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Remain and Leave clash in final EU referendum debate

Remain and Leave campaigners have clashed at the final major EU referendum debate before polls open on Thursday.

The BBC debate took place in front of 6,000 people at Wembley Arena.

Participants included Boris Johnson for Leave, and his successor as Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, who is backing Remain.

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Fact check: '500,000 jobs in London dependent on EU'

Credit: BBC

Half a million jobs in London are directly dependent upon the European Union, according to Sadiq Khan.

The claim that half a million jobs in the capital are “directly dependent” on the EU is a variant of a more familiar figure: 3 million, the number of UK jobs often said to be linked to our trade with the EU.

Which of these is the key point, according to fact-checking organisation Full Fact, analysing the live BBC referendum debate.

the studies on which these claims are based link those jobs to the UK's exports to EU countries, not to our membership of the EU per se.

We don’t know for sure what would happen to our trade if we leave; certainly nobody is claiming that all those jobs would go.

But most economists agree that fewer jobs would be created, and some might be lost, as a result of leaving the EU.

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