BENIGN EU?: At the heart of the BBC website’s EU coverage is a new animated feature by correspondent Damian Grammaticas that purports to give an objective two-minute overview of how the EU operates. This is the text of the feature in full:

DAMIAN GRAMMATICAS: The EU, as it says on the tin, is a union, a club, more than half a century old, now 28 nations. But how big is it? China is more than twice the size – so too in the United States of America. But compared to America, the EU’s population is far bigger, and its combined economies rival the US. The EU is the world’s biggest single market, people and goods, money and services flowing freely. And there’s the euro – now used by 19 nations and more than 300 million people. To make this market work, EU countries have removed some borders and pooled some decision-making. So who wields power? National leaders do, they gather regularly to take big decisions jointly, such as on the migrant crisis and set the EU’s priorities. Government ministers from each country do – they meet their counterparts every month, when they’re coordinating economic policy, it’s the Chancellor, George Osborne who goes. They, together with the elected European Parliament approve or reject any new laws. 10% of its members are from the UK. And to keep the EU running, are 55,000 civil servants. The UK government employs six times the number. Most of the EU’s civil servants work for the Commission. It’s independent of governments, draws up the laws, makes sure countries follow them. The European Court rules on any disputes and the Central Bank manages the euro. So what does the EU govern? Well, it has sole power to strike trade deals, makes competition rules like capping mobile roaming charges and fixes fishing quotas. The EU shares with member states the power to act in areas like the rights of workers and consumers, protecting the environment. And its powers are growing. It oversees banks in countries that use the euro, and monitors levels of national debt and deficit in all EU nations. Helps coordinate border controls, has a bill of rights for EU citizens, embassies around the world, even peace-keeping troops. So this union is economic, but political too, growing and changing all the time.

Where to begin unpicking how biased this is? The first overall point is that Grammticas avoids any mention that the EU is controversial. No mention, for example, that many believe that the operation of the European Commission is shrouded in secrecy and complexity. Nothing about the extent to which the EU is perceived to generate unnecessary regulations and directives. Nothing about that many fishermen believe that EU fishing quotas have wrecked the UK fishing fleet, or that the UK is repeatedly outvoted by the other EU leaders, and, indeed, on the 77 issues taken to a full vote since 1996, has been voted down every time.

On the other side of the coin, Grammaticas seems to actively play up the reasonableness and beneficial nature of EU operations. It caps telephone roaming charges, protects the environment, operates the world’s biggest single market so that people, good, money and services can ‘flow freely’. It works with governments in monitoring border controls, the rights of workers, the bill of rights for citizens and provides peace-keeping troops. Who would disagree with that?

Another issue is that Grammaticas constructs a picture of the EU’s modus operandi that makes it sound entirely democratic and fair. The members’ national leaders work closely with the European parliament to make and implement laws.  They are assisted in this process by’55,000 civil servants’, a total six times less than the UK’s government’s domestic civil service.   In this picture, The EU is doing the will of democratically elected figures, assisted by a civil service.  But critics entirely disagree.  First, the European Commission is not a ‘civil service’  It may have some of the functions, but is actually a supranational body with the power to frame laws and drive them through the EU structure so that are implemented.  The Council of Ministers cannot do so, and nor can the European Parliament – their powers are limited to making decisions about implementation. Further, the Commission’s main loyalty is not to member states, but to the EU itself. When Commissioners are appointed from the member states, they are required by EU law to swear an undertaking that their loyalties thereafter will be only to the EU.

All this adds up that Grammaticas has devised a strongly pro-EU feature. As with a similar snapshot exercise on World at One by Professor Anand Menon, it is deeply biased towards the EU and leaves out or glosses over key points that are what the opposition to the EU and desire for Brexit is based upon.   Not only that, this was expensive production with specially-commissioned graphics designed to show the EU in the best possible light.  It seems that the BBC is working behind the scenes to project the EU in the best possible light, to gloss over simplistically its shortcomings. In short, to pull the wool over the eyes of referendum voters.

 

WAR MONGERING?: Nick Robinson – for once – did a credible job this morning (9/5) in trying to pin down  foreign secretary Philip Hammond over David Cameron’s dire warning that exiting the EU could endanger peace and security in Europe, with the continent at the mercy of ‘forces of nationalism’ – a claim that led in the Daily Mail (for example) that he was saying that Brexit could lead to war.  Robinson’s first question, (or rather statement, because the interview was recorded) was:

[David Cameron] will go on to make an argument about the risk to the continent if we choose to leave. Well, a few minutes ago, I did speak to the Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond and I asked him if leaving the EU really could lead to war on the continent, perhaps he should begin by apologising to the public for holding a referendum with such enormous consequences.

Hammond immediately squirmied, and indeed, spent the next ten minutes in the prime 8.10am Today slot effectively side-stepping the point, as the transcript below shows. Robinson kept the interview on relatively narrow tram lines and it gradually emerged that Hammond was prepared only to say that the EU had a peace-keeping role; in his view, it was the newspapers that had, in effect, exaggerated the Prime Minister’s message by bringing the possibility of war into the equation.  Robinson rightly noted that it was the Prime Minister’s invocation of Churchill and Wellington that had been the trigger for that.

The full extent of Hammond’s obfuscation and slipperiness was revealed in this exchange:

NR: Well, I put to you again then the question that I opened with, which is: if it’s so serious, why on earth put this at risk by having an unnecessary referendum, and why did you, not much longer than a year ago, I think, say you were ready to vote to leave the EU in certain circumstances? PH: If there’d been no change, if there was no change of direction of the European Union (words unclear due to speaking over) NR: (speaking over) Sure, but as our Foreign Secretary, and as previous Defence Secretary, you were (fragment of word, unclear) willing to take the risk over peace and war, and you’ve changed your mind over a few welfare benefit changes? PH: Why are we having a referendum? Because this is a democracy, and because the European Union has changed significantly since we last voted on this issue in 1975, and it is right in a democracy, and clearly the will of the British people as we’re seeing from this robust debate today, that they should have a chance to express a view on this issue and it’s simply not acceptable in a democracy for the elite to say, ‘This is a question too important to put to the people.’ It’s not . . .

