but trade is a two way street. EU countries like Germany will not want to cut themselves off from the fifth largest economy in the world, which buys so many of Germany’s overpriced cars.

So one suspects there would be a great effort on both sides to make the transition as seamless as possible. Much the same would probably have happened if Scotland had left the UK. There would have been a strong economic interest on both sides not to undermine trading relations.

What the Treasury also fails to take into account is any dynamic impact of independence. When countries become self-governing they sometimes undergo an economic boom as international companies relocate their offices to take account of the new political environment. There can be a “nation-building” effect. This was seen in many the countries of eastern Europe when they left the Soviet Union. Skilled people return, businesses seek new opportunities and there is a degree of national purpose which can promote economic growth. Slovakia is the classic case of a “backward” country that became a relative economic powerhouse upon independence from Czechoslovakia.

But there's no certainty about this and certainly no-one can forecast what this might be worth in pounds and pence. And any advantages to independence can be squandered by reckless or corrupt governments, as we have seen so often in the former British colonies that achieved independence in the 1950s and 60s.

I suspect the Treasury is probably right that the risk in Brexit is to the downside, but what I object to is the attempt to predict this with any certainty. The Treasury couldn't predict the 2008 financial crash or the impact of the ERM debacle. Nor is there any attempt to assess the cost of remaining in the EU, where growth has flatlined since 2010 while America has grown by over 25 per cent.

The Scottish Government has avoided commenting on the Treasury figures and appears to have gone into purdah for the duration. Presumably they fear that if they endorse the Treasury forecast they risk retrospectively endorsing its assessment of the likely economic consequences of Scottish independence. We still await the SNP's positive case for remaining in a EU that didn’t seem to want an independent Scotland as a member.

It is depressing we allow these issues to be decided by narrow-minded bean counters who lack any sense of history and have no real concern for democracy. The issues about Europe – and I speak as someone who spent most of his life arguing the case for the EU – are not about the small change of economic policy. It is about creating a better European society and liberating the EU from its austerity mindset. Instead of project fear we need a project to give the Brussels bureaucracy some democratic legitimacy. Make it a people's Europe again, and not a narrow minded bankers club.