EU Referendum

At last! Now we know why those misguided Brits voted for Brexit. It was the ‘hang ’em, flog ‘em’ brigade exerting their prejudices.

That, in effect, is what the BBC tells us in this prominent website story. In case the message isn’t rammed home hard enough by the copy, there’s a large headline picture of a hangman’s noose.

The central gist is that, according to new polling, the referendum was won by ‘traditionalists’, cautious non-liberal individuals who support the death penalty and also – it is heavily emphasised – publicly flogging sexual offenders.

This, of course, fit perfectly with the BBC’s long-term approach to the EU: that ‘remainers’ inhabit the enlightened, educated, multicultural uplands, while those who want ‘out’ are broadly xenophobic, uneducated, bigots.

In fact, the story is based on a fascinating survey by the British Election Study (BES), a research body funded by various universities and the Social and Economic Research Council. The reality is that the findings do not support the BBC’s sensationalist conclusions. Their use in this way is a gross distortion of the survey.

It should first be noted that this latest poll, part of a long-term survey involving 30,000 individuals, took place before the official campaigning period in early May, and so is not a snapshot of opinions after the actual vote.

That said, BES’s main findings are very clear (and offer fresh insight into the vote):

Overall, our results suggest that the referendum campaign was not a fight about which side had the best argument on the issues: very few people voted leave to improve the economy and very few voted remain to reduce immigration. Instead, the fight was about which of these issues was more important.

In other words, the ‘out’ side, as the vote approached, was concerned that not enough was being done about immigration and were judging this was a major political priority. They did not believe – despite Project Fear which was already in full flow – that the economy took precedence. The polling also shows that there was concern among ‘outers’ about a raft of other issues including sovereignty, border control (and ‘control’ generally), laws, and ‘the country’ as a concept.

In summary, putting it another way, ‘outers’ were approaching the vote with a complex set of issues under consideration. At the heart of their worries was the control of immigration, but they were also firmly focused on Parliamentary sovereignty and national identity.

The remain side, in sharp contrast, was concerned most about the economy. Their other considerations included ‘Europe’ as a concept, trade, security, ‘rights’ (presumably more specifically human rights in the EU context) and stability. All these factors were themes being pushed hardest by David Cameron and by Britain Stronger in Europe, and clearly their messages were hitting home.

These core findings from BSE are the ones emphasised in their press release, and they clearly make a strong story, for example, that ‘leavers’ were not persuaded by Project Fear and wanted a Britain that could control immigration and with national sovereignty restored.

The BBC, however, took a completely different line. Finding where it came from is a detective story, and the most likely source emerges as The Fabian Society.  The BES survey referred to above was released to the public on July 11. But the Fabian society (for reasons that are not clear) were given the results on June 24. They honed in like an Exocet on the BES subsidiary questions relating to public flogging and ‘traditional’ views and decided this was the real reason for the ‘out’ vote, rather than a division based on ‘rich’ and ‘poor’.

Another left-leaning think-tank, NESTA the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts – founded by David Puttnam and the Labour government back in 1997 – picked up the Fabian society’s spin and ran with it. They embellished matters by cherry-picking findings from some of the independent polling by Lord Ashcroft that showed that some ‘leave’ voters did not also like the internet, feminism, the green movement and multiculturalism.

In other words, stick-in-the-mud, vengeful, misogynist, Luddite reactionaries.

This was deeply suspect extrapolation, but this is precisely where the BBC enters the fray. A bee to the honey. They picked up the combination of the Fabian Society findings and those from NESTA and amplified them. This is the central point of the BBC’s website analysis:

The graph below, restricted to White British respondents, shows almost no statistically significant difference in EU vote intention between rich and poor. By contrast, the probability of voting Brexit rises from around 20% for those most opposed to the death penalty to 70% for those most in favour. Wealthy people who back capital punishment back Brexit. Poor folk who oppose the death penalty support Remain.

The BBC attributes this to ‘Professor Eric Kaufman of Birkbeck College’. What it does not say that he argued his ‘traditionalist’ line in an official release for the Fabian Society. The BBC report scarcely considers the core BES findings but hones in instead on both the Fabian and NESTA findings.

To round things off, there is a concluding quote from an organisation called Britain Thinks:

“… openness, modernity and other social-liberal values…were more popular among Remain voters. Often it’s (the leave perspective) about harking back to the past – sometimes a feeling that they don’t belong to the present.”