That said, Robinson’s approach to the ‘balancing’ interview towards the end of the programme (8.50am)  with government minister Penny Mordaunt was wholly different.  First, the exchange was much shorter than that with Hammond, and in consequence, she was not able to develop any effective rebuttals. Then Robinson described her during the exchange as a ‘relatively junior minister’ (thereby surely undermining her authority), and finally asked her to take part in a game of naming world leaders who agreed with the UK leaving the EU. Mordaunt attempted to say that there was a long list of senior military and intelligence figures who supported ‘leave’, and that leaders were concurring with David Cameron for the sake of diplomacy.   But before she could respond fully, or with any coherence to the substantive point, he wound the interview up.     Earlier Robinson asked if she accepted David Cameron’s argument that ‘at a dangerous and unstable time’ Brexit was bound to weaken the glue that held the nations of Europe together; whether the UK leaving would lead to other countries leaving too, and whether that was important; and finally, whether the UK leaving would make it easier to deal with tensions created by the Eurozone crisis and ‘migration’, Mordaunt managed to say in response that the EU was not delivering on security and prosperity because it did not allow nation states to thrive, and was causing fragmentation; that exit would allow the UK to control its own borders;  and that exit would be a catalyst for beneficial reform of the rest of the EU. But Robinson interrupted her frequently, and at no stage was she allowed to formulate detailed responses which answered the points raised by Robinson fully. By contrast, Hammond had plenty of space to put his arguments about the importance of the EU in keeping the peace. Overall, therefore, the two exchanges were not at all balanced. Most weight was put on the Cameron warning.  BBC editors thought the Cameron intervention was so important that they were already trailing it in the BBC1 bulletins on Sunday evening. Security correspondent Frank Gardiner was wheeled out to reinforce the gravity. In his estimation, ‘the most authoritative voices’ in the security establishment were also warning that leaving the EU would compromise the UK’s safety.

 

Transcript of BBC Radio 4, ‘Today’, 9th May 2016, Interview with Philip Hammond, 8.10am

NICK ROBINSON:             The Prime Minister is speaking just about now about that issue of Europe.  Now, you’ve heard many risks spelt out by both campaigns in this EU referendum, mortgages, for example, going up versus the suggestion that immigration will go up.  But the Prime Minister is going much, much further than that, arguing that there is really a risk to peace and security on the continent of Britain chooses to lose (sic, means ‘leave’?) it’s produced headlines claiming that Brexit could lead to war.  In a few minutes, I’ll be asking the Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond, to explain just how that might be the case, but the Prime Minister, meanwhile, is just on his feet, let’s go live now, just to hear a little of what he’s got to say.

DAVID CAMERON . . . help decide the rules, the advantages of this far outweigh any disadvantages.  Our membership of the single market is one of the reasons why our economy is doing so well, why we’ve created almost 2.4 million jobs over the last six years, and why so many companies from overseas, from China, India, the United States and Australia and other Commonwealth countries invest so much here in the UK.  It’s one of the factors, together with our superb workforce, low taxes set by the British government, and our climate of enterprise which makes Britain such an excellent place to do business . . .

NR:        Well, there’s the Prime Minister making the more conventional argument, but he will go on to make an argument about the risk to the continent if we choose to leave.  Well, a few minutes ago, I did speak to the Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond and I asked him if leaving the EU really could lead to war on the continent, perhaps he should begin by apologising to the public for holding a referendum with such enormous consequences.

PHILIP HAMMOND:        The point that the Prime Minister is going to be making in the speech that he is giving this morning is that Britain is a European power, it has a vital interest in peace and stability on this continent and historically, whenever we’ve turned our back on Europe, whenever we’ve retreated into isolation, we’ve ended up regretting it and having to reinsert ourselves into the European equation because it’s essential for us to be there to protect our own interests, (fragments of words, unclear due to speaking over)

NR:        (speaking over) But he’s doing more than that, isn’t he?  He’s going further and saying that if we leave the glue that holds together European nations may be dissolved and that may end in conflict or war?

PH:        Well, what he’s doing is pointing out that although we in Britain have enjoyed peace and stability for many, many years, not all parts of the European continent have been that fortunate, not all parts have the deep and long democratic traditions that we have, not all parts are as stable as we are.  And he’s pointing out as well that the European Union is one of the institutions that ensures peace, stability and security in our continent, and he argues . . .

NR:        (speaking over) Can we spell it out though, is he arguing that, and are you arguing that not that there is an necessity of this, of course not, but there is a chance that is leaving the EU produces the conditions for conflict, a conflict that we in Britain are forced to intervene in?

PH:        Er, the point the Prime Minister is making is that the European Union, a strong European Union is an important contributor to peace and security in our continent, and if we . . .

NR:        (speaking over) It seems to me you’re reluctant to say it, forgive me, you’re willing the headlines that say they might be war . . .

PH:        (speaking over) Look, I didn’t, I didn’t write the headlines . . .

NR:        (speaking over) Er, you’re quoting Churchill, you’re quoting Wellington, you’re quoting the Duke of Marlborough in aid, and yet when I say, ‘Well, might it lead to war?’ you’re, ‘Oh, no, no, we’re not quite saying that.’

PH:        Well, I don’t write the headlines in some of our newspapers, what I’m saying is that the European Union is an important contributor to the stability and peace that we enjoy in Europe and that is in Britain’s interests, and history tells us that Britain is a European power, it’s a global power as well, but it’s a European power and it cannot turn its back on what’s going on in Europe, we have to be concerned about what’s going on in Europe.

