question everything

My personal favourite is the idea that we would have to rename all of our foodstuffs in Latin. The headline screamed ‘Eurocrats force Britain to rename fish and chips – Gadus Morhua (cod) ‘n’ chips will now be on the menu at your local chippy!’ Not true of course. The whole story came from the very sensible notion that it would be a good idea to standardise food names across the EU to avoid confusion. This would help to ensure that anyone going into a grocery store describing an avocado in Spanglish wouldn’t come out with a hand grenade.

 

And while we’re at it; it was never the EU’s idea for us to go metric. The UK committed itself to gradually going metric in a white paper in 1972, a year before it joined the European Community. But once in, its obligation to make the switch was formalised. Another Euromyth bites the dust. (2)

 

It’s so transparent it’s laughable and do you know who is responsible for a lot of it? Boris Johnson.

 

Bojo was the Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent from 1989-1994 and made up one outrageous story after another. He was sacked from the Times because of his passing acquaintance with the truth, but that didn’t seem to bother the Telegraph. Mostly it’s been pretty harmless; there’s no question he has a knack for dressing lies up in like an engaging whore in red light window. But here he is now as a figurehead for the BREXIT campaign and the lies have escalated into something far more serious.

 

EU costs, Democracy and Control
We’ve already covered these in previous pages. The ‘EU cost’ lie however, is by far and away the biggest lie in this debate and despite the claim being withdrawn it’s unfortunate to note that some of the electorate still believe it. A sobering reminder of how earworms like this can infect a population faster than the SARS virus.

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Britain’s exposure to the Eurozone
Another scaremongering lie. In this one he claims that the Government is unable to ‘protect the UK taxpayer from the demands of the Eurozone countries for bail-out funds’. Not true; The UK has a veto on the overall size of the EU budget and it's already been agreed that non-Eurozone countries won't have to pay for future Eurozone bailouts. (3)

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Turkey entering the EU
This is the lie that Boris Johnson and his sidekick Michael Gove have been spreading about Turkey’s impending membership of the EU. The idea behind it is to scare voters into voting for exit on the basis of the immigration issues that Turkey’s membership could pose for Britain. Vote Leave has warned repeatedly over the potential for 76 million Turkish citizens to gain the right to work in the UK if the country joins. However, they know full well, as everyone else does who has acquainted themselves with Turkey’s position, that it will not happen for decades, if at all.

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As Labour’s Yvette Cooper says, ‘Michael Gove and Boris Johnson’ know all of those things, they’re not stupid - but they are deliberately manipulating the facts, they are deliberately telling lies, in Boris Johnson’s case for his own personal interest, and it is shameful, utterly shameful. I don’t know how they live with themselves.’ (4) (5)

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Britain should remain a sovereign nation
This is a concept that dates back to the Magna Carta and is a tradition that is uncompromising about accountability and steadfast in the conviction that power should rest only in the hands of leaders elected by, and answerable to, the nation. In this way the EU, BREXIT campaigners claim, breaks the sacred bond of mutual power between decision makers and those on whose behalf they act. But it’s all hogwash.

 

Even excluding the EU, Britain is subject to some 700 international treaties involving multi-lateral submissions to multilateral compromises. Its membership of the UN similarly infringes its self-determination (it can be outvoted there just as it can in Brussels). Likewise the WTO, NATO, the COP climate talks, the IMF, the World Bank, nuclear test ban treaties and accords on energy, water, maritime law and air traffic etc. etc. Yet it submits to all of these knowing that, as with the EU, it is free to leave whenever it wants—but at a price not worth paying. If sovereignty is the absence of mutual interference, the most sovereign country in the world is North Korea. Good luck with that…

 

Sovereignty in this day and age is relative, it’s never absolute. A country that refuses to pool authority is one that has no control over the effect of its neighbours and how their actions may transcend its boundaries. Regulation and standards be they financial, economic, security related or practical are vital to ensure cohesion rather than division. To live with globalisation is to acknowledge that many laws (both those devised by governments and those which surface as a natural consequence) are here to stay whether we like it or not. (6)

 

We can puff our chests out as much as we like but the reality is Britain is not now, and hasn’t been for donkey’s years, a sovereign nation; and even if we were to leave the EU tomorrow it would make no difference to that fact.