What the report did not say here is that  Britain Thinks is run by Gordon Brown’s former pollster and a co-director whose other main activity is the Global Action Plan – an environmental group focused on an ultra-green agenda.

Overall, this was deeply biased report because it blatantly cherry-picked and then distorted the findings of an interesting piece of research. The deliberate intent was to underline that the ‘leave’ vote was based on reactionary prejudice. Graphs and graphics were used to amplify the message to maximum extent.

Reporting in this vein strengthens the impression that the BBC is on a mission to undermine the Brexit vote in every way it can.  Yet again, it was emphasised that the ‘remain’ vote was forward-thinking and open. ‘Out’ was unenlightened and backwards.

BBC reform, like so many other issues, has been pushed off the agenda by the referendum hullaballoo.

But sorting out BBC bias as the Brexit process gets underway is surely an urgent and major priority for the new May government – that is, if she genuinely wants Britain out.

The Corporation clearly now sees its central mission to push at every opportunity the case for remain, for a second referendum, for a general election to endorse the exit plans. Anything, in fact, anything to upset the referendum vote.

So great is their opposition to ‘exit’ that their bias is now arguably (for example Newsnight, here) a deliberate attempt to undermine the democratic process, and to reinforce the view (held by many in the Conservative and Labour party and those who mounted demonstrations at the weekend) that those who voted ‘leave’ were basing their decisions on lies; that they were deluded and plain wrong.

The new BBC Royal Charter is due to come into effect by the beginning of 2017, and yet the changes so far proposed by culture secretary John Whittingdale – broadly putting complaints under Ofcom and creating a new management board – will scarcely scratch the surface of current malpractice.

And meanwhile, BBC bias is continuing on an industrial scale. So brazen have they become that they have posted on the BBC iPlayer the Brexit Collection, a selection of 15 Radio 4 programmes about the Brexit vote.

The bias across most of the programmes is so extreme that it is impossible to know where to begin in describing it. News-watch, will, in due course, publish all the transcripts together with a full analysis and report.

In the meantime, a good entry point is the edition of The Food Programme, first broadcast on Sunday July 3, and presented by Dan Saladino.

He assembled for the bulk of the programme a cast list of six guests who declared, between them, that Brexit could lead to food riots; that ensuring food security after Brexit amounted to the worst peacetime challenge that the UK had ever faced; that farms would be abandoned, agricultural jobs would be lost, that the Scotch whisky industry faced virtual ruin, and that immigrants in the food processing and production industry the length and breadth of the UK were now living in fear.  The full picture is here.

A key mover in this blatant exaggeration and scare-mongering was Professor Tim Lang from the City University in London, the main ‘expert’ on food supply. What Saladino did not tell listeners, however, was that Lang also works for a greenie food charity called Sustain, which, their annual reports show, receives a significant part of its funding (at least 10% and probably as high as 25%) directly or from the EU.

Ranged against the six gloom-mongers was a lone fisherman, who was said he wanted Brexit but little more – the diminution of the UK fishing industry under the Common Fisheries Policy was not on the agenda – and Tim Worstall, from the Adam Smith Institute. The latter managed to suggest, against all the predictions of doom elsewhere in the programme, that Brexit would actually lead to a reduction in food tariffs, and that the UK could make better trade deals with partners throughout the world.

But Saladino clearly thought that any positive comment about post-Brexit prospects should come with a health warning. Unlike with Professor Lang and his link with EU funding, he carefully pointed out that Worstall had been a speechwriter for Nigel Farage. For a BBC presenter, that, of course is a dog-whistle hand grenade that any views from the contributor have to be treated with caution because of (in the BBC’s eyes) Farage’s ‘extreme’ political views.

Another programme in the Brexit Collection was How to Make a Brexit presented by Carolyn Quinn, and about Greenland’s decision to leave the EU back in the 1980s. The bias so evident it’s almost impossible to know where to start. Close to the beginning, Quinn used an extract from a pro-EU rant on the Now Show to illustrate one of her key points. The tone was thus set.

Quinn’s linking commentary and choice of quotes was framed with only one aim in mind – to tell us how desperately complex a departure would be. The first quote in this vein from a contributor was:

“This is the largest scale legislation and policy exercise that has possibly been carried out ever…The trade options alone are staggering….” Quinn left absolutely no room for doubt: leaving the EU is something that only a fool would contemplate.

Further initial commentary about the Brexit Collection can be found on the Is the BBC Biased? website here.

The choice of these programmes shows above all that the BBC itself does not care about and does not even begin to understand the depths of its pro-EU bias. The news Secretary of State for Culture has a huge challenge on his hands. The task of dealing with it has scarcely even begun.