NR:        Well, I put to you again then the question that I opened with, which is: if it’s so serious, why on earth put this at risk by having an unnecessary referendum, and why did you, not much longer than a year ago, I think, say you were ready to vote to leave the EU in certain circumstances?

PH:        If there’d been no change, if there was no change of direction of the European Union (words unclear due to speaking over)

NR:        (speaking over) Sure, but as our Foreign Secretary, and as previous Defence Secretary, you were (fragment of word, unclear) willing to take the risk over peace and war, and you’ve changed your mind over a few welfare benefit changes?

PH:        Why are we having a referendum?  Because this is a democracy, and because the European Union has changed significantly since we last voted on this issue in 1975, and it is right in a democracy, and clearly the will of the British people as we’re seeing from this robust debate today, that they should have a chance to express a view on this issue and it’s simply not acceptable in a democracy for the elite to say, ‘This is a question too important to put to the people.’ It’s not . . .

NR:        (speaking over) It’s hard to imagine Churchill saying, you know, ‘I think this could cause conflict in Europe, but never mind, let’s consider doing it.’

PH:        It’s a question that we should put to the British people.  We should have a robust debate about it, nobody on this side of the argument is suggesting that all the, all the arguments go one way, there’s a balance to be made, we believe that the balance of these arguments looking at Britain’s prosperity, future jobs, future economic growth, Britain’s security and safety and Britain’s influence in the world, clearly come down on the side of remaining in the European Union, that will make . . .

NR:        (speaking over, words unclear) your experience . . .

PH:        . . . stronger, safer and more prosperous.

NR:        Forgive me, but has your experience as, first Defence Secretary, then Foreign Secretary changed your mind?  You were a leading Eurosceptic, are there things that you’ve seen, conversations you’ve had, documents that’s crossed your desk, that have now made you think that the risk of Britain leaving is far, far higher – or is your side of the argument just to be a panic that it might lose?

PH:        It has, being Foreign Secretary has certainly changed my perspective.  I’ve visited 71 countries as Foreign Secretary and with my hand on my heart I can tell you that not in any one of those countries have the people I’ve been meeting told me that Britain would be a more influential power, Britain would be a more important partner to them if we were outside the European Union.  Quite contrary.  All of them have told me that they regard Britain as an important power in its own right, but they regard Britain’s influence and Britain’s importance is magnified by the fact that it is one of the leading powers in the European Union.

NR:        Let’s go to the kernel of this argument then about peace and security, you know, your former, your predecessor as Defence Secretary, Liam Fox would make this case, no doubt Boris Johnson will later, that it’s NATO that keeps the peace on the European continent, it is the binding of the United States in with the European countries that keeps is secure, not the EU?

PH:        Of course NATO is crucially important and will remain a member of NATO whatever happens, but NATO is essentially an outward-looking, war-fighting machine, and very, very important to us.  What the European Union does is operate to bind the nation states of the European Union together, through mechanisms for peace and security which work between those European Union states, and what the Prime Minister is saying . . .

NR:        (speaking over) But surely, surely Mr Hammond, surely Mr Hammond, you may have been able to make that argument in the first 20, 30 even 40 years of the EU, but far from binding the countries of Europe together at the moment, the crisis over the Eurozone, with people losing their jobs because of interest rates set to benefit Germany, the crisis over mass migration which is not being controlled and people are erecting fences across borders again, the EU is contributing to the sources of conflict, not ending them.

PH:        No, it’s that, but that’s a . . . er, if I may so, that’s a misanalysis.  The challenge of dealing with large scale migration flows in the continent of Europe, and we’re not in the Schengen area, so we’re not directly affected as other countries are, but that challenge would be there anyway, and the European Union gives as a mechanism for addressing that challenge.  Now, it’s not a perfect mechanism, and of course, tensions have risen as a result of the huge migratory flows that we saw last summer, but the European Union gives as a mechanism for containing and managing those threats, and we can’t, as the British people, just because we live on an island, turn our backs on those issues and say there nothing to do with us, they . . .

NR:        (speaking over) Let’s spell it out then.

PH:        They do affect us.

NR:        Yeah.

PH:        They do present us with risk, and we have to be engaged in resolving that problem.

NR:        (speaking over) I want you to spell out that risk. I, I accept, you know, you don’t want write headlines about war, let’s you spell out the risk then, if we leave, what then follows that could lead to conflict?

PH:        The European Union will be weaker without Britain inside it, and the mechanisms that maintain the peace and stability of the continent will be commensurately weaker, Britain . . .

NR:        (speaking over) But are you saying the democracies, because usually, we assume, democracies don’t go to war with one another, are you saying that if Britain leaves the . . . there would be a situation, suddenly, over a period of years perhaps, in which one country in the EU might go into conflict with another country in the EU despite the fact these are free, democratic countries.

PH:        What we, what we run the risk of is tensions rising in parts of Europe that perhaps do not have the deep and enduring democratic routes that we and our immediate neighbours have, and in the areas just outside the European Union, the Balkans for example, countries that are closely associated with the European Union that are applicant states, (fragment of word, unclear) would-be member states of the European Union, where the European Union has significant influence and significant ability to influence events, anything that weakens the European Union would weaken the forces of stability in those areas, that would be bad for Britain, bad for Britain’s security . . .

NR:        (speaking over) Sure, you made that point.

PH:        . . . and for Britain’s, er, role in the world.

NR:        A final thought for you: it is really quite extraordinary, isn’t it that a national leader who says that leaving the EU would be so fundamentally against our national interest, has chosen to put all this at risk simply to deal with the rise of UKIP and a rebellion in his own party?

PH:        We live in a democracy, er, Nick.  When we go into a general election, as a Tory I will be telling my voters that it is in the national interest to elect a Conservative government, that what the opposition parties proposing the government would be bad for Britain, but it is for the voters to decide.  And in this argument we are making the case for Britain being stronger, safer and better off inside the European Union . . .

NR:        (speaking over) Foreign Secretary . . .

