EU Referendum Blog

CORNWALL BIAS: Justin Webb is the latest Today reporter to go walkabout to get the perspective of the EU referendum ‘from different places’.  His destination was Redruth in Cornwall.

Previous News-watch postings on BBC’ presenters’ handling of the topic of ‘EU money’ have pointed out that they have missed from the equation the vital explanation that such cash is actually from UK taxpayers and only distributed by the EU.

Webb continued further down this route, and again exaggerated the pro-EU bias by over-emphasising at several points its role in the local economy.  More seriously, He seemed unaware until it was mentioned by an interviewee, of the Amion report into EU spending in the area commissioned by local authorities and published in 2015. This had severely criticised the way this money was spent and noted that only 3,300 jobs had been created by half a billion pounds of taxpayers’ cash.

In the first of three features, he spoke to Alan Buckley, vice-chair of the Cornwall Mining Association, and Donovan Gardner, who runs a local food bank. Buckley explained that as a result of its metal mines and engineering expertise Cornwall had been the NASA of the industrial revolution, but those days had long gone. Cornwall was now a place of service industry, low wages and zero-hours contracts. Gardner said the demand for his food back service was ‘unbelievable’ because of the austerity problems. He was doing 10,000 meals a month.

Webb then said to Buckley:

And what a lot of people say Alan, is the answer to that, in part at least, is European money which does flow into Cornwall, because of its, its status, if you can put it like that, as a poorer part of Europe, and yet you’re voting Leave?

Buckley said it was a secret ballot and he was not saying how he would vote. But he said of everyone he spoke to, farmers, ex-miners, engineers, he had hardly heard a voice in favour of staying. Justin Webb asked why ‘the money argument doesn’t swing it for you’. Buckley replied:

Well, the strange thing is, recently we were discussing this, among some friends, the money that’s supposed to come from Europe, and nobody, including, in fact, the letters to the local paper – where’s it gone? Nobody ever sees any benefit from it. If it does come here, who has it and where does it go, where is it spent? Because we don’t . . . we see no benefit from it.

Gardner confirmed that he was undecided in the vote. He confirmed that he was, then observed that no-one had well paid jobs any more and were going hungry for their kids. He said he agreed with Alan that it was unclear where the money had gone. There was the Heartlands place, but it did not employ many people.

Webb asked if he had applied for any European money, and then whether it would be available to him. Gardner said he was looking for money for his charity, but thought it was only available to ‘starter projects’. Webb, interrupted by a lorry passing, put it to him that ‘at the moment Europe isn’t a source for you’. Gardner answered:

No, because European money is, is a project money (sic) er, it’s not sustainable money. If, if I want to start a new project, I could probably get European money, but next year it will be there.

Webb noted that Redruth town centre was run-down. He observed:

What, what, you need money injected into the place, don’t you? And if it doesn’t come from Europe, are you confident that it could come from Westminster?

Buckley replied that what was needed was industry, and explained that a hope was that a Canadian company would re-open one of the local mines. He claimed the prospects were good.

The second feature also came from Redruth. Justin Webb set the scene:

we’ve moved around to the side of the town, and I’m at a place that is very much benefiting, or about to benefit from EU money. It was a brewery, in fact, the chimney stack, the redbrick chimney stack is still very much in place, but the rest of it has been flattened and it’s being turned into a new archive centre, Kresen Kernow Archive Centre for Cornwall. Cornwall, of course, is paved with gold provided by the EU, it glitters around me on the streets here of Redruth in the early morning sunlight, well, not quite, in fact, as anyone who’s been to Cornwall and seen more than the beaches will know, there’s no gold on the streets, and in fact, the sun is more often reflected in the empty windows of closed-down shops. There is, though, a huge amount of European development money being spent around here. €6 billion in the programme lasting from 2014 to 2020. And it is money, of course, that colours that debate on the Europe referendum, in a sometimes forgotten corner of England. Well, this to most of us is Cornwall, I’m on the Bodinnick Ferry, it takes just a few cars at a time from Bodinnick to Fowey, and it’s all really picture postcard stuff, there are little boats, the water’s listening, you can come here and you can think, ‘Well, lucky Cornwall, lucky Cornish’ – what you don’t get a sense of is the simple fact that Cornwall is England’s poorest county. It qualifies for and it receives the top level of EU funding, and that’s cash that has an impact far away from the cream teas and the country lanes and the picturesque ferries.

Webb observed that IT company Headforwards was based in the Pool Innovation Centre, a gleaming new office block that ‘would not be here if it was not for funding from Brussels’.  Craig Girvan from the company said it was a ‘great investment coming from Europe that had ’indirectly has enabled us to exist and grow’.  Webb said:

Yeah.  So there’s no question at all in your mind that the success of your business and that initial funding from the European Union are really intimately connected?

CG:        Absolutely.

JW:       Alright then, if the benefits of membership are so clear, then it’s a no-brainer, isn’t it, on June 23? Well, no, not really.  I’ve come to Trago Mills, which is an out-of-town shopping centre near Liskeard. When you ask people here specifically about the money coming into Cornwall, even then their views about the EU are pretty mixed.

The first of two vox pops said that a lot of EU money came and went to the airport, so she would be voting to stay. Webb asked if there was enough to be sure ‘there were benefits from being in the EU. One vox pop agreed.

Vox pop two wanted money put into Devon and Cornwall rather than handed over to the EU.

Webb went to Trago Mills where he said there was a ‘slightly kitsch feel’, cockerels running around and a huge Vote Leave poster, along with a statue of the emperor Nero. There was a caption which said:

‘Nero only fiddled, Eurocrats practice grand larceny.’ – a clue as to the view of Europe held by the boss, Bruce Robertson.

BRUCE ROBERTSON:      Even by the EU’s own measures, it hasn’t done anything, we’re still deprived.  My view would be that . . . our own MPs would be perfectly capable of making a strong case for precisely what Cornwall needs in our own Parliament at Westminster, rather than having a few MEPs who cover from the Scilly Isles to Southampton, who are invariably a minority, because of what we are, in a parliament of 751 people . . .

JW:        (speaking over) (fragment of word, or word unclear) But isn’t it simply that with the EU there are set rules about the level of deprivation there has to be for you to get money, and if it were done at Westminster, there wouldn’t be those set rules, it would be all about politics, and you’d be competing with . . . central Manchester, with Scotland, with all sorts of other areas that also want . . . help. And you wouldn’t get it.

Robertson said that ‘we’ were not getting back a munificent bounty, only a small element of what was paid in  Webb said that ‘you are getting it, that’s the point’ –  under Westminster that might not happen. Robertson said there was nothing to say that would not change.

Webb moved on to Polkerris beach and observed that ‘everyone agreed’ that Cornwall could not survive on tourism alone.  He said:

…does the money come best from Europe, or could it come, as those in the Leave camp suggest from Westminster? Dr Joanie Willet works for Exeter University, but in the Penryn campus here in Cornwall.

DR JOANIE WILLET:        There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that we would get money from Westminster.  We haven’t in the past, historically we really have not. All of the regional inequality measures that the government is trying to do, they’re all focusing on the North-South divide, nobody is talking about the south-west, and even fewer people are talking about Cornwall in particular.

JW:        Is the money argument going to settle it in the end?  Well, what we got a sense of in a day or two of talking to people here is that actually other things matter too.  A kind of sense of sovereignty, a sense of identity, whether you see that identity as being European or whether you see it very much based here in Britain.  It’s that feeling, that gut feeling about who you are and where you belong, that frankly seems to be deciding people here, just as much as the money does.  (sound of waves).

In the third feature, Webb was at Redruth railway station. He said trains went to all parts of the UK but they were slow ‘and that is part of what what makes Cornwall feel so separate, a separateness that affectes the debate on the membership of the EU’. He spoke to Loveday Jenkin, a former leader of the party for Cornwall and Bob Smith, a UKIP candidate in Carnborne and Redruth at the general election.

He asked Jenkin if she was English. She said Cornwall was a duchy and she was ‘Cornish British and a European’. Webb asked how that affected her view of Europe. She replied:

I think most people in Cornwall would say that erm, if we weren’t in Europe, we wouldn’t trust Westminster to give us more money.

JW:        Yeah, and that was something that has been said repeatedly to us during the course of the programme, but for what reason? Is it because they don’t care about you, or is it that you don’t care about them, in Westminster?

LJ:          I think it’s partly that they don’t even realise that we exist, quite often. I mean, a lot of people don’t realise the Cornish language exists, that . . . they realise that the Cornish are an indigenous group of people within, within the British Isles.  But it’s, it’s that lack of consideration.  We’ve seen all the money coming into HS2, and we look at the railway coming into Cornwall, and we haven’t had anything like the same investment.

Webb put it to Smith that when Westminster was left to look after Cornwall in the past it did not do a good job. He replied that if you develop a political system where ‘everybody’s forced to go to Brussels’ that is what happened. He pointed out that the Labour government in the 70s created intermediate areas and development areas.  He contended that Cornwall would not have more money it would not be filched off by the EU (‘not Europe’). It would not have to be given back with a sticker ‘this is sponsored by the ERDF’- leading to everybody walking around thinking how generous the ERDF is.

Webb said:

But do you seriously believe, when you think of the other competing parts of . . . England, never mind Wales, but just look at Westminster and look at England, the other competing parts of England that would be looking for funding, are looking for funding, are looking for help, are looking for development, that really Cornwall would be able to, to punch its weight in that fight?

BS:         Well, that’s why we’ve got MPs, and I entirely believe that in a system of government the closer people are to those who govern them, the better we are. And what I believe is that parliamentary democracy is the worst system of government apart from all the rest.  We would have that money, we would have more money, and it would be better spent.  And if you look at the Amnion Report (sic, it’s the Amion Report) it’s an absolute disgrace what’s happened to the convergence funding.

Webb asked what the report was and Smith confirmed it was a report commissioned by Cornwall Council to look at the efficient of spending of the convergence funds.

Webb put it to Perkins that there was a view that quite a lot of the European money has been wasted, that some projects were a bit ‘touristy’ and were not doing much for people who lived there. He added:

it is that business of whether or not Europe money (sic) is well spent, and whether or not, actually it would be better if they were just . . . controlled closer to home?

LJ:          Well, I think the problem with that argument is that the European money wasn’t controlled closer to home, the problem was that Westminster government and Southwest Regional Development Agency, and all these different agencies have had their finger in the pie, managing the European money for Cornwall, and actually, if the programme had been managed in Cornwall and we were allowed to manage our own money coming back from Europe, we would do very much better. There are some really good European-funded projects, there are some places where money has been taken off, and the biggest thing in this current program is that all the administration is being done outside of Cornwall, and therefore the 10% administration et cetera, et cetera, all that money is being spent outside of Cornwall, rather than, than in Cornwall, which needs it.

Webb put it to Smith that it was not actually about money, it was about a sense of identity, it was whether you were a person who looked to Westminster, ‘or whether or not your prepared to be part of that ‘European mix’.

Smith said he was right, he had spoken to 19 people in Newquay yesterday and 15 would vote leave.

Jenkin said:

I think if Cornwall returns a Vote Leave vote, it will because of misinformation coming to the people of Cornwall. We do not believe that Cornwall would be better off outside of Europe. There are things that need to be changed in the way that Europe is managed, Europe needs to be more democratic, I’ve just come back from Brussels where we’ve been having a . . . a European Parliament inquiry on language discrimination, and people, the small regions across Europe are working together to improve things, and that’s what we need to do, we need to work together within Europe to make sure that the voice of the regions of Europe are h— is heard.