Photo by blumblaum

BBC Radio 4’s Food Programme  (July 3) set a new BBC high in the relentless scare-mongering about Brexit. The ringmaster was Dan Saladino. He presented, in effect, a half-hour rant against what he projected as is one of the most dangerous and foolhardy decisions in British history.

The principal guests were supporters of ‘remain’ who predicted, among other things that the Scotch whisky industry was now in serious danger; hundreds of thousands of European workers in the food industry were now living in fear, there could be rioting in the streets, that Brussels red tape around food had been seriously misrepresented, and small food businesses were deeply worried about the loss of EU grants and investment plans and were already facing sharply-elevating costs.

Larded into the commentary and contributions were words such as panic and fear, coupled with insinuations of prejudice (against immigrants), stupid decisions, wrong claims and a lack of planning.

First off was Ian Wright, the director of the Food and Drink Federation, which campaigned vigorously against exit, and now that the vote is lost, is marshalling all its resources to continue to fight the war, as is clear here.  Wright opened by asking ‘what on earth’ we do next.  Saladino stressed his credentials and said the FDF’s members were ‘some of the biggest brands and employers in the country’, with 6,000 businesses employing 500,000.   Wright said he was ‘sombre’, there were a ‘really serious set of challenges’, the government did not know how to respond. He added:

There has been, as far as I can see, no planning at all for this eventuality, and now we have to help them plan, very, very quickly. Now, I think this is the biggest peacetime challenge that the UK has ever faced.

Saladino said that FDF’s members had been 10% pro-leave and 70% wanted to ‘remain’. Wright said:

Because all of the free trade agreements under which we operate are negotiated by Europe rather than the UK, and if they cease to apply we have to go back to WTO tariffs which are in almost every case far, far less advantageous to the UK, and everybody recognised the implications for free movement of labour. A quarter of our workforce comes from the non-UK, non-Republic of Ireland European countries. Many of them are very frightened, many of them are actually very, very, very uncertain about whether they should remain in the UK and that puts an enormous strain on our businesses. And at this stage, we simply don’t know what their status will be.

Saladino said that all week he (Wright) had been talking to businesses that imported billions of pounds; of ingredients; ‘and so the immediate shock was watching as costs went up by the second as the pound fell’. Wright added:

It’s very difficult, in an industry where, remember, the margins are very tight because of the current supermarket competition, the very, very strong price wars.  Any changes to prices in those tight margins are very concerning.

Saladino then spoke to David Thomson, Wright’s counterpart in Scotland, who thought that sales of scotch whisky worth £4.2bn a year were now under severe threat.

Julia Glottz, editor of The Grocer magazine. She said the horsemeat scandal, in effect, paled by comparison.  The price of raw materials would rocket with ‘huge impact’ in the longer term. Bakery manufacturers were ‘in despair’ about what would happen to their Polish staff. There were ‘very, very urgent questions about the future’.

Becky Rothwell, of the Magic Rock Brewery, said the fall in the pound meant that the American hops they used were now much dearer because of the fall in the value of the pound. Everything now was going to be a struggle.   Saladino asked whether they could use UK-grown hops. The answer was a decisive ‘no’.  Serious problems were in store.

Illtud Dunsford., owner of Charcuterie Ltd in Wales, was worried about EU subsidies ending in his native Wales because the area was an Objective 1 area. Without EU funding, he would not create jobs. Saladino pointed out that he had received a £120,000 EU grant to build a new processing facility and was going to get help to market his products in ‘Europe’. Now, though, he had a bad feeling. This was because he had seen Nigel Farage’s speech to the European Parliament in which he had said that they were not laughing now. Dunsford said the UK needed a good trade deal but this was not the way of getting it. There was no complete and utter uncertainty. There were no plans to deal with exit. He declared:

And since last week, it’s been my responsibility to them (my staff) that we continue, that we forget about growth, that we forget about expansion, that it’s about securing all our livelihoods.  And it’s scary. 

