Current Affairs EU In or Out

[Clint Planet]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...take-back-control-eu-referendum-a7356806.html

A Leave voter who wants to exit the European Union so the UK can take “control of our own laws” has been embarrassed on a radio phone-in when he failed to name a single EU law he was most keen to get rid of.

Ashley, a self-employed electrician who called in to James O’Brien’s LBC radio show, claimed he was willing to take a “short-term” financial hit to his business if it meant leaving the EU.

He asserted he did not listen to the spurious economic claimsmade by the Leave campaign, but voted to exit the EU “for the independence” and to “control our own laws”.


When asked by Mr O’Brien which specific laws he disliked, Ashley initially responded: “Any.”

On being pressed further, he jokingly responded: “The shape of your bananas”.

Mr O’Brien remained unimpressed: “It's not funny, is it? The pound is at the lowest it's been since 1985, you just said "any law" and I'm just asking you to name one.


'Which EU Law Are You Most Looking Forward To Losing?'
This caller voted to leave the EU so we could take control of our own laws. James O'Brien asked which law he was most looking forward to getting rid of. This is what happened next.


"We both know that bananas was a lie made up by Boris Johnson. Remind me which side he was on during the Leave campaign.

"What is the law? You know you were going to take short-term economic damage, you knew that all your customers would do as a newly-formed electrician company. Every single customer in the country is going to be potentially worse off than they were before the vote.

"So I'm just wondering what those laws are that you won't have to obey any more that made you vote for this short-term economic hit.

"Can you name one?"

Ashley's responded: "I wouldn't be able to, no."

Ashley later explained he voted to Leave because the UK should have greater control over its immigration policy.

“If immigration is all you’ve got, then you’re the cliché,” Mr O’Brien commented.

 

[1966efc]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...take-back-control-eu-referendum-a7356806.html

A Leave voter who wants to exit the European Union so the UK can take “control of our own laws” has been embarrassed on a radio phone-in when he failed to name a single EU law he was most keen to get rid of.

Ashley, a self-employed electrician who called in to James O’Brien’s LBC radio show, claimed he was willing to take a “short-term” financial hit to his business if it meant leaving the EU.

He asserted he did not listen to the spurious economic claimsmade by the Leave campaign, but voted to exit the EU “for the independence” and to “control our own laws”.


When asked by Mr O’Brien which specific laws he disliked, Ashley initially responded: “Any.”

On being pressed further, he jokingly responded: “The shape of your bananas”.

Mr O’Brien remained unimpressed: “It's not funny, is it? The pound is at the lowest it's been since 1985, you just said "any law" and I'm just asking you to name one.


'Which EU Law Are You Most Looking Forward To Losing?'
This caller voted to leave the EU so we could take control of our own laws. James O'Brien asked which law he was most looking forward to getting rid of. This is what happened next.


"We both know that bananas was a lie made up by Boris Johnson. Remind me which side he was on during the Leave campaign.

"What is the law? You know you were going to take short-term economic damage, you knew that all your customers would do as a newly-formed electrician company. Every single customer in the country is going to be potentially worse off than they were before the vote.

"So I'm just wondering what those laws are that you won't have to obey any more that made you vote for this short-term economic hit.

"Can you name one?"

Ashley's responded: "I wouldn't be able to, no."

Ashley later explained he voted to Leave because the UK should have greater control over its immigration policy.

“If immigration is all you’ve got, then you’re the cliché,” Mr O’Brien commented.

Silly Ashley. Fancy an electrician not having a working knowledge of E U law. Maybe Ashley should have said something along the lines of, "British people generally feel more comfortable with law made and upheld by their own lawmakers and enforcers. They seem to be less comfortable with law made and enforced by others."

 

[Whistlin' Dixie]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...take-back-control-eu-referendum-a7356806.html

A Leave voter who wants to exit the European Union so the UK can take “control of our own laws” has been embarrassed on a radio phone-in when he failed to name a single EU law he was most keen to get rid of.