FURTHER ANALYSIS

In the first report, Webb emphasised as a key point that that lots of EU money flowed into Cornwall – to deal with local relative poverty and lack of work – and suggested to former miner Alan Buckley that despite that, he was sympathetic to voting leave. Buckley refused to be drawn on his own voting intentions, but said that many people locally were going to vote leave and Webb again asked why the money did not ‘swing it for you’? Buckley responded that no-one knew what the money had been spent on, nobody seemed to benefit. The second interviewee, food bank worker Donovan Gardner, agreed that it was unclear where the EU money had gone. Webb, emphasising from a difficult angle the importance of the EU funds, asked him why he had not applied for financial help from the EU. Gardner said it was because it was ‘project money’ and his food bank would not qualify.

In response, Webb changed tack but returned to the EU money theme. He observed that Redruth shopping centre was run down and needed money injected. He asked whether if it did not come from Europe, it could come from Westminster. Buckley replied that investment was needed from commercial sources to get local mines going again.

The editorial emphasis on the importance of the EU money continued to be the fulcrum in the second sequence. Webb opened with a long sequence outlining that the EU funds had been vital in the conversion of a local brewery into an archive centre. He then said a ‘huge amount of ‘European development money’ was being spent in the south-west region, six billion euros was earmarked between 2014 and 2020.  He said this ‘coloured the European debate’ in the area, then he noted that Cornwall was England’s poorest county and ‘received the top level of EU funding, and that’s cash that has impact far away from the cream teas’.

For his first interview, Webb visited a ‘gleaming new office’ he emphasised had been using the EU money.  Craig Girvan an IT company who worked there, confirmed Webb’s contention that these funds were very important. Webb put it to him that there was no question in his mind that ‘the success of your business and that initial funding from the European Union are really intimately connected’.  Girvan agreed.

Webb next went to the Trago Mills project, where the owner described the EU money as ‘larceny’ and argued that MPs should make decisions about local investment.  Webb put it to him that (unlike Westminster), the EU had ruled about the level of deprivation and therefore money from Brussels to Cornwall was guaranteed. Under Westminster that might not happen. The owner disagreed.

Next point of call was a beach, and Webb said everyone agreed that Cornwall could not survive on tourism alone, thus again stressing the importance of development funds.  He repeated the question whether the money would best come from the EU or Westminster. His next interviewee, Exeter university academic Dr Joanie Willett, said in response there was no evidence whatsoever that the money would come from Westminster because its focus was elsewhere, for example on the North-South divide.

Webb’s conclusion to this sequence was to ask the Today audience if the money argument would, in effect, be foremost in how locals voted in the referendum. He introduced for the first time that other issues, such as those hinged on local identity and sovereignty could also be involved just as much.

In the third feature, Webb opened by giving Loveday Jenkin, former leader of Mebyon Kernow, the Cornish nationalist party, the opportunity first to say that, if the UK was not in Europe, Westminster could not be trusted to give Cornwall money. Webb reinforced this by observing that this (point)had been said ‘repeatedly to us’ during the course of the programme.  He asked whether she believed it was because ‘they’ did not care in Westminster.  Jenkin said they did not even realise Cornwall existed, and pointed out that money had gone into projects like HS2 but not Cornwall.

Webb next suggested to local former Ukip candidate Bob Smith that Westminster had not done a good job of looking after Cornwall in the past.  Smith replied that this was not true and made the point that ‘EU money’ was actually from British taxpayers.  Webb asked if he seriously thought that in competition with the rest of the UK, Cornwall could win funds. Smith replied that this was the job of MPs to handle local interests.  Cornwall would get money. The recent Amion report (into the spending of EU funding) showed that it was a disgrace what had happened to the EU’s convergence fund. Webb asked what the report was (he thus appeared to be ignorant of it).

He then moved back to Jenkin and suggested that ‘it was a view’ that EU money had been wasted. Jenkin replied that the problem was really that different outside agencies including Westminster had had their fingers in the pie managing the EU money. If Cornwall had been able to manage its own money coming back from the EU, it would have been well spent. She maintained that there were some really good local EU projects.  A further problem in the EU funds equation was that management fees were (wrongly) being subtracted from bodies outside Cornwall.

Webb did not comment further, other than to say such factors would ‘energise’ both sides.

CONCLUSION

What was the underlying editorial approach to these three features?

From the beginning, the prominence in Cornwall of ‘EU money’ was stressed. In the first feature, it was the undoubted fulcrum of Webb’s inquiry. In the second, he opened by heavily focusing that the EU funds were transformative and central in that process. In the third, the local ‘Cornish’ party speaker put the core point that the EU cared for Cornwall, created vital new projects there, whereas Westminster did not care at all.

Webb included guests in the first sequence who both said that they could see no evidence of the benefits of the EU cash, and one said he was not eligible to apply.  In the second, the owner of a shopping project called EU funds ‘larceny’.  And in the third, the Ukip candidate argued that Westminster, not Brussels should be the channel helping Cornwall. He further pointed out that there was evidence of serious mismanagement of EU funds.

On that basis, the perspective that EU funds were a matter of concern and debate was clearly included.  But overall, from the off, Webb stressed in different ways their importance. It was the driving line in the editorial structure. Further, in the first and second sequences, he gave the last word to local figures who underlined the beneficial impact on the local economy. This biased  emphasis was compounded by the fact that Webb himself made no effort to explain that EU funds actually originated from the EU taxpayer (it was left to contributors to do so) and also by that there was no editorial effort to explore the Amion report.  It is prominent on the internet and could easily have been found by programme researchers., This was of central importance to the local application of EU funds, and to the conduct of the EU.

The bias here is compounded by the fact that in the earlier similar sequence of three features from Northern Ireland mounted by Today, Mishal Husain also stressed the importance of ‘EU money’ without proper explanation (analysed on News-watch here).  The programme should be looking at the EU equation from a different, more balanced perspective. The Amion report raised issues that Today emphatically is not.

Full Transcripts:

Transcript of BBC Radio 4, ‘Today’, 3rd June 2016, Cornwall, 6.47am

NICK ROBINSON:             Now ahead of the referendum later this month, we’ve been doing a series of reports on the road to get a sense of the perspective from different places.  And this morning, Justin, lucky Justin, is in Cornwall, morning to you.

JUSTIN WEBB:   (laughter in voice) Morning Nick. And yes, it is lucky, and yes, it is a lovely place, and we’re in Redruth, right in the heart of Cornwall, but, at the same time it is a poor place – according to European statistics, in 2014 the second poorest region in the whole of northern Europe, after West Wales, so it’s erm, it’s very easily England’s poorest county.  And I’m joined by two people here will know all about the nitty-gritty of life in Cornwall, and the kind of things that will be . . . going to play, coming into play, when it comes to making a decision in June 23^rd.  Alan Buckley is with me, former miner, vice-chairman of the Cornish Mining Association, good morning to you.

ALAN BUCKLEY: Good morning.

JW:        And Donovan Gardner, Donovan is, er, runs the Camborne-Pool-Redruth manager (sic) morning Donovan.

DONOVAN GARDNER:   Good morning.

JW:        Now, erm, just tell us a bit about the mining first of all, as everyone knows, there was mining in Cornwall and there isn’t any more, Alan, but, but when was the high spot, and what was this place like when it was at its height?

AB:        Well, for over 200 years Cornish mining was extremely important to the . . . to the, all British industries, in fact, without it the industrial revolution wouldn’t have happened, because of the copper and the tin they produced, but also because of the engineering, they led the world as steam engineers, and some of the finest engineers and inventors came from Cornwall, (words unclear due to speaking over) Camborne . . .

JW:        (speaking over) And this place, Redruth, Camborne et cetera, this was a wealthy place?

AB:        Absolutely, in fact, it has been said that Pool, between Camborne and Redruth was the NASA of the, erm, 200 years ago, because people came from all over the world, engineers came from as far away as Russia, came back from America just to . . . to see the machines they were making and to discuss with the engineers what they were doing.

JW:        And Donovan, what’s it like now?

DG:        Unfortunately industry has completely disappeared.  Engineers have gone, we are a service industry now, poor wages, zero hour contracts, part-time work, it is really a serious problem in this area.

JW:        How much demand is there for the service that you run at the food bank?

DG:        It’s unbelievable.  We started six years ago, six years ago next Monday actually, and we were going to run a food bank for two years, because of the austerity problems, and the financial problems. We’re now into six years, it’s getting bigger and bigger, at the moment we’re doing ten thousand meals a month from our three food banks in this area.

JW:        And what a lot of people say Alan, is the answer to that, in part at least, is European money which does flow into Cornwall, because of its, its status, if you can put it like that, as a poorer part of Europe, and yet you’re voting Leave?

AB:        Erm, I didn’t say I was voting Leave . . .

JW:        Oh . . .

AB:        . . . it’s a secret ballot, as we know, according to the law . . .

JW:        (laughs)

AB:        But erm, the strange thing . . .

JW:        (interrupting) You’re leaning . . . you’re leaning towards, you’re sympathetic to Leave, let’s put it that way.

AB:        Well, but it this way, everybody I talk to, whether they’re farmers, ex-miners, engineers (word or words unclear) or whatever, I haven’t well, I’ve hardly heard a single person in favour of staying. Erm . . . and that must be significant . . . (fragment of word, or word unclear due to speaking over)

JW:        (speaking over) But why doesn’t the money argument swing it for you?

AB:        Well, the strange thing is, recently we were discussing this, among some friends, the money that’s supposed to come from Europe, and nobody, including, in fact, the letters to the local paper – where’s it gone? Nobody ever sees any benefit from it.  If it does come here, who has it and where does it go, where is it spent? Because we don’t . . . we see no benefit from it.

JW:        Donovan you’re nodding?

DG:        Yeah, yeah (words unclear due to speaking over ‘I agree’?)

JW:        (speaking over) You’re undecided, aren’t you?

DG:        Yeah, I’m undecided because I believe that the rhetoric that we hear of one day to another, er . . . the people I meet in the food bank, to be honest with you, all they want to do is survive.  Er, you know . . . I see these people, dads that . . . don’t eat for three days to feed their children, you know, this is the . . . the disaster, er . . . years ago, when we had industry, they were well-paid jobs . . .

AB:        Yeah.

DG:        . . . er, we had people that could plan their life, have a mortgage . . . they can’t do it today, er . . . and as Alan said, where has the money gone?  As it gone to . . . er, we’ve got Heartlands, you know, a tourist place, it doesn’t employ many people.

JW:        Have you applied for any European money?

DG:        Er . . . no. Erm . . .

JW:        I mean would it be available to you?

DG:        I’m not sure, I’m not sure . . . unfortunately, I’m looking for money, well . . . as a charity, to sustain the project, er . . . I find the big money is only to starter projects.

JW:        A truck is just going past us, a lorry is going past, us and I think it’s going to pause for a second here, oh no . . . things are being delivered in the centre of, of, of Redruth.  Do you have a sense, will carry on, because I think it’s actually going to stop and then move on, yeah, there it goes, there it goes.  Yeah, so you . . . you basically, you need money from wherever you can get it, and at the moment Europe isn’t a source for you?

DG:        No, because European money is, is a project money (sic) er, it’s not sustainable money. If, if I want to start a new project, I could probably get European money, but next year it will be there.

JW:        Alan, what needs to happen to re-energise this place, because we’re here in the middle of Redruth, and it’s a perfectly nice morning, we’re in the shopping, pedestrian precinct, but there are quite a few shops actually, well not exactly boarded-up here, but I’m just looking down, there are charity shops . . .

AB:        Hmm.

JW:        . . . and there are shops that are obviously quite temporary. What, what, you need money injected into the place, don’t you?  And if it doesn’t come from Europe, are you confident that it could come from Westminster?

AB:        (speaking over) We need . . . we need erm, industry, obviously, and we need mining, and unfortunately, South Crofty Mine, which closed in 1998, March, and I, like many others finished mining, erm, that now has money coming from a Canadian source, they’re investing in it, because tin is a rare commodity, and where it is, they’ve got to mine it, and because it’s becoming a diminished supply throughout the earth, and because the stockpiles in China and America have gone and the prices going up through the roof, erm, the prospects for South Crofty are very good.  And men have continued to work there since the mine closed to prepare for the opening (this may be ‘reopening’ – but there’s a slight glitch in outside broadcast)

JW:        What an amazing prospect, that actually mining comes back here.

