Skip to main content

Leaving Europe is so stupid it amounts to fatal self harm

Listening to the BBC one might think that, intellectually, the debate about British membership of the European Union was a finely balanced argument.

It isn't.

As Kate Hoey admitted to Andrew Neill, there is not one single independent study that suggests that leaving the EU would benefit the UK economy. The Leave campaign could have put up a "sock puppet" study up to suggest they were right, but they could not even do that- so damning is the factual evidence.

The press is suggesting that they are reporting the debate evenly- but the reality is that there is no factually based support for any of the statements put out by the Leave campaign- it is not supported by any sustainable facts at all.

I have made comments about the rise of stupidity in politics before, but quite frankly the utter failure of the media to recognize that one side is intellectually bankrupt implies either stupidity or bias. In the case of the Daily Mail, it probably implies both.

OK, it is fair to say that Boris Johnson, George Galloway or Nigel Farage are more interested in questions of political power than questions of political accuracy, but surely their cynicism is precisely the thing that the media should challenge.

But no: who David Furnish may or may not be sleeping with, in the context of his open relationship with Elton John, or whether or not Hugh Bonneville might have slept with a woman not his wife- that is what the press will go to the stake for. It is not a question of principle, it is a question of profit. 

It is a total disgrace.

The fact is that leaving the European Union would be so damaging, that is not even sure that the UK would survive. Building a new border across Ireland, infuriating the fractious Scottish body politic and creating enormous economic harm- apparently all of this is less important that the sex lives of celebrities.   

If British citizens do not care about their own future, the media will certainly not do it for them.

When every single friend of the UK- allies, trade partners and our own daughter states- says that leaving would weaken the UK, and every enemy of our country, Marine Le Pen, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin wants us to leave, then the balance of probabilities is really crystal clear.

The media should report not merely opinions, but the biases that inform those opinions. That they fail to do so is one reason why the mainstream media in the UK is increasingly ignored.

It is essential that each citizen brings critical faculties to our consideration of the argument. It is not acceptable to leave your critical brain at home when you consider the future or our country.

It is not an accident that two thirds of those who hold degrees support Remain. It is not a co-incidence that all our foreign or off-shore owned media supports Leave.

Draw your own conclusions.  
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Post Truth and Justice

The past decade has seen the rise of so-called "post truth" politics.  Instead of mere misrepresentation of facts to serve an argument, political figures began to put forward arguments which denied easily provable facts, and then blustered and browbeat those who pointed out the lie.  The political class was able to get away with "post truth" positions because the infrastructure that reported their activity has been suborned directly into the process. In short, the media abandoned long-cherished traditions of objectivity and began a slow slide into undeclared bias and partisanship.  The "fourth estate" was always a key piece of how democratic societies worked, since the press, and later the broadcast media could shape opinion by the way they reported on the political process. As a result there has never been a golden age of objective media, but nevertheless individual reporters acquired better or worse reputations for the quality of their reporting and
1 comment
Read more

We need to talk about UK corruption

After a long hiatus, mostly to do with indolence and partly to do with the general election campaign, I feel compelled to take up the metaphorical pen and make a few comments on where I see the situation of the UK in the aftermath of the "Brexit election". OK, so we lost.  We can blame many reasons, though fundamentally the Conservatives refused to make the mistakes of 2017 and Labour and especially the Liberal Democrats made every mistake that could be made.  Indeed the biggest mistake of all was allowing Johnson to hold the election at all, when another six months would probably have eaten the Conservative Party alive.  It was Jo Swinson's first, but perhaps most critical, mistake to make, and from it came all the others.  The flow of defectors and money persuaded the Liberal Democrat bunker that an election could only be better for the Lib Dems, and as far as votes were concerned, the party did indeed increase its vote by 1.3 million.   BUT, and it really is the bi
Post a Comment
Read more

Media misdirection

In the small print of the UK budget we find that the Chancellor of the Exchequer (the British Finance Minister) has allocated a further 15 billion Pounds to the funding for the UK track and trace system. This means that the cost of the UK´s track and trace system is now 37 billion Pounds.  That is approximately €43 billion or US$51 billion, which is to say that it is amount of money greater than the national GDP of over 110 countries, or if you prefer, it is roughly the same number as the combined GDP of the 34 smallest economies of the planet.  As at December 2020, 70% of the contracts for the track and trace system were awarded by the Conservative government without a competitive tender being made . The program is overseen by Dido Harding , who is not only a Conservative Life Peer, but the wife of a Conservative MP, John Penrose, and a contemporary of David Cameron and Boris Johnson at Oxford. Many of these untendered contracts have been given to companies that seem to have no notewo
Post a Comment
Read more