Ashley, a self-employed electrician who called in to James O’Brien’s LBC radio show, claimed he was willing to take a “short-term” financial hit to his business if it meant leaving the EU.

He asserted he did not listen to the spurious economic claimsmade by the Leave campaign, but voted to exit the EU “for the independence” and to “control our own laws”.


When asked by Mr O’Brien which specific laws he disliked, Ashley initially responded: “Any.”

On being pressed further, he jokingly responded: “The shape of your bananas”.

Mr O’Brien remained unimpressed: “It's not funny, is it? The pound is at the lowest it's been since 1985, you just said "any law" and I'm just asking you to name one.


'Which EU Law Are You Most Looking Forward To Losing?'
This caller voted to leave the EU so we could take control of our own laws. James O'Brien asked which law he was most looking forward to getting rid of. This is what happened next.


"We both know that bananas was a lie made up by Boris Johnson. Remind me which side he was on during the Leave campaign.

"What is the law? You know you were going to take short-term economic damage, you knew that all your customers would do as a newly-formed electrician company. Every single customer in the country is going to be potentially worse off than they were before the vote.

"So I'm just wondering what those laws are that you won't have to obey any more that made you vote for this short-term economic hit.

"Can you name one?"

Ashley's responded: "I wouldn't be able to, no."

Ashley later explained he voted to Leave because the UK should have greater control over its immigration policy.

“If immigration is all you’ve got, then you’re the cliché,” Mr O’Brien commented.

All very well....But can he change a light bulb?

 

[Clint Planet]

Silly Ashley. Fancy an electrician not having a working knowledge of E U law. Maybe Ashley should have said something along the lines of, "British people generally feel more comfortable with law made and upheld by their own lawmakers and enforcers. They seem to be less comfortable with law made and enforced by others."

They just want bendier bananas, mate.

But, on a more serious note, I think Ashley is a walking illustration of this sort of xenophobic lying:

(First published in the New Statesman, 1st July.)

Boris Johnson peddled absurd EU myths – and our disgraceful press followed his lead

Press coverage of the referendum was designed to inflame xenophobia and our worst “Little England” instincts.

The pound plummeted, the Prime Minister resigned, stock markets plunged and the UK began to unravel, as did the post-1945 world order. Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Marine Le Pen and Isis were celebrating the Brexit vote but that didn’t stop our disgraceful national press from crowing. “Take a bow, Britain!” the Daily Mail declared. “So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, ADIEU”, the Sun quipped in a headline. The Daily Telegraph proclaimed the “birth of a new Britain”.

They and others – the Express, the Morning Star, several of the Sunday papers – were claiming victory: a victory achieved after a relentless campaign of lies and Soviet-style propaganda about the European Union that long pre-dated the referendum. Indeed, it was a campaign that began in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Boris Johnson, who had been fired by the Times for making up a quotation, was the Telegraph’s correspondent in Brussels.

Johnson did not invent Euroscepticism but he took it to new levels. A brilliant caricaturist, he made his name by mocking, lampooning and ridiculing the EU. He wrote stories headlined “Brussels recruits sniffers to ensure that Euro-manure smells the same”, “Threat to British pink sausages” and “Snails are fish, says EU”. He wrote about plans to standardise condom sizes and ban prawn cocktail flavour crisps. He set up Jacques Delors, who was then the European Commission president, as a bogeyman and claimed credit for persuading Denmark to reject the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 with a Sunday Telegraphsplash – “Delors plan to rule Europe” – that was seized on by the Nej campaign.


To Johnson, it was all a bit of a jape. “ was sort of chucking these rocks over the garden wall and I listened to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door over in England as everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory party – and it really gave me this, I suppose, rather weird sense of power,” he told the BBC years later.