PH:        . . . but it’s the British people that will listen to the arguments, weigh them up and decide on balance where Britain’s best interests lies.

NR:        They will, and they’ll also listen to a junior defence minister who is coming on the programme later, who disagrees with that.  Philip Hammond, Foreign Secretary, thank you very much.

PH:        Thank you.  

Transcript of BBC Radio 4, ‘Today’, 9th May 2016, Interview with Penny Mordaunt, 8.50am

NICK ROBINSON:             Now, in the last few minutes the Prime Minister has used a speech to argue that a vote to leave the EU would endanger peace and security in Europe, and arguing that history shows Britain can’t stand aside from conflict on the continent.  Challenging the Prime Minister’s arguments is a woman he appointed to be a defence minister, Penny Mordaunt, she’s part of the Vote Leave campaign, and she joins us from our Westminster studio, morning to you.

PENNY MORDAUNT:      Good morning.

NR:        Do you accept the core of the Prime Minister’s argument that at a dangerous time, and unstable time, Brexit is bound to weaken the glue that holds the nations of Europe together?

PM:       No, I do not.  The Leave campaign want to drag the Prime Minister back to the issues that matter today, our borders, the security risks that come from accessing countries and to our operational security and what we need to keep our country safe today, the Prime Minister . . .

NR:        (speaking over) Sure, but let me drag you back to his argument, though . . .

PM:       (speaking over) Yes, the Prime Minister today is, is trying to tap into a . . . a vision, which I think we all share, of nations living in peace, looking West, er, secure and prosperous.  What is being debated though is that the EU is a) necessary to that, and I would actually argue that its current trajectory is absolutely counter to that.  At the same time, he’s telling us that we are heading for war if we leave, the EU is denying us the tools we need to protect our own citizens, and at the same time . . .

NR:        (speaking over) Look, there’s evidence, there’s evidence against you in this sense, isn’t there, which is in a poll Ipsos MORI have done right across the EU, what would be the response of the peoples of Europe to Brexit, they would demand their referendum, and more people would demand to get out the EU.  Now, what would be interesting to know is do you welcome that, do you think yes, let’s get, let’s get other countries at the EU, or do you hope they’ll all stay together and will just walk away?

PM:       Well, I think it, it, it’s worth asking why those countries are, are saying that, it is because . . .

NR:        (interrupting) But forgive me, I’m asking you whether it’ll happen, not why.

PM:       No, well, I think we ought to be looking at why.  Look the, the reason why the EU is not delivering, either on security or economic prosperity is it . . . because it is not doing what its nation states need in order to thrive. Erm, it is causing tremendous fragmentation, the rise of far right politics all the things that the Prime Minister are warning us could happen if we leave, are here now today.

NR:        And you (fragment of word, unclear) arguing that it would make things better, those, all those tensions created, nobody denies it, by the Eurozone crisis, all the tensions created by the migration crisis – you are arguing that if one of the principle democracies in the world, one of the biggest military powers, one of the greatest economic power (sic) votes to leave, that will somehow reduce those tensions?

PM:       I think it will, because of very, very (word unclear due to speaking over ‘confident’?) reasons . . .

NR:        (speaking over) How?

PM:       Firstly, we will be able to get back control of our own borders, that is absolutely fundamental to our own security . . .

NR:        (speaking over) No, that’s good for Britain, and you’ve made that argument day after day.

PM:       (speaking over) Yes, but . . .

NR:        What happens in Europe is what I’m asking you.

PM:       (speaking over) But also, as well as it being a better deal for the UK, it will give the remaining EU states a catalyst for reform.  You could see, to the tail end of the Prime Minister’s negotiations, other nations saying, ‘do you know, actually that sounds very sensible, we ought to have some of that to,’ we have tried . . .

NR:        (speaking over) So your message to Europe is, is, is . . .

PM:       (speaking over) We have tried . . .

NR:        . . . we’re walking out the club just to help you.

PM:       No, we have tried absolutely everything to get the EU to reform from within, this is our last chance I think to get it to start to get back to its democratic principles, to actually start doing what its nation states need, both in terms of security and economic prosperity, unless we have . . .

NR:        (speaking over) Can I ask you one last question if I may . . .

PM:       Certainly.

NR:        Well, with respect and you are a relatively, you know, junior minister, fairly new to this, can you name a single world leader who agrees with you on this, and let’s leave Donald Trump out shall we?

PM:       (laughs) Look, no head of state or Prime Minister or President is going to want to annoy our Prime Minister . . .

NR:        (interrupting) What, they’re all saying what they don’t believe . . .

PM:       (speaking over) there are a . . . no . . . there is . . .

NR:        . . . because they’re being diplomatic.

PM:       There is a big, long list of admirals, generals, er, the former head of the CIA, former head of MI6 who think that we will be safer if we leave the EU, rather . . .

NR:        (speaking over) Just not every other world leader.

PM:       No, but rather than trade job titles, the public want the arguments, that’s what . . .

NR:        Okay.

PM:       . . . we need to give them, why we’ll be safer, we need control over our borders, we need the EU to stop undermining our security relationships with the Five Eyes . . .

NR:        (speaking over) We’ve got to leave it there, I’m afraid. Penny Mordaunt . . .

PM:       . . . that’s why we’ll be safer out.

NR:        Thank you for your time.

