Britain Doomed.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of the European election results has been the scaremongering that the success of Eurosceptic parties has led to. The perennially fact challenged Johann Hari writes that if we left the EU:

we would gain little, but we would suffer horrible self-inflicted wounds. Three million jobs would melt away to a Europe that would now be wrapped away behind tariff walls. The millions of Brits living elsewhere in the EU – one million in Spain alone – would be left stranded, and have to come home, or apply for immigration rights they were no longer entitled to.

This is quite impressively wrong. I won't deal with the 3 million jobs myth. You can guess how accurate it is by seeing how scrupulous he is with the other number he throws out, one million Britons living in Spain. Thankfully the OECD compile statistics, based on census data, for the residents of a country by national origin. According to their figures, at the 2001 Spanish census there were 88 415* British people resident in Spain. By my calculation this is less than a million, in fact if I claimed to be 60 feet tall I would be exaggerating by a lower ratio than Hari.

Also, Spain isn't 1970s Uganda so mass expulsions seem unlikely in any case.

* The database lists two sets of figures for Spain so I've used the higher estimate.

Update: In the comments Matthew points to there being other estimates of the British population in Spain that do approach 1 million. Whilst I'm not convinced by the methodology used, it is fair to note that whatever the case the figure wasn't invented by Hari.