AB:        Oh yes, we feel it will, because the tin is needed and it’s, it’s here, and there’s a lot there. When the mine closed, there was still a lot left there.

JW:        Okay, well Alan Buckley and Donovan Gardner, thank you both very much for talking to me here in Redruth.

SM:       Justin, thanks very much . . .

JW:        (thinking he is off mic, to interviewees) That was great.

SM:       (laughs) That was great, thank you very much.

 

Transcript of BBC Radio 4, ‘Today’, 3rd June 2016, Cornwall, 7.34am

SARAH MONTAGUE:      Well, as we heard earlier, Justin is in Cornwall this morning for the latest in our series of reports on the road, head of the referendum later this month.  Good morning Justin.

JUSTIN WEBB:   Yes, hello again from Redruth, we moved around to the side of the town, and I’m at a place that is very much benefiting, or about to benefit from EU money.  It was a brewery, in fact, the chimney stack, the redbrick chimney stack is still very much in place, but the rest of it has been flattened and it’s being turned into a new archive centre, Kresen Kernow Archive Centre for Cornwall.  Cornwall, of course, is paved with gold provided by the EU, it glitters around me on the streets here of Redruth in the early morning sunlight, well, not quite, in fact, as anyone who’s been to Cornwall and seen more than the beaches will know, there’s no gold on the streets, and in fact, the sun is more often reflected in the empty windows of closed-down shops.  There is, though, a huge amount of European development money being spent around here.  €6 billion in the programme lasting from 2014 to 2020.  And its money, of course, that colours that debate on the Europe referendum, in a sometimes forgotten corner of England.  Well, this to most of us is Cornwall, I’m on the Bodinnick Ferry, it takes just a few cars at a time from Bodinnick to Fowey, and it’s all really picture postcard stuff, there are little boats, the water’s listening, you can come here and you can think, ‘Well, lucky Cornwall, lucky Cornish’ – what you don’t get a sense of is the simple fact that Cornwall is England’s poorest county.  It qualifies for and it receives the top level of EU funding, and that’s cash that has an impact far away from the cream teas and the country lanes and the picturesque ferries.

CRAIG GIRVAN: So this is one of the eight rooms that we’ve got here at the Pool Innovation Centre (words unclear due to speaking over)

JW:        (speaking over) I’m with Craig Girvan, one of the founders of Headforwards, which is a software development company and it’s based in the Pool Innovation Centre, it’s a gleaming office block.  It would not be here if it wasn’t for funding from Brussels.

CG:        Being in this building has enabled us to grow our offering very, very quickly. (word or words unclear) in Cornwall aren’t . . . great, you know, so it’s not a great investment to create a building and put it there, so honestly, coming from Europe has enabled this to happen. Erm, and . . . indirectly has enabled us to exist and grow.

JW:        Yeah.  So there’s no question at all in your mind that the success of your business and that initial funding from the European Union are really intimately connected?

CG:        Absolutely.

JW:        Alright then, if the benefits of membership are so clear, then it’s a no-brainer, isn’t it, on June 23? Well, no, not really.  I’ve come to Trago Mills, which is an out-of-town shopping centre near Liskeard. When you ask people here specifically about the money coming into Cornwall, even then their views about the EU are pretty mixed.

VOX POP MALE:              I’ve lived in Cornwall for 30 years and I think it has benefited Cornwall for sure.  I work at the airport and . . . there’s a lot of European money that comes in and out of there. Yeah, I will be voting to stay.

VOX POP FEMALE:          I have seen projects that say they’ve been funded by money . . .

VPM:     So partly-funded. (laughs)

VPF:      Yes, well partly-funded, yes, so . . .

JW:        But you’ve seen enough of them to make it look to you as if there are benefits from being in the EU?

VPF:      It looks like it.

VOX POP FEMALE 2:       Definitely exit, because we put money into the EU, so why couldn’t we have put money into Devon and Cornwall, before handing it over to those Brussels people?

JW:        Trago Mills is peculiar in some ways, it’s got a kind of slightly kitsch feel to it, there are cockerels running around, there are water features, there is a huge Vote Leave poster, and a statue of the Emperor Nero.  And just looking down to the inscription underneath, it says, ‘Nero only fiddled, Eurocrats practice grand larceny.’ – a clue as to the view of Europe held by the boss, Bruce Robertson.

BRUCE ROBERTSON:      Even by the EU’s own measures, it hasn’t done anything, we’re still deprive.  My view would be that . . . our own MPs would be perfectly capable of making a strong case for precisely what Cornwall needs in our own Parliament at Westminster, rather than having a few MEPs who cover from the Scilly Isles to Southampton, who are invariably a minority, because of what we are, in a parliament of 751 people . . .

JW:        (speaking over) (fragment of word, or word unclear) But isn’t it simply that with the EU there are set rules about the level of deprivation there has to be for you to get money, and if it were done at Westminster, there wouldn’t be those set rules, it would be all about politics, and you’d be competing with . . . central Manchester, with Scotland, with all sorts of other areas that also want . . . help. And you wouldn’t get it.

BR:        We’re not receiving some munificent bounty, we’re actually getting back a small element of what we pay in, and we’re not (words unclear due to speaking over)

JW:        (speaking over) You’re getting it, that’s the point, you’re getting it, and under Westminster you might not?

BR:        Look, we’re getting it at the moment, but there’s nothing to say that that could change.

JW:        We’ve come back to picturesque Cornwall now, this is Polkerris beach, and it’s a lovely site, children playing in the water and lovely Sunshine and all the rest of it. What it really comes down to is this, everyone accepts that this isn’t enough, Cornwall can’t survive and prosper in the future by tourism alone, but does the money come best from Europe, or could it come, as those in the Leave camp suggest from Westminster? Dr Joanie Willet works for Exeter University, but in the Penryn campus here in Cornwall.

DR JOANIE WILLET:        There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that we would get money from Westminster.  We haven’t in the past, historically we really have not. All of the regional inequality measures that the government is trying to do, they’re all focusing on the North-South divide, nobody is talking about the south-west, and even fewer people are talking about Cornwall in particular.

JW:        Is the money argument going to settle it in the end?  Well, what we got a sense of in a day or two of talking to people here is that actually other things matter too.  A kind of sense of sovereignty, a sense of identity, whether you see that identity as being European or whether you see it very much based here in Britain.  It’s that feeling, that gut feeling about who you are and where you belong, that frankly seems to be deciding people here, just as much as the money does.  (sound of waves)

NR:        Justin splashing about in Cornwall there.

 

Transcript of BBC Radio 4, ‘Today’, 3rd June 2016, Cornwall, 8.29am

JUSTIN WEBB:   We’ve moved again round to Redruth Railway Station now, and you can go from this pretty little station, you can go west to Penzance, you can go east to Devon to London, further afield there’s a train about to leave for Glasgow in a few minutes’ time, that’s going to take its time because, of course, the trains here are very slow, and that is part of what makes Cornwall feel so separate, a separateness that affects the debate on the membership of the European Union. We heard a range of Cornish views during the course of the programme this morning, I’m going to finish with Loveday Jenkin, who is former leader of Mebyon Kernow, the party for Cornwall, and with Bob Smith who was UKIP’s candidate for the Camborne and Redruth constituency in the general election in 2015.  Morning to you both.

LOVEDAY JENKIN:           Myttin da.

BOB SMITH:       Good morning.

JW:        First, Loveday, that separateness, how do you describe yourself, what’s your identity?  Are you in any way English?

LJ:          No, no, no, and I have to take you to task about what you were saying . . .

JW:        (speaking over) I thought you would.

LJ:          . . . earlier about Cornwall being a county of England – Cornwall is managed as a county, within England, but it’s a Duchy and I’m Cornish and I’m British and I’m European.

JW:        And how does that affect your view of Europe?

LJ:          I think most people in Cornwall would say that erm, if we went in Europe, we wouldn’t trust Westminster to give us more money.

JW:        Yeah, and that was something that has been said repeatedly to us during the course of the programme, but for what reason? Is it because they don’t care about you, or is it that you don’t care about them, in Westminster?

LJ:          I think it’s partly that they don’t even realise that we exist, quite often. I mean, a lot of people don’t realise the Cornish language exists, that . . . they realise that the Cornish are an indigenous group of people within, within the British Isles.  But it’s, it’s that lack of consideration.  We’ve seen all the money coming into HS2, and we look at the railway coming into Cornwall, and we haven’t had anything like the same investment.

JW:        And Bob Smith, it is a fact, isn’t it, that when . . . Westminster is left to look after Cornwall, as it was in the past, it didn’t do a very good job?

BOB SMITH:       Well, if you’ve developed a political system where everybody’s forced to go to Brussels, er, that’s what you end up with.  But if you remember, the ’76-’79 Labour government, we had a policy then of intermediate areas and development areas.  We’d have had that money, we would have more money, because the money we give to Europe is filched off by the EU, not Europe, the European Union, and given back to us, with a sticker, saying ‘this was sponsored by the ERDF’ – and everybody walks around thinking how generous the ERDF is.

JW:        But do you seriously believe, when you think of the other competing parts of . . . England, never mind Wales, but just look at Westminster and look at England, the other competing parts of England that would be looking for funding, are looking for funding, are looking for help, are looking for development, that really Cornwall would be able to, to punch its weight in that fight?

BS:         Well, that’s why we’ve got MPs, and I entirely believe that in a system of government the closer people are to those who govern them, the better we are. And what I believe is that parliamentary democracy is the worst system of government apart from all the rest.  We would have that money, we would have more money, and it would be better spent.  And if you look at the Amnion Report (sic, it’s the Amion Report) it’s an absolute disgrace what’s happened to the convergence funding.

JW:        Which is a report that says what?

BS:         It’s a report commissioned by Cornwall Council to look at the efficiency of spending of the convergence funds.

JW:        Yes, there is a view here, isn’t there, Loveday, that quite a lot of the European money has been wasted, there are some projects that are a bit touristy people say, well, actually they’re not really doing much for people who, who live here, it is that business of whether or not Europe money (sic) is well spent, and whether or not, actually it would be better if they were just . . . controlled closer to home?

LJ:          Well, I think the problem with that argument is that the European money wasn’t controlled closer to home, the problem was that Westminster government and Southwest Regional Development Agency, and all these different agencies have had their finger in the pie, managing the European money for Cornwall, and actually, if the programme had been managed in Cornwall and we were allowed to manage our own money coming back from Europe, we would do very much better. There are some really good European-funded projects, there are some places where money has been taken off, and the biggest thing in this current program is that all the administration is being done outside of Cornwall, and therefore the 10% administration et cetera, et cetera, all that money is being spent outside of Cornwall, rather than, than in Cornwall, which needs it.

JW:        (fragments of words, unclear) In the end though, it’s not about money is it? It’s, it’s about a sense of identity, isn’t it, Bob Smith, there is this sense of whether you regard yourself as being primarily a, a, a person who looks to Westminster, or whether or not you’re happy to be part of that, that European mix?

BS:         I think you’re right, and I’ve been going round Cornwall a lot in the last few weeks, and er . . . what most people tell me, I was in Newquay yesterday, spoke to 19 people – 15 are going to vote Leave, 2 vote in, and 2 are undecided. I think Cornwall’s going to return a Vote Leave vote in this referendum.

JW:        Loveday?

LJ:          I think if Cornwall returns a Vote Leave vote, it will because of misinformation coming to the people of Cornwall. We do not believe that Cornwall would be better off outside of Europe. There are things that need to be changed in the way that Europe is managed, Europe needs to be more democratic, I’ve just come back from Brussels where we’ve been having a . . . a European Parliament inquiry on language discrimination, and people, the small regions across Europe are working together to improve things, and that’s what we need to do, we need to work together within Europe to make sure that the voice of the regions of Europe are h— is heard.