Photo by DFID – UK Department for International Development

MORE EU PROPAGANDA: Previous News-watch blogs have shown how Nick Robinson’s BBC2 programme Europe: Them and Us presented a false history of the EU in line with the EU’s own self-perpetuated myth that its existence has been an essential ingredient in keeping the peace since the Second World War. Listeners to BBC World Service have this week been heard their own concentrated version of the same propaganda, in an edition of The Inquiry called ‘What Happened to the European Dream?’  The full transcript is below.  The first part of the programme was about the founding of the EU. Presenter James Fletcher first spoke to Professor Desmond Dinan, who was introduced as being the holder of the Jean Monnet chair at the George Mason University in the US. What he did not say is that this is one of hundreds of such professorships round the world set up by the EU to study ‘European integration’ under the Jean Monnet project, and is a building block of Union’s massive propaganda project to convince the world – and figures such as the US President – that the EU is vital to peace in Europe. Professor Dinan did not disappoint.  He delivered a masterclass in the EU myth. This is what he declared that Monnet and his colleagues had delivered immediately after the war:

I think they were pragmatic.  It was an arrangement between countries which meant that war would not happen again and which meant also that countries would be not only peaceful but that they would be prosperous and that economic development and economic success in each country was not a zero-sum game, that all countries in Europe could prosper together and be peaceful together.

This was followed a few sentences later by:

And what cut through the Gordian Knot of this particular conundrum was Jean Monnet’s proposal to establish European-wide Coal and Steel Community.  So, what the European Coal and Steel Community did was two-fold.  First of all, it addressed very particular economic resource allocation problem.  And second, it built trust, because it required countries participating in it to hand over responsibility, national resource ability to a supranational authority, to make key decisions in these very important economic sectors.

Dinan’s first major propaganda point – writ large – was that the EU was set up to ‘look beyond a narrowly-defined self-interest’, then the second, that an essential ingredient was that a supranational body was required to make key decisions (the unelected and unaccountable European Commission, of course).

In the second part of the programme, Fletcher spoke to another ‘authority’ on EU history: Professor Sara Hobolt, from the London School of Economics.  Her credentials?  Exactly the same as Professor Dinan.  She holds the ‘Sutherland Chair in European Institutions’ and is also funded by the European Union Studies Association. He academic record includes dozens of publications about topics such as public attitudes towards integration. He role was to explain what had happened from the 1970s after Monnet had started the brilliant EU dream. As with Dinan, her focus was the importance of the EU, starting with:

The thing that happened in the 70s is really what has sometimes been referred to as the sort of European dark ages, or the dark ages of European integration.  A long period where there was no real integration in Europe.

Of course. Not enough integration.  At this point Fletcher colluded with the propaganda. He declared:

In the 60s and 70s, the Coal and Steel Community had expanded to become a broader trading area, known as the European Economic Community, and had admitted new members like the United Kingdom, Ireland and Denmark.  But the tension we heard about from our first expert witness, between national sovereignty and further political integration had slowed moves towards greater economic cooperation. 

Hobolt continued the propaganda with another observation that may have surprised Margaret Thatcher and the vast majority of Eurosceptics. She said:

Now, what we come to in the early 80s was a new dynamism, and a new willingness to bring European nations closer together both in terms of economic integration and also in terms of institutional reform.  So, the sort of golden era of European integration really goes there from 1995 and up to the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in ’91.

And then she moved on to Jacques Delors, who was:

….a visionary, he had a vision for closer economic and political integration, bringing nation states together, but not necessarily, sort of, a European superstate, that would supersede nation states to the extent that they wouldn’t exist.

Delors the superstar. Further analysis would be more of the same. The reality is that this programme, in the key area of the development of the EU, was one-sided pro- EU propaganda provided by figures whose job is to collaborate with EU myth-making.  They delivered in spades. That the BBC should have made a programme of this nature during the referendum campaign is  highly questionable, and appears to be in direct contravention of the BBC’s own Referendum Guidelines. The audience was led to belief that Dinan and Hobolt are authoritative, objective sources on the subject of EU history. But they are not.

 

Transcript of BBC World Service, The Inquiry, ‘What Happened to the European Dream?’ 3 May 2016, 3.06am

JAMES FLETCHER:           This week: what happened to the European dream? On June 23rd this year, British voters will go to the polls. On the ballot will be a simple question: should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union. No matter the result, the mere fact that for the first time in 40 years a member country is seriously considering leaving is a sign of the problems Europe is facing.  Across the continent anti EU political parties are on the rise. In April, Dutch voters rejected an EU deal with Ukraine. Even the president of the European Commission admitted recently that the EU project had lost part of its attractiveness. Bureaucrats are fond of phrases like ‘The European Project’ – but what does it actually mean and has lost its shine?  This week, we’re asking what happened to the European dream? (music)

FEMALE ANNOUNCER: Part One: A continent rebuilds.

NEWSREEL MONTAGE:  Pointing to Western Europe as a shattered ruin from which great masses of the people could never hope to rise without American a . . . France had miraculously emerged from general strikes which paralysed her national life.  But civil war had barely been averted.

PROFESSOR DESMOND DINAN:  Those days were grim, the circumstances were bad, Europe faced an enormous challenge of reconstruction immediately after the war.

JF:          Our search for the European dream begins in the aftermath of World War II.

DD:        And the men who would go on to become the so-called founding fathers of the European Community were very much immersed in that challenge.

JF:          Professor Desmond Dinan works at George Mason University in the United States, where he holds a chair named after one of those founding fathers, French civil servant Jean Monnet.

DD:        He had worked for the League of Nations in the late 20s and early 30s, he had worked for the French government, so he was very well known internationally, and he had never stood for elected office, he preferred to operate in the background, that’s how he pushed the goal of European integration forward.

JF:          Monnet’s main partner in France was government minister Robert Schuman who had been part of the French resistance with a price on his head.

DD:        Schuman was an experienced foreign minister, very committed as Monnet was to try to find a new way to manage relations between states and especially between France and Germany.

JF:          Monnet and Schuman were part of a group of European statesmen all in their 60s and 70s who had all lived through turbulent times.

DD:        They had experienced not just the Second World War but the entire inter-war period, and indeed, the First World War as well.  So for them, throughout their careers Europe had been in chaos, war, recession, unemployment was the norm.  They wanted to change that; they wanted to break that cycle.

JF:          And so how would you express what they came up with.

