Brexit

The polls are tight, so George Osborne has a cunning plan. He’ll present a “Brexit budget” where he will spell out how he’ll punish voters if they vote to leave the European Union. He'll be forced to tear up his election pledge not to raise taxes: the voters will have provoked him, you see. Pushed him too far.  He has all kind of sums in mind, that they won't like one bit, starting with an extra 2p on the basic rate of income tax. Fuel duty will rise. The higher rate of income tax will go up 3p. Another 5 per cent on alcohol and fuel duties. Then £2 billion off pensions, and another £2 billion from public services. All told, £15 billion of tax rises: you can almost sense his nose growing longer as he reels off his list.

What would Brexit mean to dance? Many big hitters in dance were among the 300-plus arts people who signed last month’s public letter urging the UK to remain in the EU: the Royal Ballet’s director Kevin O’Hare, choreographer Akram Khan, Sadler’s Wells chief Alistair Spalding and Sir Matthew Bourne among them. I’ve asked some of them to spell out exactly would be altered by a Brexit. First, dance structurally depends on maintaining large numbers of permanent employees, whose skills require long-running and continuing group schooling. Both of these givens imply structural costs far beyond those entailed by opera or theatre.

Campaigns only last for a few weeks, but politicians can be defined by what they say during those campaigns. Ed Miliband will never live down the #EdStone, Zac Goldsmith will always be stained by his murkier attacks on Sadiq Khan – and I suspect David Cameron will never manage to shake off the threat he made to pensioners today. At times, it can seem as if he’s got confused and has set out to attack his own reputation, rather than that of his opponents. Those who watched George Osborne grilled by Andrew Neil last week will know the issue: the Remain campaign has decided to pretend that pensioners will be worse off after Brexit.

To subscribe to The Spectator’s weekly podcast, for free, visit the iTunes store or click here for our RSS feed. Alternatively, you can follow us on SoundCloud. The EU referendum on June 23rd looks set to be one of the most important political moments in a generation. But if Britain does vote out, what would the next 100 days actually be like? The Prime Minister has predicted disastrous consequences, saying Brexit would plant a bomb under the economy. And we've been warned that house prices will crash and everything from air fares to ice cream will cost more. So, would Cameron step down straight away and watch the pound tumble? James Forsyth says in his Spectator column that a vote to leave would be a defining event in recent British political history.

This is an abridged transcript of Nigel Farage's Brexit interview with Andrew Neil IMMIGRATION Reducing the level of immigration has been central to your pitch to voters, can you tell the British public at what level broadly you’d expect net migration to fall if we left the EU? Up to us. The point about this referendum, too much of this is sounding like a manifesto, a Remain manifesto, a Leave manifesto.  The real point about this referendum is who makes the decisions, do we have the ability to control the numbers that come to Britain or not, that’s the first and most important point to make.  What do I think would be the right number?