Catching up with recent press articles, I came across an article by former Director of the Thatcherite Institute for Economic Affairs Russell Lewis, who claims that Britain would be better off outside the EU. His argument, citing the well known Eurosceptic academic Patrick Minford, is that Britain's economy will be increasingly held back by European regulations. He cites the minimum wage, arguing that if it were raised by 50% "social costs would rise by 20% and unemployment by 5.7%".

Whatever the veracity of his calculation, the existence of the minimum wage, and even more so its level, has nothing to do with the EU. It is not required in any EU legislation; some EU countries don't have a statutory minimum wage. Britain introduced its one only seven years ago by a purely national decision.

Lewis goes on to warn that some continental countries have deficits in their pension schemes and that "if Britain were obliged to share the burden of their deficits, the bill would be 7% of the country's GDP". But why on earth would we have to share this burden? It has never been on the cards. On the contrary, the Treaty contains a "no bail-out clause" specifying that each country is responsible for its own finances. Messrs Lewis & Minford are surely aware of that, yet they prefer to deliberately mislead and use scare tactics.

It doesn't stop there. The article makes a whole set of preposterous claims: that the EU will stop us from trading in services with the rest of the world, that there is no internal free trade in services, that there will be "harmonisation" of state pensions, and so on.

What is alarming is that the Eurosceptics know that, if they repeat such claims often enough, most non-experts will begin to believe at least some of them. Remind me - was it Goebbels who said the bigger the lie, the more effective it was?