JW:        Alright, the decision not that far away now, the people of Cornwall energised by it on both sides, so thank you very much to Bob Smith and to Loveday Jenkin as well.

 

 

Photo by big-ashb

NORTHERN IRELAND BIAS: On Friday’s Today programme (May 27), Mishal Husain presented three packages from Northern Ireland about the possible impact of Brexit. In the first she interviewed two Irish farmers – one for ‘remain’ and one for ‘out’- who worked near the Western border with Eire close to Londonderry.  In the second she moved to the border itself. She spoke first to two local businessmen who had benefitted from open borders and feared the consequences of Brexit, then to a DUP member who supported Vote Leave, and finally to a local academic who noted that barbed wire had gone up in Hungary and suggested the same might happen in Ireland as this ‘was a frontier as well’.  Finally, at 8.34am Justin Webb, in introducing the third package, noted that Ireland had benefitted from EU agricultural subsidies and also from ‘so-called peace money, infrastructure investments.’  He stated:

As a net beneficiary over many years, surely it is a given that it will vote to stay in. The polls suggest that Remain are in the lead, but the DUP – the party of the First Minister Arlene Foster is backing Brexit – the only one of the big parties in Northern Ireland to do so. Mishal is in Londonderry this morning,

Mishal Husain was on the peace bridge in Londonderry which she said had cost £14.1m and had been paid for by the EU. She said that the largest political party, the DUP, supported Brexit, but the majority of the other parties were supporting ‘remain’. She asked Gregory Campbell of the DUP why he supported Brexit, then Claire Hanna of the SDLP why she supported ‘remain’.

The issues here are not imbalance between contributors, as can be seen from the transcripts below. Each feature contained ‘remain and ‘leave’ opinion, and Husain allowed both sides to make their points. There was, however, significant bias towards the role of the EU in Northern Ireland.

In the first feature, Husain said she had heard nothing about immigration being an issue in the referendum debate but the money that came back to Northern Ireland in farming subsidies was mentioned. William Taylor, the farmer for ‘remain’ made the point that whatever happened in terms of the EU, subsidies would continue in one form or another. Husain seemed, however, not to register that, and put it to Robert Moore, the supporter of ‘out’:

But in purely financial terms, if you look at the level of subsidy that does come in to this region, farming subsidy I mean, from, from the EU, we are talking about hundreds of millions of pounds a year, could you survive without that?

In effect, this was a question and a message based on that despite what both farmers had said, the EU contributed ‘hundreds of millions of pounds’ to Northern Ireland.

At this point it is relevant that the exact figure is £349m, A quarter of that, however, is not directly to agriculture but is spent on rural development projects. It would have been helpful to have introduced this into the discussion to get exact scale. ‘Hundreds of millions of pounds’ could have been anything from £300m to £900 million and even beyond.

It would also have been helpful to have stated that farming is actually only 2.4% of Northern Ireland’s economic output; Husain suggested that agriculture it was a key economic issue, and in turn that EU subsidies were an important component of that. But was it actually?  Was it not rather one area where EU benefits could easily be identified and extolled?

The second feature, at 7.44am, found Husain actually on the Irish border. She noted first that it was not very obvious that it was a border, but observed that the referendum was raising questions about how border controls might operate in future.

What were those questions? Billy Kelly, a local historian provided Husain with her first raft of answers, but they were totally irrelevant to the referendum. He said that during the troubles, there had been a major terrorist incident in the local check point. Husain then asked what he remembered of passing through. He replied:

It was never something that you liked doing, because if there was even the slightest thing wrong you could be held for hours.

Next up was Kevin McCool, who had started with his father a tyre business that involved a lot of transactions in Eire. Husain asked if he was worried about how the referendum might affect him. He was, especially concerned about the ‘checkpoint’ issue that had been planted in listeners’ minds by the previous section. He said:

If the referendum was to pass . . . you know, is there going to be checkpoints, is there going to be customs there constantly, you know, I would say even a five or ten minute stop . . . it’s going to put people off. You know, there’s a lot of people . . . over the border, just over the other side of the border that do what we do, erm . . . at the minute there is a lot of people that pass them to come to us, but if it got to the stage where . . . for the sake of 5 . . . €5 or 5 sterling . . . or half an hour at, at the checkpoint, then they’re not going to cross, you know?

Husain went over the border to talk to Donal Doherty, another local businessman, the owner of a restaurant.  He said:

Everything he has changed. Two things: peace has got rid of all the army and checkpoints and everything associated with that, and as far as I’m concerned Europe and the free movement of goods made a huge difference in terms of taking customs posts off the roads and literally we can now see in this village where . . . this village was a stop village, because customs major stop, now it’s just a business…to trade in the whole of the North West.

MH: People here think in two currencies, making daily decisions about what to buy where, in sterling or euros. Many see themselves as part of a single, cross-border economy. But for Donal, the referendum means it’s an uncertain one.

DD: At this site here in Bridgend, for example, we are holding off on an investment on this site, heavy investment on the site, until we’re sure about Brexit, because there is nothing good about Brexit for any business around this border.

No doubt about that, then. Brexit would be the equivalent of Armageddon for local businesses. Having carefully established this point, Husain then spoke to the DUP, which, she said, ’has come out in favour of Brexit’. Local director of Vote Leave Lee Reynolds said that existing open border arrangements would not change, and explained that they pre-dated Ireland joining the EU and were enshrined in treaties. Husain was not convinced. She said:

But it would be much more than the border between the UK and Ireland, in the event of Brexit, it would be the UK’s only land border with the European Union. Are you saying it would be entirely unchanged? People would . . . cross it with exactly the same ease as they do today?

LR:         Yes.  We’ve looked at this, we are convinced that the Common Travel Aarea can continue to exist, and that people’s lives can carry on normally, that people will be able to travel across the border and trade across the border.

Husain then said:

Back on the road between Derry and Donegal, the traffic is flowing freely from one country into another. But Brexit would turn this border into the European Union’s external frontier. In that event, there would be more than trade to consider. Dr Eamonn O Ciardha teaches history and Irish language at the University of Ulster.

DR EAMONN O CIARDHA:           There are considerations with, you know, money laundering, with drugs, you know, human trafficking et cetera, and you know, Churchill famously talked about the Iron Curtain going up all over Europe.  An Iron Curtain has just gone up along the Hungarian border and the Slovenian border and the steel shuttering went up very quickly along the frontier of the European Union, and, you know, this is a frontier as well.

No doubt about that, either. Exit from the EU – despite what the DUP said – would lead to iron shutters going up.

At 8.34, Justin Webb, as has already been noted, introduced Husain’s next piece by stressing that Northern Ireland received a great deal of money from the EU in the form of agriculture subsidies, infrastructure investments and ‘so called peace money’, and was a ‘net beneficiary’. He said the money also benefitted the ‘healing process’, but did not say how much was involved. In fact, since 1995, the EU has contributed around £900 million to Northern Ireland on a match-fund basis. Webb made no effort to say that this was actually UK money in the first place, but did suggest that the EU grants were the reason that polls showed the ‘remain’ side was in the lead and noted that only one party, the DUP, was for ‘exit’.

After that curtain-raiser, Husain pushed home further to listeners the importance of the EU cash.  She said she was on Londonderry’s peace bridge, ‘a symbol of the money you (Webb)) talk about’ that was part of the peace process. She said specifically that the £14m bridge had paid for by the EU.

This was only partly true. EU money (originating from UK taxpayers) had contributed towards the bridge but the UK and regional bodies had contributed match funding, so only half the cost was actually met by so-called EU funds.

Husain then spoke to Gregory Campbell, the DUP MP for East Londonderry, and Claire Hanna, the SDLP MP for South Belfast. Campbell said that exit would lead to less bureaucracy and contended that the ‘European superstate’ could not be changed from within.  Husain countered by again stressing the importance of EU money.  She said:

But the reason that that is surprising, coming from where we are is because of the way that this region in particular benefits from money coming in from the EU.  We’re standing on this peace bridge right now, so financially, don’t the sums suggest that you should be in favour of remain?

Campbell made the point was that the EU money involved actually came from the EU. Hanna, in a contribution longer than that of Campbell, said:

Well, we’re very firmly, we think, firstly the economic case is very clear, one in eight jobs here is linked to EU trade, about 3% of GDP.  And as you said, investment across sectors, not least agriculture and, and, and community development, but invest like that under your feet.  We . . . we do get considerably more than our nominal share of the UK’s fees, so we think it would be lunacy for Northern Ireland in financial terms, but obviously, it’s a wider debate than that, and because of the values of Europe and the fact that in a big, wide and certain world, we don’t want to retreat into our shell any more than people across the water, who are supporting the Remain campaign too.

MH:       But if you look at one of the streams of money that’s coming in, farming subsidies, and talk to farmers as, as I have done today, you can see how hard it is for them already, how much farming income have dropped, so it’s not as if this region is doing fantastically well because of some of those streams of funding?

CH:        Well, we believe it would do considerably worse outside Europe, we have absolutely no expectation that the Conservative London, er, current Conservative London government would replace the money that we lose from the EU, we would, on the Barnett consequences, on the basis of need, we wouldn’t necessarily get that.  But the investment in our farming and our fisheries has allowed those sectors to modernise and to diversify, and the fact is, Northern Irish producers and agri-foods is a much bigger part of our economy here than it would be in England . . .

Husain did not challenge Hanna at all about the nature of the EU money  (in line with Campbell’s point) but instead only suggested that the sums emanating from the EU were not enough to deal with Northern Ireland’s problems. She then put it to Campbell that he could not be sure that the government would continue giving money to the province in the event of a UK exit. Campbell replied that the there was no guarantee wither that EU money would continue.

Husain then suggested that most Catholics favour ‘remain’, and Hanna responded:

Well I think the beauty, I think the beauty of this issue is that it is too important to view through any green or orange prison, and the fact that the Remain campaign is very cross-community, it includes two . . . nationalist and two Unionist parties.  I mean, yes, if you’re a nationalist it would copper-fasten partition, and it would throw up issues around the border again that we have got past, but, you know, for a Unionist like Gregory, we think it would precipitate the breakup of the Union as well, because the Scots would inevitably vote to leave if the UK leaves Europe.

Campbell countered by stating that the Scottish Nationalists were looking for any excuse for a second referendum. What counted was that exit from the EU would allow the UK to become more progressive.

Overall in the final feature, Husain and Webb stressed heavily how important that EU money was to Northern Ireland, not only for improving infrastructure but also in the peace process. Husain’s main intent thereafter was to push that point. She gave Gregory Campbell the opportunity to explain why exit would be beneficial and he did so in general terms, but her question to him again pushed the importance of EU cash to Northern Ireland to the forefront. Hanna was clearly attuned to Husain’s theme and all her points were crafted to amplify it.

Taking the three features together, the perspective pushed most strongly was that Northern Ireland benefitted from EU money in terms of agriculture and general infrastructure; that it was vital to the local economy and in the peace process.

The money was said to be ‘hundreds of millions’ but the exact sums were not given. There was no explanation, either, of the scale of the EU money in relation to GDP.  If it had been said that agricultural income was only 2.4% of local GDP, it would have helped viewers to put into context the EU’s contributions. The deliberate editorial vagueness over-emphasised the money’s importance.

Husain compounded this by wrongly giving the impression that EU funds had paid entirely for the peace bridge in Londonderry.

The sequence that explored what would happen to border controls if there was a Brexit vote, was also deeply misleading.  A major omission was the absence of an explanation that current border arrangements are based not on the EU at all, but on a bilateral agreement between the UK and Eire called the Common Travel Area (CTA). This was mentioned tangentially by the ‘exit’ speaker, but this only underlined the editorial failing to explain it.  Another major problem was that the first speaker talked about the checks that were in force at border crossings during the Troubles. These were focused entirely on national security, and anti-terrorism measures, and nothing to do with routine border controls. That was not explained to the audience and thus a highly misleading impression was generated that Brexit could result in the introduction of similarly highly inconvenient controls once more.