DD:        I think they were pragmatic.  It was an arrangement between countries which meant that war would not happen again and which meant also that countries would be not only peaceful but that they would be prosperous and that economic development and economic success in each country was not a zero-sum game, that all countries in Europe could prosper together and be peaceful together.

ROBERT SCHUMAN Speaking French, over music.

JF:          In 1950, Robert Schuman gave a speech proposing the creation of what would eventually become the European Union.  He talked about avoiding war and the importance of economic development.  Peace and prosperity.  Professor Dinan says this was the founding dream.  Of course, dream is just a dream unless you can figure out a way to make it a reality.

DD:        They saw this challenge, not just as a diplomatic challenge or a challenge of international relations, they saw it also, and this is very important, as an economic challenge.

JF:          Coal and steel were the key resources as Europe rebuilt after the war.  The problem for France was that Germany had most of the coal.  Being on the side of the victors, some in France advocated simply taking the coal from Germany.  But keeping Germany down wasn’t consistent with those goals of peace and prosperity.  So, it was clear that nations like France would have to look beyond their narrowly-defined self-interest.

DD:        And what cut through the Gordian Knot of this particular conundrum was Jean Monnet’s proposal to establish European-wide Coal and Steel Community.  So, what the European Coal and Steel Community did was two-fold.  First of all, it addressed very particular economic resource allocation problem.  And second, it built trust, because it required countries participating in it.  To hand over responsibility, national resource ability to a supranational authority, to make key decisions in these very important economic sectors.

JF:          Economic cooperation required political institutions to make it work.  European bureaucracy which stood above national governments and took some of their powers away from them.  So, from the beginning, signing up to Europe meant link wishing some national sovereignty.

DD:        Monnet described the Coal and Steel Community as a functional economic approach to greater European integration, but his hope was that this would result in policy spillover, that as countries cooperated very closely in one or two economic sectors that their cooperation and collaboration inevitably would spill over into other sectors.

JF:          So we’ve heard how the European dream was for peace and prosperity, achieved through economic cooperation.  The vehicle for this was the Coal and Steel Community, but crucially, that was seen by some as just the beginning.

FEMALE ANNOUCNER:   Part two: the golden age.

SARA HOBOLT:  The European Union has always been this fascinating experiment of change, a political experiment.

JF:          Our second expert witness is Sara Hobolt, originally from Denmark, now at the London School of Economics.

SH:        The thing that happened in the 70s is really what has sometimes been referred to as the sort of European dark ages, or the dark ages of European integration.  A long period where there was no real integration in Europe.

JF:          In the 60s and 70s, the Coal and Steel Community had expanded to become a broader trading area, known as the European Economic Community, and had admitted new members like the United Kingdom, Ireland and Denmark.  But the tension we heard about from our first expert witness, between national sovereignty and further political integration had slowed moves towards greater economic cooperation.

SH:        Now, what we come to in the early 80s was a new dynamism, and a new willingness to bring European nations closer together both in terms of economic integration and also in terms of institutional reform.  So, the sort of golden era of European integration really goes there from 1995 and up to the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in ’91.

JF:          The Maastricht Treaty is important, and will tell you more about it in a minute.  But first, let’s hear about the driving force behind this so-called golden era – Jaques Delors.

SH:        He was a visionary, he had a vision for closer economic and political integration, bringing nationstates together, but not necessarily, sort of, a European superstate, that would supersede nation states to the extent that they wouldn’t exist.

JF:          Delors was a Socialist politician and former Minister of economics in France.  In 1985, he became President of the European Commission, then and now, Europe’s executive body.

SH:        If you go back to the early years of integration, integration was very much about removing tariff barriers, but Jacques Delors as a Socialist was also one who wanted a more social dimension, this more, what we might think of as a welfare state at the European level, and add a political dimension to European integration.

JF:          He started by furthering the original European dream: economic integration.

SH:        What he did first was about the completion of the single market, establishing a common geographical area where companies can trade with each other without any kind of barriers to trade, but also they established sort of common external borders and tariffs, so they have a common policy vis-a-vis the rest of the world in terms of how difficult they see it is for the world to trade with this area.

JF:          The single market was considered a success, and that meant Delors wanted to go further – towards establishing a single currency.

SH:        Now, of course, I’m sure he wasn’t unaware that once you have a single currency there will also be pressure for more common fiscal policy.

JF:          Fiscal policy means taxes and spending – pretty fundamental functions of national governments.  Establishing a single currency was an ambitious step, that would require European states to give up much more control over their own affairs.

SH:        So what he proposed was a three-stage roadmap.

JF:          Stage I was the Maastricht Treaty in the early 90s.

ARCHIVE NEWS REPORT:             Fanfare at Maastricht as the governments of the 12 reassembled here two months after the haggling of the summit which finally produced the treaty now ready for signature – a treaty charting the European Community’s course closer to that of a superpower, with agreements on monetary union, moving towards a common foreign and defence policy, and increasing the Community’s scope to make law for all member states.

JF:          Maastricht also brought in a significant name change The European Economic Community dropped the ‘Economic’ and became part of the European Union.  Jacques Delors had taken Europe deep into political territory, and a long way from the dark ages we heard about earlier. (music)

SH:        That was the high watermark, you know, it was the establishment of an economic union, the prospect of a political union and all forces were sort of joined to say we are creating, you know, this grand new project. (music, with lyrics, ‘Unite tonight – Europe’ and applause)

FEMALE ANNOUNCER:   Part three: Overreach?

ADRIAAN SCHOUT:         They have the European dream, they believe in the European dream.

JF:          Adriaan Schout is from the Netherlands Institute of International Relations.  Back in 1988 he was living with people who’d studied at the College of Europe – considered an elite finishing school for budding European bureaucrats.

AS:         If you were the son of a diplomat, and you speak five languages and you’ve lived in several other countries, then it’s easy to believe in the European dream.

JF:          What’s that vision that they’ve had that they’ve signed up to heart and soul?

