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.  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Liberal Democrats v Conservatives: the battle in the blogosphere

It is probably fair to say that the advent of Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by our Conservative opponents. Indeed, it would hardly be wrong to say that the past few weeks has seen some "pretty robust" debate between Conservative and Liberal Democrat bloggers. Even the Queen Mum of blogging, the generally genial Iain Dale seems to have been featuring as many stories as he can to try to show Liberal Democrats in as poor a light as possible. Neither, to be fair, has the traffic been all one way: I have "fisked' Mr. Cameron's rather half-baked proposals on health, and attacked several of the Conservative positions that have emerged from the fog of their policy making process. Most Liberal Democrats have attacked the Conservatives probably with more vigour even than the distrusted, discredited Labour government. So what lies behind this sharper debate, this emerging war in the blogosphere? Partly- in my ...

Concert and Blues

Tallinn is full tonight... Big concerts on at the Song field The Weeknd and Bonnie Tyler (!). The place is buzzing and some sixty thousand concert goers have booked every bed for thirty miles around Tallinn. It should be a busy high summer, but it isn´t. Tourism is down sharply overall. Only 70 cruise ships calling this season, versus over 300 before Ukraine. Since no one goes to St Pete, demand has fallen, and of course people think that Estonia is not safe. We are tired. The economy is still under big pressure, and the fall of tourism is a significant part of that. The credit rating for Estonia has been downgraded as the government struggles with spending. The summer has been a little gloomy, and soon the long and slow autumn will drift into the dark of the year. Yesterday I met with more refugees: the usual horrible stories, the usual tears. I try to make myself immune, but I can´t. These people are wounded in spirit, carrying their grief in a terrible cradling. I try to project hop...

Are the Liberal Democrats Libertarian?

A few days ago Cicero met with one of the better known figures in the Libertarian Alliance, Brian Mickelthwait . Brian writes for various blogs that I enjoy reading- including Samizdata . Ahead of our meeting Brain expressed "scepticism" about the Libertarian credentials of the Liberal Democrats: "My charge was that when you meet a Liberal Democrat you never know what he will believe. The one who talks to you is likely to say what you want to hear. But the others will simultaneously be telling other people with quite different views what they want to hear. So don't vote for these lying creeps." Political parties- all of them- are coalitions of people who quite often disagree with each other. Apparently we are not supposed to "air our dirty linen in public", but actually one of the reasons that the Liberal Democrats appealed to me was that they were prepared to talk about issues and policies amongst themselves in public. The eclipse of the Liberal Party...