The debate about joining the European Union is now a very real one – and the pro-Brexit media and its faux-academic experts are behaving with all the unhinged fervour you might have expected.
Andy Burnham’s unexpected, albeit obviously very welcome, decision to very publicly put membership of the EU back on the political agenda has the Brexiteers replaying their greatest hits of 2016, very often performed by the same superannuated politicians who provided them last time.
And while many of the right wing press outlets do not have anything like the influence they boasted just a decade ago, some of the most shriekingly hysterical coverage has come from one which didn’t even exist at the time of the referendum. GB News is feeding its viewers, and those reading its website, a constant diet of the epic betrayal they would face were Brexit to be revisited.
Headlines on its site at the time of writing include “Suella Braverman brands Andy Burnham’s Brexit U-turn ‘slap in the face to British patriots’”, “Andy Burnham’s Brexit betrayal is a huge danger to Labour – and the PM should know it”, “Two maps expose Andy Burnham’s EU reset as the Rejoiner dream crumbles” and “Andy Burnham dealt fresh EU reset blow as Britain faces bill worth billions with crown jewels at stake” (not the actual crown jewels, although it’s unclear from the article what crown jewels they actually mean).
Three things stand out about each and every one of these stories. First, they seem obsessed with the fact that GB News and only GB News is pro-Brexit (unlike, say, pretty much all of the newspapers bar the Guardian and Mirror). Secondly, they largely stem from just three tiny, obscure anti-EU think tanks. And third – and you might want to sit down for this one – they’re a pack of lies.
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GB News is convinced that the rest of the media is chomping at the bit to join the EU. “How is it so many people think Brexit has caused a hit to our economy?” writes “multi-skilled journalist” Ben McCaffrey in one article. “The answer, unfortunately, is in the lies and propaganda the public has been subject to, which is worthy of a totalitarian dictatorship like Russia. Russia itself hasn’t needed to interfere – our governments have done the job for them.” (It is worth bearing in mind that this is supposed to be a news report.)
Elsewhere, John Redwood, the swivel-eyed former Conservative cabinet minister you probably haven’t thought about since Robson and Jerome were last in the charts, is quoted approvingly as saying: “Excepting GB News, much of the mainstream media… presents [the EU] as something the UK needs to join. They fail to see it is a snare to less growth and more cost.”
Ah, John Redwood. Which brings us on to the second aspect: so much of GB News’s EU coverage is based on reports from just three tiny fringe groups: Brexit Facts4EU, Stand for Our Sovereignty and The Campaign for an Independent Britain.
Well, we say three. The tiniest bit of digging suggests they’re pretty much one body: Leigh Evans, who founded Brexit Facts4EU, is also the executive chairman of Stand for Our Sovereignty.
Meanwhile, the three groups’ “famous faces” supporters are almost identical man-for-man (and two women: Suella Braverman and Kate Hoey), right down to using the same pictures. One is the aforementioned Redwood, who presumably has his own parking space at GB News’s Paddington HQ such is his present ubiquity.
And finally the lies. The “news article” from McCaffrey mentioned above is a classic of the genre: based on a report from all three of those organisations, quoting Redwood at length and, in claiming Brexit to have been in fact a rip-roaring success, reliant on selective data, misinterpreted statistics and confusing correlation with economic impact.
For example, McCaffrey says figures showing the UK economy grew prove that forecasts claiming Brexit would cause a 4% to 8% hit to output were “falsehoods” and “doomster lies” when in actual fact no one said that – independent institutions like the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) and the Bank of England estimated a 4% long-term reduction in potential productivity/GDP relative to what it would have been had the UK remained in the EU. Denying a cost because an economy grew is like claiming a car isn’t slowing down from a flat tyre simply because it is still rolling forward down a hill.
Is it news to New World readers that GB News’s coverage of our relationship with Europe is characterised by propaganda, bad faith and lies? Probably not. But nor should we close our eyes to it.
Because if Andy Burnham really is serious about taking Britain back into the heart of Europe, there’s going to be a lot more of this to come – and every GB News viewer’s vote in a future referendum counts the same as yours.
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