That many of Johnson’s stories bore scant relation to the truth did not matter. They were colourful and fun. The Telegraph and right-wing Tories loved them. So did other Fleet Street editors, who found the standard Brussels fare tedious and began to press their own correspondents to follow suit. I know this because I became the Brussels correspondent of the Times in 1999 and suffered the consequences.

Soon, a Europe of scheming bureaucrats plotting to rob Britain of its ancient liberties, or British prime ministers fighting gallant rearguard actions against an increasingly powerful superstate, or absurd directives on banana shapes, became the only narratives that many papers were interested in. They were narratives that exploited our innate nationalism, distrust of foreigners and sense of superiority. They were narratives so strong that our political leaders mostly chose to play along with them.

The EU is arrogant, bureaucratic, wasteful and meddlesome. It desperately needs reforming. But post-Boris, its great achievements – cementing peace, uniting the continent, creating the world’s largest single market, enabling its citizens to travel and live anywhere they choose, busting monopolies, improving the environment – have gone largely unreported. Similarly ignored is that Britain has many natural allies in Europe and has enjoyed some significant successes: competition policy, free trade, eastward enlargement. The French now regard the EU as a plot to impose Anglo-Saxon economics on the continent. True, we lost the argument on the euro and the Schengen Agreement, but we won opt-outs.

With a few honourable exceptions – such as the Financial Times, the Times and the Guardian – the referendum coverage was merely a supercharged version of what had gone before. It was led by the biggest broadsheet (the Telegraph), the biggest mid-market paper (the Mail) and the biggest tabloid (the Sun). And it was based on myths: that we pay £350m a week to Brussels, that we can continue to enjoy access to the single market without freedom of movement, that millions of Turks are heading our way because their country is about to join the EU, that immigrants are destroying the NHS rather than keeping it going.

The coverage was designed to inflame xenophobia and our worst “Little England” instincts. Loughborough University found that 82 per cent of all referendum stories, adjusted for newspaper circulations, were negative. The conventional wisdom is that newspapers don’t matter any more but they do when just 635,000 votes for Remain instead of Leave would have averted this national catastrophe. They do when the press is a primary source of information for millions of Brits. They do when most of our papers have relentlessly portrayed the EU as the monster of Johnson’s fertile imagination, not just for a few months, but for more than two decades.

The referendum was a chance for our national press, particularly the tabloid press, to restore its standing after the phone-hacking scandal and to prove its continuing worth to the British people. Sadly, most newspapers chose wilfully to deceive, mislead and inflame. They decided to follow Johnson’s lead by peddling lies and phoney patriotism. They helped him to hoodwink the millions of poorer, less-educated Britons – those who will be the first to suffer from Brexit’s consequences – into voting against their own interests.

Johnson campaigned against a myth of his own creation, with the result that a mendacious pundit, one who achieved prominence by writing entertaining but dangerous nonsense, is the odds-on favourite to be our next prime minister.

Martin Fletcher is a former foreign editor of the Times

 

[Clint Planet]

All very well....But can he change a light bulb?

I wouldn't bet on it.

 

[Seanjd]

Silly Ashley. Fancy an electrician not having a working knowledge of E U law. Maybe Ashley should have said something along the lines of, "British people generally feel more comfortable with law made and upheld by their own lawmakers and enforcers. They seem to be less comfortable with law made and enforced by others."

Fancy anyone phoning into a national radio program complaining about not having control over our own laws, then failing to name any of those laws. Pathetic.

 

[1966efc]

They just want bendier bananas, mate.

But, on a more serious note, I think Ashley is a walking illustration of this sort of xenophobic lying:

(First published in the New Statesman, 1st July.)

Boris Johnson peddled absurd EU myths – and our disgraceful press followed his lead

Press coverage of the referendum was designed to inflame xenophobia and our worst “Little England” instincts.