This was followed by Professor Tim Lang, who was introduced as being from the City University Centre for Food Policy. He said it was a deep troubling time and we had ‘a serious problem’. The political class was failing to rise to the challenge.  Saladino referred to Lang’s research papers on the impact of the EU and noted that they had concluded that membership of the EU kept food prices stable.  Lang said:

We then did a study looking at the big picture, of Brexit versus Bremain, and that made us even more concerned.  We thought the enormity of this really is not featuring in the debate.  Why? Why?  This is food.  This is what was one of the main motivations for the creation of the common market in the first place.  The Netherlands have had a famine in 1944, Europe had been devastated.  And then we did two other studies, one on horticulture in particular, because Britain is highly  exposed, we get . . . huge amount, big percentage of our horticulture, fruit and vegetable, from the European Union.  So, to summarise all of those papers, we concluded we could vote to leave and indeed we did, but if the people chose it a period of major reorganisation was needed.  And that was our final point.  We didn’t think the British state was ready for it, and what we’re seeing now in politics is a sign that we were absolutely right. There is very little civil service expertise, the politicians haven’t thought about it, there’s no Plan B.  The secretary of state even gave a speech in January saying there is no Plan B.  I mean, I nearly tore what her I’ve got left out of my head. There should be Plan B, there should be Plan C, D, E and everything.  So dear British consumer, think very carefully about this.

Saladino amplified this. He observed that Lang believed that a country that only just feeds itself is a fragile state, and asked if he was overstating this. Lang said not – the UK produced 54% of its own food, 30% came from the EU and the food trade gaps was £21bn – by any definition, that was a fragile state to be in.

Next, a Food Programme phone-in listener asked Lang if food prices would go up. He said there was absolute agreement among academics that they would. More local food would sell, but were those who voted for Brexit prepared to go pick cabbages? There was no sign they would Eastern Europeans, however, would do so.

Saladino said that some believed that Britain was wealthy and so could buy food on the global market.

Lang claimed that Michael Gove had told the BBC that he wanted to open up trade with the rest of the world and in a ‘throwaway remark’ had said that cheaper food could be got from Africa. Lang said:

I thought Africa had a problem and it needed to feed itself? Is that option really moral and justified? I don’t think so. It’s a fantasy of free trade – very strange politics.

Saladino observed that this, however , was not strange to people working hard to take Britain out of the EU.

(After hearing from the Adam Smith Institute and New Zealand meat farmers), Saladino noted that New Zealand farmers were forced to change their business plans. He asked:

But should we expect a future in which food production becomes simpler, more vibrant and free from unnecessary red tape?  Well no, says journalist and food writer Rose Prince.  She spent her week reflecting on a story she investigated 16 years ago.

Prince explained that she had worked in 2000 on the story of UK abattoirs closing down in huge numbers. Saladino said the numbers had fallen from 1000 in 1985 to 200 today. Prince said that Brussels red tape had been blamed, but said the real culprit – as had been established by an inquiry in Parliament – had been the UK ministry, which had interpreted the rules in a way that was ‘almost hostile’.    She asserted:

There was a willingness to believe that it is all the fault of Brussels.  We would be reading stories about straight bananas and people absolutely loved to believe all of that.  When it came to more difficult subjects like the meat industry, if you went to an editor and said, ‘I really need to tell you that this actually not the case, and it’s our government to have the problem’ they weren’t that willing to go along with that. And I mean, this is where it’s been for absolutely years.  And is even now.

Saladino said that ‘we were learning’ that the Breixt story would likely take generations to unfold. He said that meanwhile Oliver Letwin was leading negotiations, and Tim Lang believed the exercise had to be treated as a ‘top priority’. Lang declared:

In Mr Letwin’s new unit, which Prime Minister Cameron has said he’s setting up, there needs to be a big bunch of food specialists in there, or else people like me are very worried, indeed.  Why?  Because food security matters.  Food has a great capacity to create riots.  Food ought to be for health, for biodiversity, for good things in life, all the things the Food Programme has celebrated since Derek Cooper started it.  We want to maintain that, but we’re now in tricky waters.  Food has got to be in those negotiations, we’ve got to have specialists brought back out of retirement, because DEFRA has sacked huge swathes of its workforce, and we’ve got to make sure that the public health and environmental interests, and consumer interests are right in the centre of those EU negotiations.

Saladino implored Lang to say something positive. He said:

‘…why have young people voted so strongly for Europe? Because they’re Europeans in their food culture.  So I think there is an opportunity for progressive food movements to come forward and say we want a good food system for Britain.  If the political classes can’t deliver that, well we have to push it onto them.

Saladino said the podcast edition had more on ‘the unfolding story of Brexit’ including that Rosie Prince was deeply concerned about the 73 British foods which were under the EU’s Protected Name Scheme, including Stilton and Scotch beef. Prince said:

If we, through leaving Europe, lose the right to participate in the Protected Food schemes, it will be a tragedy. It’s good for our industry.