The two businessmen interviewed by Husain compounded this misleading picture. They were both strongly in favour of ‘remain’, and said in effect that their businesses would go bust because customs posts would be re-introduced. Lee Reynolds of Vote Leave begged to differ, but Husain completely over-rode his important core point about the CTA by concluding the sequence with observations from a historian who claimed that the Irish border would follow the examples of other frontiers in the EU where ‘steel shuttering went up very quickly’.  The Brexit points advanced by Reynolds were completely overwhelmed by the other material in the feature.

As already noted, the main thrust of the closing feature, both in the introduction and in Husain’s handling of the piece, was to stress the importance of so called EU money in Northern Ireland. No editorial effort was made to explain that this was not ‘EU money’ but that it came from British taxpayers.  Gregory Campbell pointed this out, but his points were in effect neutered by the overall editorial framework and comments.

Overall, Husain and Today wove a highly misleading impression that EU ‘investment’ was vital to Northern Ireland’s economic well-being; that exit would lead to the introduction of oppressive and highly inconvenient ‘steel shutters’ across the EU-Northern Ireland frontier; and that vital local infrastructure projects would be put at risk. Counter views were included, but they were swamped.

 

6.50am Report from Northern Ireland

JUSTIN WEBB:   Now, how is the referendum debate on our future in the EU playing out in Northern Ireland?  Mishal is in Londonderry, all this morning, in the latest of our series of reports from around the country ahead of June 23. Mishal, good morning to you, your with farmers?

MISHAL HUSAIN:             Morning Justin, yes, we’re in north-west Ulster, this morning, when people hear talk about the Republic, they say the South, but it’s really out to the west from where we are Molenan Farm, just outside Londonderry, and we are here because agriculture is such a big part of the economy in Northern Ireland, and therefore an important aspect of how people here see the EU. It’s interesting that since I arrived yesterday I’ve heard no mention of immigration being an issue in this referendum for people in Northern Ireland, but I have heard a lot of talk about money. The UK contribution to the EU and the funds that come back to Northern Ireland, for example, in the form of farming subsidies.  And I’m joined here by Robert Moore, whose family has farmed here at Molenan for 200 years, he grows barley, wheat, oats, oilseed rape, and he also has beef cattle, and by William Taylor who is a beef and sheep farmer from nearby Coleraine, and the Northern Ireland coordinator for the pressure group Farmers for Action UK&I, which is in favour of remaining in the EU, and William Taylor I would assume, that that is because of the farming subsidies?

WILLIAM TAYLOR:          Well, you’re partly right.  Let me be clear, with we stay in the EU or whether we leave, then everybody assumes that farmers will get subsidies, but the part that is always missing is that the corporate food giants take the subsidies from farmers by stealth, so therefore we have a problem on farm incomes, a problem that we think we can resolve by staying in the EU – in other words, holding the EU to account on the legislation, treaties and promises that are already in place, in other words the EU promises, through Article 39 of the Lisbon Treaty, that rural dwellers in short are to be properly rewarded for their work.  This is not happening, so we want to hold them to account on it, so we say, stay in and force them to walk the walk.

MH:       Robert Moore, you see this rather different?

ROBERT MOORE:            Well, we agree on many things, but yes I do, I, I think if we stay in, we won’t get any change.  Britain has been the biggest thorn in the side of the European Union for many years now, and I think if we vote to stay and then try to change things, the rest of Europe will say, look, either put up or shut up.

MH:       But in purely financial terms, if you look at the level of subsidy that does come in to this region, farming subsidy I mean, from, from the EU, we are talking about hundreds of millions of pounds a year, could you survive without that?

RM:       Well, I think you have to start by looking at the total income from farming last year, which was, in Northern Ireland, about 183 million – that’s £53 million less than we get in subsidies.  It equates to approximately £7000 on average per farm business in Northern Ireland.  If I employ somebody, I have to legally pay them double that.  Now, that level is clearly unsustainable, and we have to change it, we have to do something different.  And I don’t see why we can’t do that, even if we leave the European Union.

MH:       So you’d be looking for a greater level of support from the UK government than you get at the moment from the EU?

RM:       No, not necessarily.  Erm . . . I think a different system would, would deliver that.  The biggest problem is within the supply chain, as William has alluded to. The . . . we are not getting our fair share of the margins within the supply chain. And I believe that EU policy is partly, maybe greatly to blame for that.

MH:       And yet, you see the EU as being a potential solution to that?

WT:       Let me clarify the situation, I have been to Brussels, as indeed Robert has and we understand how it works and ticks.  You have the Commission who work for the purpose that they serve, you have the . . . European Parliament that serves its purpose, and you have the Council of Ministers, who in effect, the guys that hold the purse strings and control, to a certain extent what the EU does financially. But the bottom line is that we are not getting our fair share of the cake, as Robert has alluded to, and we therefore have to find a way forward to solve this problem before all our farmers go bankrupt.  So, for us does not mean that consumers have to pay any more for their food, other than normal inflationary increases what it actually means is that we need legislation in place to force the corporates, the corporate food giants to pay farmers properly for their produce.

MH:       And you think the EU is a better place to do that.  Although you’re on different sides of the referendum debate, the strong sense I get from you is how hard it is to earn a living, let alone a decent living from a farm like this?

RM:       Yes, it’s become ridiculous, particularly the last few years.  This conversation would be very different if we were at least getting cost of production, and then the EU subsidy we get would be our income.  But now that we’ve gone below that, and the EU is doing nothing or saying nothing to either of us, to actually change.  They don’t seem to have a plan.  They’ve lost all direction, and I don’t think it’s beyond the possibility for the fifth largest economy in the world to devise a better system of its own.

MH:       Wouldn’t it be a simpler framework to get what you want out of, William . . . Taylor, if you were just dealing with the UK government, briefly?

WT:       Well, the UK government has had 20 to 30 years to help to do something for farmers and they have totally ignored the situation, because, like the EU, they’re in bed with the corporates.

MH:       Okay. But nevertheless you . . . well, yes, so you still think the EU is a better . . . better framework to do business in?

WT:       Purely because there is a legal route for us to achieve our legislation on farmgate prices, which is what we’re trying to do in Northern Ireland.

MH:       William Taylor, Robert Moore, thank you both very much.  This farm’s only about half a mile from the Irish border, but after 7 o’clock we will be right on the border to explore the particular issues that arise there.

 

7.44am Report from Northern Ireland

SARAH MONTAGUE:      How does the EU referendum look from Northern Ireland?  That’s what we’ve been asking this morning, in the latest of our reports from different parts of the UK, ahead of the vote. We heard from her earlier, let’s go back again now to Mishal who is there, hello again Mishal.

MH:       Sarah it’s not often you can say, ‘I have one foot in one country and the other in a second’, but I am standing this morning right on the border of the UK and the Republic of Ireland.  The traffic you might be able to hear now and then is on the main road between Londonderry and Northwest Ulster and County Donegal. It’s not a border that’s very noticeable, you have to keep your eyes peeled to spot where the road signs start to appear in Irish as well as English, the speed limit is in kilometres rather than mph, and the petrol suddenly gets cheaper.  But the EU referendum is raising questions about how this boarder might operate in the future – questions coloured by difficult memories of the past.

BILLY KELLY:       We’re on the site of a former British Army border checkpoint, which would have been a very substantial military construction or military base.

MH:       Historian Billy Kelly lived in this area through the troubles.

BK:         (fading up) The IRA kidnapped a man who worked for the British Army, they put a bomb in his van, told him to drive the van into the checkpoint, and when he drove it into the checkpoint, they detonated the bomb.

MH:       What do you remember of passing through this checkpoint?

BK:         It was never something that you liked doing, because if there was even the slightest thing wrong you could be held for hours.

MH:       With the referendum coming, the border is once again a talking point for local people and businesses.

KEVIN McCOOL:              My name’s Kevin McCool, it’s my father’s business, it’s a tyre depot, we started it twenty years  now, so it’s only . . . the last four to five years that I’ve come in and started taking over. It’s gone from strength to strength so . . .

MH:       Are you worried about the referendum and how it might affect you?

KM:       Worried, aye, I mean, we’re not too sure about what way it’s going to affect things at the minute, obviously we do a lot of cross-border trade.

MH:       Kevin now lives in the Republic, where properties cheaper, and crosses back and forth several times a day.  He relies on his suppliers and his Irish customers doing the same.

KM:       If the referendum was to pass . . . you know, is there going to be checkpoints, is there going to be customs there constantly, you know, I would say even a five or ten minute stop . . . it’s going to put people off. You know, there’s a lot of people . . . over the border, just over the other side of the border that do what we do, erm . . . at the minute there is a lot of people that pass them to come to us, but if it got to the stage where . . . for the sake of 5 . . . €5 or 5 sterling . . . or half an hour at, at the checkpoint, then they’re not going to cross, you know?

MH:       Just across the Irish side is another family business, Harry’s Restaurant, run by Donal Doherty.

DONAL DOHERTY:          Everything he has changed.  Two things: peace has got rid of all the army and checkpoints and everything associated with that, and as far as I’m concerned Europe and the free movement of goods made a huge difference in terms of taking customs posts off the roads and literally we can now see in this village where . . . this village was a stop village, because customs major stop, now it’s just a business (?) to trade in the whole of the North West.

MH:       People here think in two currencies, making daily decisions about what to buy where, in sterling or euros.  Many see themselves as part of a single, cross-border economy. But for Donal, the referendum means it’s an uncertain one.

DD:        At this site here in Bridgend, for example, we are holding off on an investment on this site, heavy investment on the site, until we’re sure about Brexit, because there is nothing good about Brexit for any business around this border.

MH:       But Northern Ireland’s dominant political force, the DUP has come out in favour of Brexit. Lee Reynolds is the regional director for the Vote Leave campaign.

LEE REYNOLDS: The border would operate essentially as it operates now.  We’ve had a common travel area between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, with the land border we’ve had, open freely for travel.  The arrangements predated European Union, they’re already recognised inside EU treaties and EU law, and it would be in our interests, islands interests and the EU’s interests for those to carry on afterwards.

MH:       But it would be much more than the border between the UK and Ireland, in the event of Brexit, it would be the UK’s only land border with the European Union.  Are you saying it would be entirely unchanged?  People would . . . cross it with exactly the same ease as they do today?

LR:         Yes.  We’ve looked at this, we are convinced that the common travel area can continue to exist, and that people’s lives can carry on normally, that people will be able to travel across the border and trade across the border.

MH:       Back on the road between Derry and Donegal, the traffic is flowing freely from one country into another. But Brexit would turn this border into the European Union’s external frontier. In that event, there would be more than trade to consider. Dr Eamonn O Ciardha teaches history and Irish language at the University of Ulster.

DR EAMONN O CIARDHA:           There are considerations with, you know, money laundering, with drugs, you know, human trafficking et cetera, and you know, Churchill famously talked about the Iron Curtain going up all over Europe.  An Iron Curtain has just gone up along the Hungarian border and the Slovenian border and the steel shuttering went up very quickly along the frontier of the European Union, and, you know, this is a frontier as well.

JW:        Hmm, that was Mishal in Ireland, North and South, and we’ll hear more from her later on in the programme.

 

8.34am Report from Northern Ireland

JUSTIN WEBB:   Of all the nations in the UK, Northern Ireland has received a great deal of money from European Union, farming subsidies, infrastructure investments, so-called ‘peace money’ to help heal the divisions of the Troubles.  As a net beneficiary over many years, surely it is a given that it will vote to stay in. The polls suggest that Remain are in the lead, but the DUP – the party of the First Minister Arlene Foster is backing Brexit – the only one of the big parties in Northern Ireland to do so. Mishal is in Londonderry this morning, good morning, hello Mishal.