The pound plummeted, the Prime Minister resigned, stock markets plunged and the UK began to unravel, as did the post-1945 world order. Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Marine Le Pen and Isis were celebrating the Brexit vote but that didn’t stop our disgraceful national press from crowing. “Take a bow, Britain!” the Daily Mail declared. “So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, ADIEU”, the Sun quipped in a headline. The Daily Telegraph proclaimed the “birth of a new Britain”.

They and others – the Express, the Morning Star, several of the Sunday papers – were claiming victory: a victory achieved after a relentless campaign of lies and Soviet-style propaganda about the European Union that long pre-dated the referendum. Indeed, it was a campaign that began in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Boris Johnson, who had been fired by the Times for making up a quotation, was the Telegraph’s correspondent in Brussels.

Johnson did not invent Euroscepticism but he took it to new levels. A brilliant caricaturist, he made his name by mocking, lampooning and ridiculing the EU. He wrote stories headlined “Brussels recruits sniffers to ensure that Euro-manure smells the same”, “Threat to British pink sausages” and “Snails are fish, says EU”. He wrote about plans to standardise condom sizes and ban prawn cocktail flavour crisps. He set up Jacques Delors, who was then the European Commission president, as a bogeyman and claimed credit for persuading Denmark to reject the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 with a Sunday Telegraphsplash – “Delors plan to rule Europe” – that was seized on by the Nej campaign.


To Johnson, it was all a bit of a jape. “ was sort of chucking these rocks over the garden wall and I listened to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door over in England as everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory party – and it really gave me this, I suppose, rather weird sense of power,” he told the BBC years later.

That many of Johnson’s stories bore scant relation to the truth did not matter. They were colourful and fun. The Telegraph and right-wing Tories loved them. So did other Fleet Street editors, who found the standard Brussels fare tedious and began to press their own correspondents to follow suit. I know this because I became the Brussels correspondent of the Times in 1999 and suffered the consequences.

Soon, a Europe of scheming bureaucrats plotting to rob Britain of its ancient liberties, or British prime ministers fighting gallant rearguard actions against an increasingly powerful superstate, or absurd directives on banana shapes, became the only narratives that many papers were interested in. They were narratives that exploited our innate nationalism, distrust of foreigners and sense of superiority. They were narratives so strong that our political leaders mostly chose to play along with them.

The EU is arrogant, bureaucratic, wasteful and meddlesome. It desperately needs reforming. But post-Boris, its great achievements – cementing peace, uniting the continent, creating the world’s largest single market, enabling its citizens to travel and live anywhere they choose, busting monopolies, improving the environment – have gone largely unreported. Similarly ignored is that Britain has many natural allies in Europe and has enjoyed some significant successes: competition policy, free trade, eastward enlargement. The French now regard the EU as a plot to impose Anglo-Saxon economics on the continent. True, we lost the argument on the euro and the Schengen Agreement, but we won opt-outs.

With a few honourable exceptions – such as the Financial Times, the Times and the Guardian – the referendum coverage was merely a supercharged version of what had gone before. It was led by the biggest broadsheet (the Telegraph), the biggest mid-market paper (the Mail) and the biggest tabloid (the Sun). And it was based on myths: that we pay £350m a week to Brussels, that we can continue to enjoy access to the single market without freedom of movement, that millions of Turks are heading our way because their country is about to join the EU, that immigrants are destroying the NHS rather than keeping it going.

The coverage was designed to inflame xenophobia and our worst “Little England” instincts. Loughborough University found that 82 per cent of all referendum stories, adjusted for newspaper circulations, were negative. The conventional wisdom is that newspapers don’t matter any more but they do when just 635,000 votes for Remain instead of Leave would have averted this national catastrophe. They do when the press is a primary source of information for millions of Brits. They do when most of our papers have relentlessly portrayed the EU as the monster of Johnson’s fertile imagination, not just for a few months, but for more than two decades.