Saladino said that the chef Angela Hartnett was worried about the restaurant world with its 600,000 employees. She said:

The one thing that comes through more than anything in the restaurant industry is movement of people. My restaurant, 70% are Europeans – easily.

Two voices in favour of Brexit were included.

A fisherman – who said only that he had been praying for exit.

Tim Worstall, from the Adam Smith Institute think-tank, was introduced by Saladino  as someone who did not think it morally wrong to take food from Africans.  He said the vote to leave was the first decent decision in 20 years.  Saladino said he was a former speechwriter for Nigel Farage. Many of his arguments revolved around food, then asked him if he had expected a degree of panic. Tim Worstall agreed there would be a period of ‘headless’ chickens’ but then things would settle down.  Saladino said that on a Skype call from his home in Portugal, Worstall thought there would be a more stable and affordable food future. He said:

The bigger problem I think that people have got here is that they really just don’t quite understand how markets work. We do not buy food from the European continent because we are members of the European Union. It’s some farmer, it Georges or Jacques or Joaquim or somebody who sells something to Sainsbury’s, and why would that change just because we’ve changed the political arrangement?  Whatever tariffs food faces after Brexit will be determined exactly by the British government.  We get to decide what our import tariffs are.  Why are we going to make the things we want to buy more expensive for ourselves?  So, obviously, you know, we like buying continental food, great, we won’t have tariffs on continental food.  What’s the difference?

Saladino asked him if he agreed that food had got cheaper, and as TW answered suggested it had happened ‘under EU membership’.   TW said that tariffs had to be paid on food from outside the EU and could be up to 35%. If the UK was outside the EU it could choose where to buy products like sugar from wherever it wanted. He added:

Here in the UK, or you there in the UK, should be growing the high value stuff that Britain grows really well. I mean, our grass-fed beef, for example, is some of the best in the world.  People line up to buy joints of it.  But it’s simple stuff like turnips or wheat.  Why should we even think about trying to grow it in the UK when there’s the vast steps of the Ukraine, or the American Midwest or the Canadians, at hundreds of dollars a ton, and ship it to us? Why would we bother to make this cheap stuff when we’re a high income, high cost nation.

Saladino said Tim Worstall’s vision was based on the economic model of Beef and Lamb New Zealand which came into existence in the 1980s when subsidies came to an end. Dave Harrison said the number of sheep had halved but the businesses were now profitable.

ANALYSIS: Saladino’s programme was deeply biased against the impact of  Brexit on the food industry , and, indeed, appeared deliberately constructed to be negative towards the prospect. On a basic, logistical level, there were eight contributors who expressed serious concerns about what would happen next as a result of the ‘exit’ vote, against only two who favoured the UK’s departure from the EU. One of those – a fisherman – was a token inclusion in that he spoke only one sentence. Saladino explained next to nothing about the fishermen’s concerns about the EU.

In sharp contrast, the supporters of ‘remain’ were all given full opportunities to explain their respective stances, often with help from Saladino, who reinforced their points, or added details clearly designed to show their importance and validity.

Another point of negativity against ‘out’ was that Tim Worstall, the sole Brexit supporter who gave reasons for his stance, was introduced as a speechwriter for Nigel Farage. Why was this emphasised? By comparison, for example, Saladino did not mention that one of the ‘remain’ contributors, Professor Tim Lang, is deeply connected to the green movement through the highly partisan campaigning organisation Sustain. Those from such organisations view Farage and Ukip as racist and xenophobic. The suspicion must be, therefore, that Saladino wanted to stress the Farage connection for negative political reasons, and to undermine his contribution.

What Tim Worstall did say boiled down to two fundamental points – that tariffs in future could be negotiated according to British needs – meaning that some tariffs would go down – and that the UK should start buying low-cost food staples that need not be grown here from other markets and concentrate on developing high cost, high value food products in keeping with the UK’s status as a high-cost nation.

There was thus, at best, only minimal effort to bring pro-Brexit ideas into the frame.

By contrast, those who wanted to point out the problems of Brexit were given virtually a free rein. With Ian Wright of the Food and Drink Federation, Saladino stressed his authority by explaining that he led an organisation representing 6,000 businesses and half a million employees, and which imported billions of pounds’ worth of ingredients. To summarise his contribution, Wright suggested that Brexit was the biggest peacetime challenge ever faced by the UK; that there was a danger that higher WTO tariffs would be imposed on food: and that hundreds of thousands of workers in the food industry were now living in fear.  Saladino made no attempt to challenge anything he said, and at the end of his contribution added another problem – the shock to food importers as the value of the pound ‘went up by the second’.