AS:         It’s about fiscal union, it’s about a political union, it’s about an economic union, it’s about the Parliament is being a true parliament that appoints a government and that has a sizeable EU budget. But all of that goes at the expense of member states.

JF:          As we’ve heard, around this time, people with this expansive dream of Europe were in the driving seat in Brussels.

AS:         We started to realise that the EU was more than just a market, but we didn’t know what it quite was, what it was going to be.  It was an abstract discussion, but it became clear with a remark by Jacques Delors.

JACQUES DELORS:          (speaking French)

AS:         That 80% of policies would be formulated at EU level.  And I think that remark really woke up and to European feelings, or at least Eurosceptic feelings that . . . ‘Hey, this is going too fast – that means we can more or less close our own Parliament and the EU will become a government’ so that remark was a bit the turning point.

JF:          Adriaan Schout says it started to become clear just how much political spillover, Jacques Delors’s vision of Europe was going to involve.

AS:         All sorts of policies came in, all kinds of areas, so you could see around 1990, you s— could see the resistance also in the public administration growing, of all these new proposals, are they really necessary?

JF:          There was just a sense almost of the paper piling up too fast on the desks?

AS:         Oh yes.

(music)

JF:          These concerns began to gain more traction with the public, as Europe move towards monetary union and the single currency.

AS:         You could see a dip in popularity of the EU, and, let me stress, that is not just only in the Netherlands but also in, for example, France and Germany, because while the popularity of the EU was going down, the integration process just continued with the momentum that it had.

JF:          The Maastricht treaty was narrowly rejected in a referendum in Denmark, and only just approved in a referendum in France. And what do you think was the fundamental difference between the vision of the European Commission, where they were taking Europe, and the people who were opposed or even tepidly in favour of?

AS:         Well, the first step was the enormous widening of the policy areas, then the introduction of the euro, and then subsequently the widening of the number of member states that happened from the first 10 Eastern European countries and then later some more joined, and then the final blow came when it became clear that the euro was much more than just a symbol and a coin.

JF:          We’ve moved fairly swiftly through a lot of history there, but essentially, Adriaan Schout is talking about the pattern we identified earlier: the move from economic to more and more political integration, and particularly in difficult times, more and more people becoming concerned about the loss of sovereignty that this entails.  The extent of public opposition to further EU integration became particularly clear in 2005 when moves to adopt European Constitution were rejected by French and Dutch voters.

VOX POP FEMALE:          To much power is going to the minster of that little countries like Holland.

VOX POP MALE:                             It’s the wrong referendum, I vote against.

VOX POP FEMALE 2:       They never asked us anything, and we don’t have time to read all the 350 pages.

AS:         It was an attempt to make the EU more simple, in a way, by having clear, identifiable structures.  But these things, they just . . . were not supported in the Netherlands, ‘We don’t want European president, we don’t want European flag, we don’t want a European hymn’ and that still is the tension that we now see in Europe.  It was vetoed in 2005, but we’re actually still on this trajectory of more and more Europe.

(music)

JF:          As the European project has faced crisis after crisis over the past ten years, over the constitution, the euro, immigration, this key question has emerged again and again.  Are these crises caused or made worse by Europe travelling too far down the road of political integration? Or do you European nations need to bite the bullet and give up more sovereignty to make political integration work?

FEMALE ANNOUNCER:   Part four: Where to now?

NIKOLAUS BLOME:         My name is Nikolaus Blome, I’m the deputy editor of Bild, which is the biggest daily in Europe.

JF:          Meet our fourth expert witness, a man with his finger on the pulse of popular opinion in Europe’s most powerful country – Germany.

NB:        The euro is in dire condition, maybe it’s the worst (word unclear, ‘phase’ or ‘face’?) of the European integration ever witnessed.  It’s a multitude of crises, starting from the debt crisis, from the euro crisis, erm . . . Ukraine, refugees, but there are crises coming from within too. We’ve seen some sort of renaissance of nationalism.  So, all in all, it’s not in good shape.

JF:          And where do these crises leave the European dream?

NB:        The narrative we had over decades, all about preventing war in Europe.  That one is mission accomplished, definitely, so well it’s  . . . some sort of a problem, if you have success, what is your next story, what is your next project?

JF:          Nikolaus Blome says finding that next project is complicated by the fact that the low hanging fruit: politically uncontroversial stuff like lowering trade barriers has already been picked.

NB:        Member states, all over the years and decades, have given away a lot of their sovereignty already. And now you’re like coming to the very hot . . . issues of defence, taxes, domestic security. And so that’s, obviously, it’s more difficult to hand that part of sovereignty over to Brussels than it has been about car parts or  . . . cucumbers. And erm . . . I am not astonished about having a fierce debate on that.

JF:          And do you think there is still a fundamental belief amongst Europeans that there are some things that are done better, you know, together as Europeans?

NB:        That belief is shrinking – they don’t buy the dream, if you want, anymore.

JF:          This June, Europe will get a clear sign whether some of its inhabitants buy the dream, when the UK votes on whether or not to remain in the EU.

NB:        Already the campaign is setting some standards for future debates like this in other countries.  And if the United Kingdom steps out, this might trigger similar things in Austria, in Belgium and the Netherlands, whatever.

JF:          So, if Britain leaves – known as Brexit – what would happen to the idea of closer political integration?

NB:        I think if Brexit will happen, the next day some few member countries, Germany and France maybe will do something in terms of more integration, just to show to everybody that the European thing is still alive, but it’s going to be difficult to have more than six or even five member states to be part of that new phase of integration.

JF:          If Britain does vote to stay in, so there’s no Brexit, do you think that, that new phase of integration will still happen, is there this sense that there’s these five or six core countries that are going to keep moving ahead with the kind of broader project?

NB:        No, I don’t think so.  If Brexit does not happen, they will try to consolidate what they have, and they will let pass like, five years, before trying to renegotiate the whole thing.