MISHAL HUSAIN:             Justin, hello, we are in the Londonderry, Derry, city centre now, right on the peace bridge across the River Foyle, it’s a cycle and footbridge that was paid for by EU money, it cost about £14 million and it opened in 2011, a symbol of that money you talk about that did come in from the EU, is coming in from the EU, in support of the peace process.  So, let’s have a look at where Northern Ireland’s political parties stand overall on the referendum.  As you said, the largest party, the DUP has opted for Brexit, the majority of the other parties, Sinn Fein, the SDLP, alliance, and even the Ulster Unionists, the UUP, are backing Remain. We’re joined now on the bridge by Gregory Campbell, who’s the DUP MP for East Londonderry, and from Belfast by Claire Hanna, the SDLP assembly member for Belfast South, good morning to you both.  Gregory Campbell, that would be surprising to many people that your party has chosen to come out for Brexit, why?

GREGORY CAMPBELL:    Well, we think that the . . . the issues are fairly . . .while they are complex, they are fairly dramatic in terms of the emancipation that would occur to the United Kingdom if it were to leave the EU, restrictions of bureaucracy, the cost, the implications for continued European expansion, all of those things we think should propel most people to believe, even those who want change in Europe, but don’t, aren’t as dramatic as those who want to live completely, even those people should say, ‘We’ll only get change if we vote to leave,’ because there’s been a 40 year impetus, which has created the basis for a European superstate in Europe, and we will never change that from within.

MH:       But the reason that that is surprising, coming from where we are is because of the way that this region in particular benefits from money coming in from the EU.  We’re standing on this peace bridge right now, so financially, don’t the sums suggest that you should be in favour of remain?

GC:        Well, I think it would, if that was EU money, some sort of extraneous money that was injected into Northern Ireland, but most of it is our money, most of it is UK money that is recycled through Europe, and they keep most of it and then, out of their largess allow us to have some back to, to build structures like the one we’re standing on, on the peace bridge.

MH:       Well, let me turn then to Claire Hanna of the SDLP – why are you in favour of remain.

CH:        Well, we’re very firmly, we think, firstly the economic case is very clear, one in eight jobs here is linked to EU trade, about 3% of GDP.  And as you said, investment across sectors, not least agriculture and, and, and community development, but invest like that under your feet.  We . . . we do get considerably more than our nominal share of the UK’s fees, so we think it would be lunacy for Northern Ireland in financial terms, but obviously, it’s a wider debate than that, and because of the values of Europe and the fact that in a big, wide and certain world, we don’t want to retreat into our shell any more than people across the water, who are supporting the Remain campaign too.

MH:       But if you look at one of the streams of money that’s coming in, farming subsidies, and talk to farmers as, as I have done today, you can see how hard it is for them already, how much farming income have dropped, so it’s not as if this region is doing fantastically well because of some of those streams of funding?

CH:        Well, we believe it would do considerably worse outside Europe, we have absolutely no expectation that the Conservative London, er, current Conservative London government would replace the money that we lose from the EU, we would, on the Barnett consequences, on the basis of need, we wouldn’t necessarily get that.  But the investment in our farming and our fisheries has allowed those sectors to modernise and to diversify, and the fact is, Northern Irish producers and agri-foods is a much bigger part of our economy here than it would be in England . . .

MH:       (speaking over) Okay, Gregory Campbell (words unclear due to speaking over)

CH:        (speaking over) those (words unclear) compete on volume, they compete on quality.

MH:       I just want to put that to Gregory Campbell, you can’t be sure that the Chancellor, whether it’s George Osborne or someone else is going to match what you would lose?

GC:        But we can’t be sure that we’re going to continue to get the funding, that, that amount of funding of our own money in the future, in fact, whenever Turkey and the other accession states come into the EU, there is one inevitability about the money that is going to be available to UK farmers – it’s going to go down.  The uncertainty is by how much. So, for those who remain (sic) to try and project the issues as being certainty now within the EU and uncertainty without is really a total nonsense, there is uncertainty on either side.

MH:       Is there a relative certainty, though, that there is a sectarian divide in how people are going to . . .

CH:        (speaking over) No.

MH:       . . . vote here, Claire Hanna, most Catholics would be in favour of Remain (words unclear due to speaking over)

CH:        (speaking over) Well I think the beauty, I think the beauty of this issue is that it is too important to view through any green or orange prison, and the fact that the Remain campaign is very cross-community, it includes two . . . nationalist and two Unionist parties.  I mean, yes, if you’re a nationalist it would copper-fasten partition, and it would throw up issues around the border again that we have got past, but, you know, for a Unionist like Gregory, we think it would precipitate the breakup of the Union as well, because the Scots would inevitably vote to leave if the UK leaves Europe.

MH:       (speaking over) Right . . . that . . . potentially on your shoulders, Gregory?

GC:        (laughs) (laughter in voice) Well, I think we’ll, we’ll wear that quite well, no, I mean, the Scots and the Scots Nats particularly are looking for any excuse to rerun a second referendum, that, that, that simply doesn’t wash.  Do we want an outward-looking progressive United Kingdom that can trade freely across the globe, or do we want to stay within the confines of the EU that are going to restrict our growth?

MH:       Gregory Campbell, Claire Hanna, thank you both very much.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Lindy Buckley

THE DOG THAT DIDN’T BARK? A poster published by the pressure group Operation Black Vote (OBV) showing a skinhead thug intimidating a sari-wearing immigrant – and aimed, say OBV, at encouraging ethnic turnout in the EU referendum – has been strongly attacked by the ‘leave side as divisive, negative stereotyping.

But the BBC has virtually ignored the controversy over the tactics and imagery being deployed.   Coverage was confined to an outline website story, a short interview on Radio 4’s World Tonight with the head of OBV and a Ukip spokesman, and brief, one sentence mentions on BBC1’s News at Six and on BBC2’s Newsnight.

By comparison, when Boris Johnson, of the ‘exit’ side, mentioned President Obama’s Kenyan ancestry, BBC coverage was extensive across all outlets and included very strong attacks on Johnson’s motivation, with clear, repeated insinuations that he was being racist.

OBV is funded by left-leaning and EU-supporting trusts Esme Fairbairn and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

OBV’s advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi, who designed the poster, say that the aggressive imagery in their poster is necessary and appropriate because the political campaigning has so far failed to cut through to the 4 million target audience.

Director Simon Woolley, in his The World Tonight appearance on Wednesday evening, said the poster was in response to ‘toxic’ claims about immigration by the ‘leave’ side in the EU debate. These included the mentions of President Obama’s Kenyan ancestry and an unwarranted attack on ‘diversity’ by Nigel Farage, the leader of Ukip,

Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn is among those who has strongly attacked the poster. He observed:

Using grotesque racial stereotypes to scare white people is as despicable as it is desperate. This type of rabid propaganda has no place in an advanced democracy.

So what’s the difference between this hypothetical Vote Leave advert and the genuine poster campaign wheeled out by Operation Black Vote, which is led by a member of the Remain camp?

It features two people sitting face-to-face on a see-saw. One is an elderly Asian woman in a sari; the other a tattooed white skinhead jabbing his finger aggressively and snarling in her direction. The poster is going up on 37 digital billboards in London and Manchester in the run-up to polling day.

The justification for this demagogic imagery is that it is designed to encourage members of ethnic minorities to vote in the referendum and counter the ‘demonisation’ of foreigners and people of colour’ by the Leave campaign.

But the clear, not even subliminal or subtle, implication is that those who want to get out of the EU are all knuckle-scraping BNP boot-boys brimming with hatred for non-whites.

So why did the BBC virtually ignore the poster?

In the website copy about it, the headline is simply:  EU referendum:  White ‘thug’ poster aimed at black voters’.  The story lays out that Nigel Farage had said the approach was ‘disgusting’, an example of ‘sectarian politics’ and was trying to ‘divide society’.

But the bulk of the copy is focused on the OBV perspective., and contains quotes from both OBV director Simon Woolley and Magnus Djaba, chief executive of Saatchi and Saatchi, who was responsible for the poster design.  Most prominent is Djaba’s claim:

This is a message about democracy, not a message about race. Whichever community you’re from, it hits home.

The only other substantial mention of the poster on in The World Tonight, Simon Woolley was given clear space to make claims that echoed the website story and to amplify the message that elements of the debate had descended into race and ‘diversity’ based toxicity.  The presenter made no effort to challenge the use of the ‘thug’ imagery. Her main intent was to allow Woolley to explain why he thought it was necessary.

Steven Woolfe MEP, the Ukip spokesman on migration, was placed on the back foot by Wooley’s claims and the clear undertone that Ukip was being racist. His main focus was thus rebuttal.  As a result, he had only minimal opportunity to state that he believed the poster’s imagery was provocative, and the presenter did not explore further – her main focus was to give Woolley the opportunity to put his case.

Both The World Tonight and the BBC website, in the only mainstream coverage of this story, thus gave only minimal exposure to the alleged controversy over the poster’s imagery, and indeed, arguably glossed over it.  They publicised the poster gave OBV opportunity to put its case, but showed only minimal editorial curiosity about the extensive reaction to it, or to the debate about OBV’s motives.

Evidence of this was on Wednesday’s edition of Newsnight shortly after the World Tonight item was broadcast. As detailed by News-watch here, reporter Katie Razzall, explored at length the ethnic minority communities’ reactions in the Midlands to the referendum debate.  The only mention of the poster was at the end.  She said:

Operation Black Vote said today a third of Britain’s 4 million or so BAME voters are not actually registered. Today the organisation released this controversial poster in an attempt to encourage them to do so. Because minority voters’ apparent support of Remain could prove decisive, but only if they turn out to vote.

She thus acknowledged the controversy, showed the poster, but chose not to explore further, even though it was arguably of direct relevance.

Her approach was in line with the BBC as a whole.  They acknowledged a story and an organisation whose prime motives in devising this imagery were to purse the pro ‘diversity’, pro-immigration and pro-EU perspectives, but virtually ignored the controversy surrounding it.

CURRYING EU FAVOUR?: Both Newsnight on Wednesday night and Today on Thursday morning presented what might be called pre-emptive pieces in their  EU referendum coverage. ‘ Both carried items about the immigration statistics due to be published  during the course of Thursday and expected to show very high levels of new  arrivals beyond government targets. They can be described as ‘pre-emptive’ because – in that context – both can be seen as being clearly designed to limit the importance of claims that they said were going to be made by the Brexit side.

Nick Robinson said in introducing his item:

The release of the latest statistics is certain to fuel the debate about whether leaving the EU is the only way to regain control, not just of how many people come into the country, but who precisely – a debate that’s been fuelled by an argument about who should be allowed to come into cook up the nation’s favourite dish.

The debate over curry, it emerged, during Robinson’s carefully crafted piece, was that some curry restaurants were worried by new developments in employment law which forced them to increase the wages of chefs to up to £30,000 to chefs who were often from Eastern Europe. Robinson explained:

The voices you hear above the chopping and the sizzling are increasingly from Eastern Europe, as people born here don’t want the jobs, and tougher immigration rules means it simply costs too much to bring new chefs over from Bangladesh.

Pasha Khandaker from the Bangladesh Caterers Association was not happy. He declared:

We’ve been told by the British ministers to employ European Union peoples, and European Union peoples we welcome them, especially we’ve got some people who are interested to work from Romania and Bulgaria.  But they never, they never stay.  I don’t blame them.  There is a language problem, culture problem and mainly the smell problem for them is bad, they can’t stand the curry smell.  So where can I get these people from? So if JP Morgan can bring in skilled people from outside, or Big Brothers (?) can do it, why not from the small business, why is the double standard for the immigration policy?

NICK ROBINSON: How does your experience, as someone running a chain of curry shops, how has your experience affect (sic) your attitude as to whether we should leave or stay in the EU?

PASHA KHANDAKER:        We should leave the European Unions (sic) because the European Unions (sic) are creating many pressure (sic) specially for the migration, we could have a better migration, better skilled people from abroads (sic) we have to give chance from everybody in this world who is fit for the jobs. Not for their colour, not for their geographical identity.