The next contributor, Wright’s counterpart in Scotland David Thomson, issued another warning, that the £4.2bn Scotch whisky export was in dire danger. Saladino amplified this, too, by pointing out that although Scotland sold whisky to China, ‘the biggest market was Europe’. Another problem, he said, was that whisky distillers saw ‘EU membership as giving them more clout’. Thomson added (to reinforce the point) that membership was seen as vital because of  ‘the weight of Europe in trade negotiations and protecting their intellectual property’.

Saladino ‘s introduction to Julia Glotz of The Grocer magazine was as glowing as that of Wright and Thompson. The magazine, he said, had been around for 150 years and had covered the UK’s biggest food stories.  Ramping up the drama, he added that Glotz had been trying that week, in connection with Brexit, to keep track of the sheer quantity of stories from inside an industry which was the UK’s largest manufacturing sector. He suggested that exports worth £20bn were at stake.   Glotz in summary, said events of the week had felt more dramatic than the horsemeat scandal, there were ‘very, very urgent questions to answer’, prices of raw materials had gone up overnight, businesses – some in ‘absolute despair’ were very worried about the long-term impact, and whether lay-offs of overseas staff would be necessary.

Saladino introduced Becky Rothwell of the Magic Rock brewery by saying that they had plans to sell in Europe, but were now feeling an immediate effect of the referendum vote. Rothwell said there had already been huge price increases for American hops. A lot of people would struggle with this, they did not know what was happening.  Introducing Illtud Dunsford  oif Charcuterie Ltd, Saladino noted that though Wales had voted for exit, his story painted a ‘less familiar side of the EU’.  He explained that through the EU, he had received £120,000 to build a new processing plant and had ambitions to move into Europe with his products.  Dunsford claimed that all this had changed because Nigel Farage had attacked the European Parliament for not believing him about Brexit. There was an extract from the Farage speech. In the next sequence, Dunsford claimed that this was not the way to reach trade deals. Now everything was at risk without a Plan B, or any plan at all.

Saladino picked up this theme, and introduced Professor Tim Lang, who, he said, believed no plans were in place and this therefore was a ‘serious problem’. Saladino added that Lang’s papers on the EU showed that it had helped keep food prices stable. Lang himself, in this framework, issued a series of dire warnings about the prospects for the food industry. His thesis was the EU had been set up to create security in the food supply, there was no plan to deal with Brexit, and not even the expertise to facilitate it.     Saladino noted at this point that Lang’s papers had also pointed out that a country which only just fed itself was a very fragile state. He asked whether this was an overstatement. Lang’s answer was resoundingly not. For numerous reasons, the food industry was going to suffer. Saladino asked if the UK could import food from the rest of the world. Lang’s answer was simply that Michael Gove had suggested such food could come from Africa. This was impossible because Africa needed to feed itself. He claimed the ‘leave’ approach was thus a ‘fantasy of free trade’.

Saladino made no effort to challenge this, or to suggest Lange had side-stepped a huge  topic (the possibilities of free trade) by an ad hominem attack.  The reality is that African producers do want to export to the EU, but are seriously disadvantaged in doing so because of tariffs and green concerns ion the EU about air transport.

After the sequence with Tim Worstall already mentioned above, Saladino noted that there were claims that the EU created red tape in food production.   Rose Prince’s contribution was to debunk the idea that the closure of hundreds of UK abattoirs in the 1990s , despite what newspapers said, was down to the EU. It was rather overzealous interpretation of the EU rules by British ministry officials.

Saladino observed as he headed towards the conclusion that ‘we are quickly learning that the Brexit story….will take years and more like generations to unfold’. He noted that a cabinet team under Oliver Letwin had been set up. Professor Lang then warned that there needed to be food specialists in the equation, because food had a great capacity to create riots. He finished off with ‘something positive’ – at the invitation of Saladino  – that young people had voted strongly for Europe  ‘because they are Europeans in their food culture’ If the political classes would not accept that ‘we will have to push it onto them’.

Quoting all that has been necessary to show the strength of the anti-Brexit sentiment and opinion included in the programme.  Stripped down it amounted to a tsunami of negative speculation about the likely consequences of Brexit a re-run of the arguments for ‘remain’ that Lang, and the Food Federation had already advanced in the run-up to the vote, and strident complaints that an exit plan was not already in place.   The only concrete development contained in all the comment was that some food prices had gone up to British importers (such as the Magic Rock company) of overseas ingredients in the backwash of the Brexit vote.