JF:          Do you think even in five years’ time it might be possible to get all 28 member states heading down the same road at the same speed?

NB:        (two second pause) No not at all. There might be some . . . different, multispeed Europe, that’s fine, that’s in the treaties already, but still it’s getting more and more obligated to have decent relations between those in the faster pool and those staying out of that deeper-integrated pool of member states.

JF:          It’s a tricky balancing act.  Enough flexibility to address the concerns of those who think Europe is going too far, too fast, but not so much flexibility that a common project ceases to make sense.  And it’s even trickier to pull off in the heat of multiple crises.

NB:        Hopefully, in like, five years’ time, there’s no longer a refugee crisis, there has been some settlement with Greece, there’s more growth, and the European Union, somehow consolidated and gone through all those crises, might be able to take a new breath, and to start again.

(music)

JF:          So what happened to the European dream? We’re a long way from where we started – peace and prosperity achieved through economic cooperation.  Under Jacques Delors, political integration developed a momentum of its own, and since then the EU has found itself increasingly out of favour and under siege.  But the idea that what’s needed now is a pragmatic response after a time of crisis – that’s something that might feel very familiar to Europe’s founding fathers.

 

MORE ROBINSON BIAS: One of the most extraordinary questions of the EU referendum so far was posed by Nick Robinson when he interviewed Lord Patten on the Today programme on Wednesday (27/4). In essence, it seemed that the Today presenter – having first noted how wonderful he (Patten) thought the BBC was – invited the former BBC Chairman to say that the Corporation’s coverage was favouring too much the Brexit case.

The relevant sequence was at the end of the interview. This was it is full:

NR:  A last word on an organisation that you used to be in charge of, you were Chairman of this organisation, of course, which you . . .

CP:         (speaking over) (word unclear)

NR:         . . . generously called ‘the greatest broadcast in the world’ the BBC . . .

CP:         Hmm.

NR:         There are people on your side of the argument now who are in favour of remaining in the EU who, to paraphrase them say ‘the BBC is bending over backwards to produce balance in this argument, and doing so in a way that does not produce the facts.’

CP:         Well . . . erm . . . I think the BBC has an extremely difficult job. Erm, it’s having to cover this referendum, er, with the shadow of a Charter Review and Mr Whittingdale hanging over it, erm, I think that may make people excessively deferential when trying to produce balance.  You have the Govenor of the Bank of England on, or, or the IMF chief, so you feel obliged to erm, put up some, er . . . some Conservative backbencher that nobody’s ever heard of on the other side of the argument.  And it does, it does . . . occasionally raise eyebrows, but I think I would prefer the BBC to be being criticised for being so balanced, excessively balanced, than for, than for doing anything else. It’s a very great broadcaster, which is dedicated to telling the truth, and that’s an unusual thing in the world of the media.

Fundamental points here before considering in detail how seriously irregular this exchange was are that Lord Patten is a) an ardent Europhile who served as one of the UK’s  European Commissioners. He is thus bound by the terms of his pension never to criticise the EU; and b) while BBC Chairman, he vigorously resisted efforts by the House of Commons European Scrutiny Committee to investigate perceptions that the BBC coverage of EU affairs was strongly pro-EU.  He refused three times to appear before the Committee. It was only after he had resigned the post and Rona Fairhead had taken over that the Chairman did appear, in January 2015.

Against this background, a reasonable adversarial question to have put to Patten would have been whether – in the context of the blanket coverage by the Corporation of President Obama’s threat the previous week to put Britain to the ‘back of the queue’ for a trade treaty – BBC reporting had been rigorous and balanced enough.  Instead, Robinson tamely asked what Lord Patten thought of the suggestion (from the remain side) that the BBC was bending over backwards to produce balance in the argument in such a way that it was distorting the facts. In other words, Robinson asked a strongly pro-EU figure whether the Corporation was doing too much to bring the ‘exit’ arguments to the audience. This gave Patten the opportunity both to agree with the main point, and then to be extremely condescending and dismissive of the ‘exit’ case – and to amplify the threat that Robinson suggested was an issue of concern. At this point, he cannot have believed his luck, and, indeed, he appeared slightly surprised (in his rather halting response) that he had been presented with such a wide open goal to attack his Brexit foes.

Patten replied it was extremely difficult for the BBC to cover the referendum because of the ‘threat’ hanging over it from Culture secretary John Whittingdale and the Charter Review. His agenda here was almost certainly deeply political: that John Whittingdale was considered a threat to the BBC by the ‘remain’ side because he had formally warned the Corporation that its EU coverage was considered in some quarters to be pro-EU.  Patten suggested that in the face of this threat, BBC staff were being ‘too deferential’.  His next point stuck the boot in further and was both smug and condescending: against the high quality figures that the ‘remain’ side could marshal, such as the Governor of the Bank of England, or the IMF chief, this deference meant that producers felt ‘obliged’ to scratch around and put on ‘Conservative backbenchers that nobody’s heard of on the other side of the argument’.  His parting point was that he would nevertheless prefer the BBC to be ‘excessively balanced’ in this way than to do anything else – which is why, he claimed, it was ‘a very good broadcaster dedicated to telling the truth’.

Robinson thus elicited an answer from Lord Patten to vent in full his ‘remain’ prejudices, to concur with his interrogator’s observations that the BBC was a very high quality broadcaster, to attack the calibre of of the ‘exit’ speakers, to imply the Charter review process was biased because it was in the hands of Brexit supporter John Whittingdale, and to air his belief that, if anything, BBC coverage of the referendum campaign was ‘excessively balanced’;  in other words, heavily  biased towards) the Brexit side.

Nick Robinson, as well as being Today presenter, is a former BBC political editor. It is arguably an affront to journalism that this exchange ever happened, and – coming after his aggressive interview of Nigel Farage on the same day also noted on this blog – seems to be blatantly against the BBC’s referendum coverage guidelines.

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