Having thus identified the problem, Robinson then tracked down another restaurant owner from Epsom who agreed that finding and keeping the right staff had become more difficult but nevertheless thought the answer was to stay in the EU and be jolly grateful.  He said:

My decision would be to stay in, because . . . we’ve been fortunate to be able to tap into the Eastern European sector of the community who are willing to do the jobs that British people aren’t willing to do.  So we have economic migrants who are coming . . . coming in, working hard and fulfilling the vacancies that otherwise, right now, I think the restaurant would be closed, because we wouldn’t have stuff that we would need to do those jobs, that no one is willing to do.

In other words, that brilliant EU – despite its shortcomings – was filling the gaps through its free movement directive and solved  the problems caused by lazy and unwilling Britons.

Robinson concluded:

The Vote Leave campaign have gone so far as to claim that a vote to quit the EU would save our curry.  That would only be true though if the British people wanted their politicians to relax the immigration rules to allow more people to come here from outside Europe.  And the problem with that is even if you could switch off EU immigration just like that, there’s still an awful lot more people coming here than most voters say they want. Stopping or controlling immigration – that’s the main reason people who say they’re going to vote Leave give for choosing to vote that way, but even if we did leave, the debate about who we want here, how many we want here, what jobs we want people to do, would only just be beginning.

In other words, the immigration concerns of ‘leave’ suporters in the referendum debate were simply ‘dog-whistle’ type responses, and the voters who wanted controlled immigration and who thought that voting ‘leave’  would solve issues like this were being simplistic in their expectations.

The item by Katie Razzall on Newsnight the previous evening in her series Referendum Road was in similar territory. The Newsnight budget, however, stretched to a visit to the Midlands. Her purpose? Evan Davis explained:

Back to the referendum now. We heard Nick earlier reporting on arguments on the Leave side about focusing on immigration, whether it’s is in danger of alienating ethnic minority voters, but does a Commonwealth heritage make you more inclined to stay in the EU, or go?

In the event, it was neither, though in her exploration of Sutton Coldfield and beyond, those who wanted to remain seemed the most articulate and had most space to advance their reasons.  First stop was a curry house.  She explained:

Now curry has got mixed up in the EU referendum debate. Restaurateurs complain that tightened immigration rules stop them bringing in skilled chefs and other staff from South Asia. The Leave campaign is promising a vote for Brexit would change that. They say without open borders to Europe, Britain could re-forge its Commonwealth links.

Razzall spoke to three restraurant proprietors.  The first said he blamed the government and the EU for his staff shortages.  The second said he would vote to leave the EU in order to secure controlled migration, and to allow more immigration from Commonwealth countries. Razzall asked him if he had picked up this message from the Leave campaign, and he affirmed that he had. The third restaurant owner commented:

People who have no experience, people who even could not stand the smell of aromatic spices, how can you justify to recruit them, put them in the kitchen?

She then returned to the first restaurateur, asking, ‘Can’t you train them up?’ He replied, ‘They are not interested, full stop.’

Next up in Razzall’s package was the Sikh community. She explained:

The Prime Minister appeared on the Birmingham-based Sikh Channel recently arguing the case for Remain. British and minority ethnic voters could decide this referendum. According to the British election study, unlike white voters, who appear evenly split on the issue, two thirds of the BAME community wants to stay in the EU.

Davinda Bal, founder of the Sikh Channel, a television service, then declared:

It’s going to be largely a Remain vote for many, many Sikhs across the country. And certainly from our programming, we have been out in the Sikh community and we are getting an overwhelming sense that people want to stay as a part of the EU, because this issue really is about segregation and separation, and the Sikh community strongly believe in one world and one society.

KATIE RAZZALL: As well as live news and daily prayers, the Sikh Channel is running a nightly referendum programme up to the vote. I know Vote Leave has sort of raised the idea that if we stop being a member of the EU, we will be able to close our borders, which means we will be able to not take EU migrants necessarily, and choose to bring people in from the Commonwealth instead. Is that resonating at all with you or anyone?

DAVINDA BAL: I don’t think it resonates with the Sikh community very deeply, because it seems to be a bit of a shallow argument. We will replace one type of migration with another type of immigrant, or migration. That doesn’t seem to be . . .  ring true, and if there is any Asian communities who are supporting that sort of stance, there may be some self-interest in that they want to see people from their home countries be preferred.

Razzall’s next point seemed to be aimed at reinforce Davinda Bal’s argument. She said:

Long before EU citizens set up home in the UK, immigrants from Britain’s colonies were moving here, filling jobs created after the Second World War. When Britain last held a referendum on Europe, many argued we were turning our backs on the Commonwealth and those close historical ties. The Commonwealth diaspora helped make the West Midlands the UK’s most ethnically diverse region outside London, and it’s a key battle ground for the ethnic minority vote in June.

Of course the Midlands is now ethnically diverse partly as a result of the Commonwealth influx from 1948 onwards,  but her presentation was misleading because it gave no indication of the variations and scale over the years.  The earlier Commonwealth influx did not simply morph into the same rate of EU immigration after the 1975 referendum, and indeed the Commonwealth influx now – even with the current preference for EU nationals under free movement –  is higher than before the UK’s EU membership. This is what Migration Watch UK says about Commonwealth immigration from 1948:

The British Nationality Act 1948 granted the subjects of the British Empire the right to live and work in the UK. Commonwealth citizens were not, therefore, subject to immigration control but the Home Office estimate is that the net intake from January 1955 to June 1962 was about 472,000.[57]From 1962 onwards, successively tighter immigration controls were placed on immigration from the Commonwealth. In the 1960s New Commonwealth citizens were admitted at the rate of about 75,000 per year. In practice the new immigration controls resulted in only a modest reduction in Commonwealth immigration. The average number of acceptances for settlement in the 1970s was 72,000 per year; in the 1980s and early 1990s it was about 54,000 per year. From 1998 onwards, numbers began to increase very substantially.[58] In 1998, net Commonwealth migration leapt to 82,000 and continued to grow before peaking at 156,000 in 2004 before beginning to decline. Some historians argue that the majority of early “New Commonwealth migrants” were, in fact, British settlers and colonial officials and their descendants returning from Britain’s former colonies.

Razzall then spoke to the Chughtai family, who had come to the UK from Kashmir in the 1960s and had established a successful a clothing shop. She explained that Aftab Chughtai was a keen ‘outer’. He said that because most of his clothes were manufactured outside Europe, he wanted more competitive trade deals with the rest of the world:

AFTAB CHUGTAI: Most of the products that we sell now are manufactured outside of Europe, erm, so if we were to be able to have trade agreements with countries like China, with India, with Commonwealth countries, we would be able to be much more competitive on these goods coming over from there. We are paying into a club which we personally don’t see the benefit out of. What I would like is a fair immigration system.

KATIE RAZZALL: Is, is, do you feel there is an irony in the fact that somebody like you, whose parents came over, you were immigrants originally, and now you are complaining about new immigrants?

AC:        No. Immigration is good for a country. If we had a system which was fair, which went all around the world, so we get the best people from around the world, so we are able to get computer programmers from India, we are able to get nurses, doctors from any of the Commonwealth countries where they speak our language, they have the same law systems and everything as us, it is much easier. So immigration isn’t the problem, it is the levels of immigration.

Next stop was a Birmingham art gallery which was holding  an exhibition by black serviceman about their contribution to Britain’s armed forces. Few, she said, saw the Commonwealth as an important factor in deciding about the EU.  Donald Campbell, a former RAF Engineer said:

DONALD CAMPBELL:For me, our unity is strength, and if the UK leaves Europe, the UK will be on its own. So I think it will have a devastating effect on businesses. I know a lot of people are quite emotional about this, and say, you know, we’re losing our jobs to people from abroad, but . . .

KATIE RAZZALL:        For you it’s an economic argument?

DONALD CAMPBELL:        Yes, indeed.

Other speakers, presented as visitors to the exhibition, also gave their opinions, although no on-screen information was given on them, and one wasn’t named.  The first, Merisha Stevenson, had previously received free media training as part of the BBC’s ‘BAME Expert Voices’ – a programme designed to ‘increase the diversity of the experts our viewers see on BBC Television’ – and has co-presented shows on BBC West Midlands, although Newsnight chose not to indicate to its viewers in their captioning that, according to Ms Stevenson’s dedicated page on the BBC Academy’s website, she is a ‘business consultant, strategist and radio broadcaster’.

MERISHA STEVENSON:        When we have historically been the great nation that Britain managed to carve itself out to be, a big part of that was our link to the Commonwealth. There was our link to other parts of the world that actually helped us to gain our strength economically and politically. I think we are in a different world now. We don’t know what’s going to happen if we separate, and whilst some are arguing that yes, it could be better, that ‘could’ is a really, really big ‘could.’

CHERYL GARVEY:        I feel that some of the discussions and the things that people want to change are about really taking away some of the support mechanisms for people right at the bottom of society. If it wasn’t for Europe, we wouldn’t have a number of protections around maternity leave, the 48-hour rule, and if we remove all the protections then I fear that those sorts of communities will be exploited.

KR:        Older voters are more likely to be for Brexit, but that’s not how Rakeem Omar sees it.

RAKEEM OMAR:        My grandfather, for example, he came over here in the ’60s from Jamaica, so it took around six weeks to get here, and he really fought for a better life, and coming here, really working after World War II, the country was completely dismantled, and I think helping with others to put that back together, working in the NHS, building our country back again to really build a stronger, you know European Union, as well as obviously the UK. I think to leave that EU would really take away that legacy.

A final speaker in the art gallery, unnamed by the programme, saw things differently; he wanted resumed links with Commonwealth countries so more immigrants would start coming from those areas again.

Razzall concluded:

Will ethnic minority voters decide this referendum? Operation Black Vote said today a third of Britain’s 4 million or so BAME voters are not actually registered. Today the organisation released this controversial poster in an attempt to encourage them to do so. Because minority voters’ apparent support of Remain could prove decisive, but only if they turn out to vote.

What was Razzall’s goal in this rather complex feature?  How long she spent with the curry house owners in Sutton Coldfield is not clear. But what she included from her exchanges with them appeared to be aimed at establishing that the ‘out’ arguments about wanting immigration from the Commonwealth by curry houses and local businessmen were based on  pettiness (the smell of curry) and self-interest  so that they could find good chefs from their own background. In sharp and immediate contrast, the contribution she edited from her Sikh guest Davinda Bal – who wanted closer integration with the EU – was broader, more considered  and less self-interested. She included his explanation that the issue facing immigrants was about ‘segregation and separation’ and his community ‘strongly believe in one world and one society’. In the art gallery, too, the motives of her interviewees were edited to show them to be less selfish, based on a realistic and enlightened desire for international co-operation and to ensure the equity of EU law to help the disadvantaged ethnic community.

Razzall tacked on the end of the piece the perspective of the Operation Black Vote.  Her exit point was that the ethnic community ‘s support for the EU could prove divisive, and that a ‘controversial’ poster had been released by the organisation.

In fact, in many quarters, that poster was regarded to be hugely controversial, in portraying  what looked like a white – skinhead-type – thug intimidating a gentle, sari-clad member of an ethnic minority.  The motives of the Operation Black Vote organisation, funded by the immigration-supporting Esmee Fairbairn and Joseph Rowntree trusts, have been strongly called into question. Given that Razzall’s fulcrum appeared to be the significance of the ethnic vote in the EU referendum, it is hard to understand why she did not explore this further. It was a highly relevant news development.

Overall, both Razzall and Robinson in their respective reports were in clear pre-emptive mode. Detailed analysis shows that this was not straightforward, balanced reporting. Their  goal was rather to undermine claims by supporters of exit from the EU that an expected rise in immigration figures could threaten UK  curry houses. On route, Razzall assembled a feature that undermined as narrowly selfish those Asians who wanted more Commonwealth immigration. She also chose to ignore an important controversy about the portrayal of the immigration debate.