Arguably, that was also the consequence, however, of actions of market speculators. Saladino could have chosen to analyse that but chose not to – it was considered only through the negative Brexit prism.

Overall, Saladino acted only as midwife to the compilation of what amounted to a treatise against Brexit. The inclusion of what meagre counter-opinion was qualified by his  undermining by association of the sole at-length supporter of exit.

A further point here is that Professor Tim Lang was projected without qualification as an expert on EU-food issues. He has, of course, written extensively on this subject. But what the programme did not mention at all – or seek to challenge – was that he his highly partisan in his approach. He is a member of the Sustain organisation, which works to influence food policy through the green agenda, and which receives significant financing from the EU.

Equally, the Food and Drink Federation has a highly partisan agenda and for years has been strongly pro-EU. The job of programme such as this is to step outside such frameworks of self-interest and promotion. Arguably, the FDF is big business looking after its own needs. In this programme, its narrow perspective set the whole programme agenda. That is bias of the worst kind.  There was also gross bias by omission – of voices who thought that Brexit offers new horizons for the British food industry.

Transcript of BBC Radio 4, The Food Programme, 4^th July 2016, 12.30pm

ANNOUNCER:    Now, a special edition of the Food Programme with Dan Saladino.

DAN SALADINO:                            I need to ask you a question: how has your week been?

UNNAMED FEMALE:       The UK has voted to leave the European Union (cheers)

DAVID CAMERON:          The British people have voted . . .

MISHAL HUSSAIN (?):     There were big wins for Leave.

DC:        . . . and their will must be respected.

MISHAL HUSSAIN:           In The City, shares plunged, and the pound fell dramatically.

DC:        The country requires fresh leadership.

MH:       Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU.

NICOLA STURGEON:       A second referendum must be on the table.

DS:        As if you need reminding.  But that question I posed, ‘how has your week been?’ isn’t intended to sound flippant, it’s actually the question I’ve spent the last couple of days put into people whose lives and livelihoods revolve around food and drink, farming and retailing. So, if you are feeling a little Brexited out, I’m genuinely sorry, but the last 10 days has served up a way to big a food story for the Food Programme to ignore.  And in many ways it’s an untold story.  So this our Plan B – a fast and sometimes furious exploration of a newly unpredictable food future.

UNNAMED MALE:           It has thrown what I’ve known pretty much throughout my farming career all up in the air.

UNNAMED FEMALE 2:   I have no knowledge of what it’s like to be outside the EU.

DS:        Think of this programme as less a guide as to what’s going to happen next and more a road map of the food issues to be aware of, or even just what questions we need to start asking when it comes to food. I can’t promise you a huge amount of joy, but I think there’s at least one laugh tucked away in the programme, and I think we’ve found a way of ending on a positive note. But first, let’s hear from a small sample of the people who really matter. That’s you, me, and the other 60-odd million of us, all following events as best we can.

UNNAMED MALE 2:        Food wasn’t something that I heard anyone talk about, or recognise that some things might get more expensive.

UNNAMED MALE 3:        Everybody talks about the price of food going up, and yet, by the pound valuing, British farmers are going to get a better deal from a lot of the supermarkets, we’ll be buying a lot more British products.

UNNAMED FEMALE 3:   I don’t think it will make much difference to ordinary working class people, to be honest. I wonder where my shopping bill’s taking me every week, so it doesn’t make any difference.

DS:        Well, is Brexit making any difference?  Let’s go back to our central question: ‘how has your week been?’, one I put to a man who has an eye across the vast majority of food consumed in the UK. And it’s safe to say his was a stressful week.

IAN WRIGHT:     The real question was what on earth do we do now, because (fades out)

DS:        Ian Wright is the director of the Food and Drink Federation, which represents some of the biggest brands and employers in the country, from Nestlé and Unilever to smaller producers including Nairn’s oatcakes and Hawkshead Relish, and it all adds up to more than six thousand businesses, and a workforce of close to half a million.  He says after the initial shock, he started to plan.

IW:        I’m sombre and of a mood that we’ve got to get on with it and get to a solution now.  We’re faced with a really serious series of challenges; we do not know how the government will respond and that’s because the government doesn’t know how it will respond. There has been, as far as I can see, no planning at all for this eventuality, and now we have to help them plan, very, very quickly.  Now, I think this is the biggest peacetime challenge that the UK has ever faced.