The referendum was a chance for our national press, particularly the tabloid press, to restore its standing after the phone-hacking scandal and to prove its continuing worth to the British people. Sadly, most newspapers chose wilfully to deceive, mislead and inflame. They decided to follow Johnson’s lead by peddling lies and phoney patriotism. They helped him to hoodwink the millions of poorer, less-educated Britons – those who will be the first to suffer from Brexit’s consequences – into voting against their own interests.

Johnson campaigned against a myth of his own creation, with the result that a mendacious pundit, one who achieved prominence by writing entertaining but dangerous nonsense, is the odds-on favourite to be our next prime minister.

Martin Fletcher is a former foreign editor of the Times

Euroscepticism was alive and well before the U K joined the Common Market, with Tony Benn as its spiritual leader. Johnson's contribution was to latch on to a feeling already well established and use his gift for language to embellish / lie about the system's inadequacies.

Lying? Misrepresentation? I don't know.

I do know that ordinary people like Ashley should not feel excluded from the conversation because a commentator exercises his limited gift for debate.

 

[1966efc]

Fancy anyone phoning into a national radio program complaining about not having control over our own laws, then failing to name any of those laws. Pathetic.

I occasionally walk in the countryside. Though not a mycologist, I follow the general principle of not picking whatever mushroom I fancy.

 

[The Cowboy]

Fancy anyone phoning into a national radio program complaining about not having control over our own laws, then failing to name any of those laws. Pathetic.

Indeed. Why willingly call in and complain about something they're sure to press you on, but not have any idea what your problem is?

At least the folk on QT tend to have a clue what they're talking about.

 

[Seanjd]

Indeed. Why willingly call in and complain about something they're sure to press you on, but not have any idea what your problem is?

At least the folk on QT tend to have a clue what they're talking about.

Saying that, it was LBC

 

[Clint Planet]

Lying? Misrepresentation? I don't know.

You don't know? Johnson has admitted it and you don't know? Spare us your disingenuous ness, will you.

I do know that ordinary people like Ashley should not feel excluded from the conversation because a commentator exercises his limited gift for debate.

Ordinary people like Ashley are not being excluded from what is passed off as "the conversation," they are lied to and manipulated by the Little Englander brexiteers

 

[1966efc]

You don't know? Johnson has admitted it and you don't know? Spare us your disingenuous ness, will you.



Ordinary people like Ashley are not being excluded from what is passed off as "the conversation," they are lied to and manipulated by the Little Englander brexiteers

I don't know. I may suspect. There are so many self appointed experts in this thread, I try very hard to avoid projecting knowledge I don't have.

Ordinary people likje Ashley are subject to pseudo intellectual sneering.

Little Englander Brexiteers: jolly good. You've soaked in the language of those who find the result distasteful, the irony being that the more such terms are used the less chance Remainers have of winning the second referendum they crave. As an Irishman, it doesn't offend me; others will take strongly agin it.

 

[The Cowboy]

Euroscepticism was alive and well before the U K joined the Common Market, with Tony Benn as its spiritual leader. Johnson's contribution was to latch on to a feeling already well established and use his gift for language to embellish / lie about the system's inadequacies.

Lying? Misrepresentation? I don't know.

I do know that ordinary people like Ashley should not feel excluded from the conversation because a commentator exercises his limited gift for debate.

To use modern parlance, ordinary people like Ashley should check themselves before they wreck themselves.

 

[1966efc]

To use modern parlance, ordinary people like Ashley should check themselves before they wreck themselves.

Erm ... you may be right. Genuinely don't what it means.

 

[Seanjd]

Ordinary people likje Ashley are subject to pseudo intellectual sneering.

I'm as 'ordinary' as Ashley is, but unlike Ashley, I've at least done some research into which laws we control and which we don't. Being ignorant doesn't make you ordinary. He speaks for a large number of people who bought into the rhetoric without understanding the implications. He speaks for a large number of people who are being dragged to the right by fear-mongering 'politicians'.