 

Photo by kkalyan

BREAKFAST  BIAS: BBC1’s Breakfast programme examined, with glitzy but highly misleading graphics, the UK’s  contribution to the EU budget. The peg for the analysis is a claim by Brexit campaigners that membership of the EU cost the UK £350 million a week.  Emphatically wrong! said presenter Charlie Stayt. That figure is the headline UK contribution figure  but is actually substantially less because a) there is a rebate of  £85 million (negotiated by Margaret Thatcher); and b) the EU spends a further £88 million in the UK.  Stayt said:

…it’s divided up into five main areas. £50 million of that is spent on farming and fisheries. Most of it goes direct to farmers to keep them in business. Another £11 million goes to rural development to help them improve and maintain life in the countryside. Every week, £20 million is spent on developing less prosperous parts of the country, it’s spent on things like transport infrastructure and helping businesses to grow. £5 million goes to social development, tackling things like poverty and unemployment, and the money goes to education and training. And that last piece £2 goes to other EU projects here in the UK, we’re talking about things like medical research or low carbon energy funds. So if we subtract what the UK Treasury gets back, we end up with a weekly contribution of £188 million. But the UK private sector also gets money from the EU in three main areas. In scientific research, in university funding, and in engineering projects. Add that up, and it is £27 million a week. That means, when you take away the rebate, the EU money is sent to the Treasury, and the private sector funding £161 million a week is going to the EU.

The bias point here is entirely presentational.  The phrasing made it sound as though the EU has a strongly and wholly benevolent role in the UK, and indeed plays a key role in public spending.   Who would want to stop the EU’s assistance to farmers, to poorer communities, to helping small business start-ups, to improving transport infrastructure, universities, unemployment and scientific research?

What Stayt entirely omitted from his analysis is the eurosceptic perspective, that the money is taken out of the UK’s public coffers (tax receipts)  and that EU bureaucrats in the European Commission – an entirely unelected body –  decide how it will be spent. Once the money goes to Brussels, control over it through the UK taxpayer is entirely lost and, in the UK, those seeking to be ‘assisted’ by the EU have to bid for money. In that sense, say eurosceptics, the role of local and central government in providing help for deprived areas has been completely usurped by faceless EU bureaucrats.

Also missing was reference to that the remaining £161 million a week that  – irrespective of the amount of money coming back to the UK  – makes the UK a ‘net contributor’ (EU jargon) to the EU’s budget.  All he said on this topic (in sharp contrast to the detailed weight on the positive side of EU ‘contributions’ to the UK) was this:

So how does that stack up? Well, every week the UK spends £821 million on defence. It spends £1.4 billion on education. On the NHS, £2.6 billion. And on top of that, it spends £3.6 billion on pensions. So the price of EU membership, £161 million a week. Is it worth it?

The effort here was clearly and deliberately to make the £161 million a week insignificant – and in light of the detailed, positive list he had outlined of what the  EU provided – very good value for money.  A key factor here is how this money is spent.  The answer, it seems, is that no-one actually knows. The Full Facts independent charity says:

We can be pretty sure about how much cash we put in, but it’s far harder to be sure about how much, if anything, comes back in economic benefits.

“There is no definitive study of the economic impact of the UK’s EU membership or the costs and benefits of withdrawal”, as the House of Commons Library says.

What IS certain is that the money goes into the EU’s vast bureaucracy. Does it help to pay for roads in Latvia? The salaries of the 10,000+ European Commission employees who earn more than the British prime minister?  In paying for propaganda films about how disastrous leaving the EU would be for the UK?

Of course, that’s a eurosceptic perspective, but the point here is that Stayt did not mention it. He could have but did not; his emphasis was biased.  That skew in presentation was further emphasised by the feature that followed.  It was a location report on how EU money was spent. The reporter, Ben Thompson, said:

…But of course a century later, things aren’t looking quite so rosy for many former industrial towns up and down the country. And many of them now rely on funding from the European Union to, well, help rebalance the economy, to train staff to create jobs, to move away from heavy manufacturing and get us into those high added-value jobs that bring value to the economy. And they need money from Europe, there’s a big question about if we vote to leave the European Union, what would replace that money? Where would the funding come from, and what would it mean for former industrial towns like Manchester and the North West, but also places in Wales and Scotland that we’re told would be hardest hit.

Exactly as in the Stayt analysis above, this put detailed weight on what the  UK’s EU money is spent on. Who could quarrel with the need to inject new life into declining Northern towns?  The report presented the facts in the best possible light – this amounted to a detailed exposition of that the EU is s a vital force in the UK’s economic revival.

What of the eurosceptic perspective?  The reporter said:

Now those vote . . . er, that are campaigning for us to leave the EU, say well we spend so much money sending it to Europe that actually that money would be better spent ourselves here in the UK. So it is a big debate.

There was clearly no effort at this point to introduce any balancing comment about how the EU spent money, only a vague contention that this was a ‘big debate’.

Ten minutes later, Breakfast continued with this theme. Ben Thompson was still at the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry. He repeated that parts of the UK that had led the industrial revolution and were important manufacturing centres were now in decline, then said:

They have struggled in the wake of a decline in manufacturing. And many are reliant on money that we get from Europe to try and retrain people to create new jobs and to rebalance the economy, over six years we’ll get about £7.5 billion from Europe and it will be used to do just that, to train people in new industries and try to create more jobs.

The message of the importance of the EU and the effectiveness of its investment projects was rammed home to the audience yet again. There was then comment from a spokesman from the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institution, who explained that EU funding had to be matched by the UK government, and suggested that the EU component might continue to be provided in the event of Brexit.  But he finished with a question:

But it’s that uncertainty, will it . . . will the same kinds of projects be funded? What will the impact be over the longer term?

Ben then spoke to Christian Spence from the Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce. He asked if he could give examples of how the EU money was used. Spence replied:

The big remit around things like the ERDF (European Regional Development Fund) funding is exactly as the name suggests,, it’s about regional development, it’s about helping all aspects of the EU to contribute more successfully to the economy.

Ben wanted to know what this meant on a day to day basis, and that it was not just about ‘creating nice visitor attractions’, but about ‘reskilling, creating jobs and things like that’.  Spence was happy to oblige. He stressed that it was particularly about ‘business and skills development’. He added:

So how do we support new advances within our universities and research in the material science? How do we look to up skill our new generation, through new courses, new workforce skills providers, but also about how do we do innovation, how do we improve productivity, how do we help more businesses to start up? It’s ultimately about creating a more successful economy.

Ben asked what the danger was if the UK left the EU. Spence replied that the funding picture  for regional development was changing in in any case, and was up for debate regardless of the EU referendum. If Brexit happened his organisation would look for cash from alternative Westminster channels.

As the final part of the sequence,  Ben spoke to Nigel and Ian Baxter, brothers who each ran their own freight business, but who had different views on EU membership.  Nigel said he wanted the UK to take back control of borders, immigration and long term economic policy;  Ian worried that supporters of Brexit could not explain what ‘out’ would look like, that it would not be beneficial, and further exit from the EU would upset trading agreements.  Their contributions were reasonably balanced, but overall, the two sequences definitely put the EU and its contribution to the UK in a highly favourable light. Stayt and reporter Ben Thompson – each in his own way – structured the presentations so that it appeared that EU investment in the UK was vital to economic revival and focused on highly important and desirable projects. By contrast, they made virtually no effort to explore the eurosceptic perspective, and it was almost airbrushed out of the equation. An alternative approach would have been to investigate how effectively EU money is actually spent – the blanket assumption instead was that the British contribution is money well-spent, and contributors were found who reinforced this message.

 

 

 

 

NEWSNIGHT BREXIT HELL?  When it comes to impartiality, which planet does Newsnight  – the BBC’s television news and current affairs flagship programme – inhabit?

Over the past six weeks the programme has run six separately-themed referendum specials, a marathon six hours of broadcasting in which it has discussed sovereignty, the impact on the economy, security, immigration, how the EU works, and the options post-Brexit. The final one was broadcast last night.

Each programme on the surface was carefully balanced with prominent politicians from both sides of the debate, together with a weekly sprinkling of pro-EU and pro-Brexit experts. A feature throughout was a panel of eight allegedly undecided voters chosen, host Evan Davis said, by the Ipsos Mori polling company.

Was the series as a whole properly impartial? Measuring bias across six hours of broadcasting is immensely complex and labour intensive.

News-watch has already noted in previous postings major issues of negativity towards the Brexit case, for example choosing Sealand, an obscure, decrepit ‘independent’ platform in the North Sea to depict what the UK post-Brexit might look like, and opening the programme on immigration from Boston in Lincolnshire with a heavily pro-EU selection of views.

Further bias problems arose in the final programme. Daniel Hannan presented a short piece to camera about what Brexit would achieve and look like. This was the first time in the series that a deliberate production effort was made to explain this perspective.

However, it clearly did not work as intended. Seven of the eight ‘independent panellists declared at the end that they favoured ‘remain’ (of which more later) and when asked by Davis said they had found Hannam’s film ‘unconvincing’.

Part of the reason may well have been the gut-busting production counter-effort put into establishing the ‘remain’ case. This was another piece of film shot in advance by Newsnight.  It was undoubtedly the centrepiece of the programme – if not of the series as a whole – and featured Tony Blair’s former chief of staff Jonathan Powell – who has come out strongly on the ‘remain’ side – in a staged reconstruction of what post-Brexit negotiations might involve. His ‘opponent’ in these talks was Antonio Vitorino, the (Italian) European Commissioner for Justice from 1999-2004.

What emerged in the tortuous ten minutes was that whatever the UK opted for, it would be very costly, would not work and would lead to economic disaster. The Norway option? Forget it. Switzerland’s?  If you choose that, certain penury and an overwhelming tide of immigration. Canada’s trade agreement? Even worse. EFTA-style arrangements? Britain might as well jump into a pit of vipers.

This was weirdly compelling television, deliberately staged to be so. Every penny of the production budget was squeezed to maximum extent to show that ’out’ was horrendous, and no matter what the UK said, or hoped for, the EU would undermine it or put obstacles in the way.

It was clear that Powell was not really trying, to the extent that Davis was forced to say so after the film was shown, but the point was made with a vengeance: ‘out’ for the UK would be worse than anything that Dante ever remotely imagined.

A further issue on Monday night was that one of the guest experts in the final programme was a prominent Norwegian campaigner against the EU, who led the relevant Parliamentary group. But she was scarcely asked to contribute, and even then, her command of English was relatively limited, so her points did not come across as fluently as the ‘remain’ case.  Another reason why the Newsnight panel voted ‘in.’

Another big – and unanswered – question here is how Newsnight selected the so-called ‘undecided’ panel. How their status was established by Ipsos Mori was not revealed. Were they in any sense representative of the electorate? Three of the eight were obviously from ethnic minorities and one was an Irish national. There were three white women, but only one white man (the Irish national) and none was clearly over 65. Alarm bells ring here. Was the choice to meet the BBC’s version of ‘diversity’?.

Analysis of what they said over the six programmes shows that they raised or made (unprompted) pro-EU points more often than Eurosceptic ones, and in the final edition, a typical contribution was this:

PANELIST: Basically, I cannot see any, any (fragments of words, unclear) leaving the EU it makes us safer, it makes our economy stronger, and I can’t see any of that. In any case, I . . . I trust my Prime Minister with what he says . . .

EVAN DAVIS: Okay.

PANELIST: We have elected the government and he says, and he cannot make anything . . . make it up. So I (fragment of word, unclear) put my trust in him, and what I hear (fragment of word, unclear)

Those do not sound like the words of someone who was deeply ‘undecided’. Whatever else is involved in the referendum saga, David Cameron has staunchly pro-EU throughout, and is now emerging – in his Project Fear utterances – as probably more fervent in his adoration of Brussels than even Edward Heath.