DS:        And an issue for his membership, who make up a large part of the UK’s food supply.  The reason is that 10% of the FDS members are thought to have been pro-Leave – and 70% backed remaining in the EU.

IW:        Because all of the free trade agreements under which we operate are negotiated by Europe rather than the UK, and if they cease to apply we have to go back to WTO tariffs which are in almost every case far, far less advantageous to the UK, and everybody recognised the implications for free movement of labour.  A quarter of our workforce comes from the non-UK, non-Republic of Ireland European countries.  Many of them are very frightened, many of them are actually very, very, very uncertain about whether they should remain in the UK and that puts an enormous strain on our businesses.  And at this stage, we simply don’t know what their status will be.

DS:        And all week, he’s been talking to businesses who import billions of pounds ingredients, and so the immediate shock was watching as costs went up by the second as the pound fell.

IW:        It’s very difficult, in an industry where, remember, the margins are very tight because of the current supermarket competition, the very, very strong price wars.  Any changes to prices in those tight margins are very concerning.

DS:        North of the border, Ian Wright’s counterpart as a man called David Thomson.  Members of the Scottish Food and Drink Federation make up 20% of Scotland’s economy.  David had been looking forward to Friday June 24.

DAVID THOMSON:         I was lucky enough to be wondering around the Royal Highland Show which is a big agricultural show in Scotland, with lots of food companies there.  And most people’s immediate reaction was one of confusion and uncertainty.

DS:        Confusion and uncertainty quickly turned to anxiety for a group of members who campaigned hard for Remain – Scotland’s distillers.

DT:        Scotch whisky is the UK’s biggest food export, and therefore is Scotland’s biggest food export worth something north of £4.2 billion a year.  So, it’s not anything that can be played with.

DS:        Because however popular whisky has become in China and India, Europe remains the biggest market.  But their anxiety isn’t just about sales.  They also see EU membership as giving them more clout.

DT:        Not least of which is the weight of Europe in trade negotiations and protecting their intellectual property all over the world.

DS:        But for others in Scotland, June 24 was a long-awaited day of celebrations.

FISHERMAN:      It’s a totally new ballgame.  We just have to take stock and see where we go from here.

DS:        Unlike the distillers, Scotland’s fishermen wanted Out.

F:           You see I’m a bit emotional.  The strong we’ve had er . . . the last few years, watching the Europeans steal our fish away from us, it, yes, it was an emotional night.

DT:        They feel that they can better manage the seas than Brussels negotiations would ever get them, and so it has not been a unified picture in Scotland.

DS:        Someone else who I asked how their week had been had simply been trying to keep up with the quantity of stories coming from inside the food industry, which, I should mention, is the UK’s largest manufacturing sector, with more than £20 billion of exports at stake.

JULIA GLOTZ:     It’s been an absolutely extraordinary week (fades out)

DS:        That’s Julia Glotz, managing editor of The Grocer magazine, and during the publication’s 150 year history, they’ve covered the UK’s biggest food stories.

JG:         I remember the horsemeat scandal very well, but it didn’t feel quite as dramatic as this past week has been.  Some smaller manufacturers in particular, have told us that the price of their raw materials searched overnight and they’re very worried about the impact that is going to have longer term.  The conversations I’ve been having have been more, been more emotional than, than usual.

DS:        You mentioned this felt like a week . . . like no other, I mean, was there one conversation, one story that made you realise that?

JG:         (exhales) It’s the account of our bakery manufacturer, who, who told us just of her absolute despair, her worry for her Polish staff, whether she would be able to retain them, her concern about soaring raw material prices, and as a small business owner just some very, very urgent questions about her future.

DS:        Which got me thinking about a few people I thought might be vulnerable to the clear signs of economic shock, as George Osborne has described it, caused by the Brexit vote.  The young, small food businesses we feature each year in our BBC Food and Farming Awards.  And at this point, I think we all need a drink.

UNNAMED MALE 4:        A pint of (word unclear) please.

UNNAMED MALE 5:        Cannonball, which is our flagship IPA, full of American hops.

DS:        Magic Rock in Huddersfield is one of the UK is 1,300 breweries riding the wave of the craft beer revolution.  Its small, creative and inspirational team produce a growing range of beers, and with plans to expand and sell into Europe.  I arranged to meet one of the Magic Rock team as they arrived into King’s Cross Station to promote their beers in London.  I asked Becky Rothwell about her week.  She told me that after the referendum result there was an immediate effect.

BECKY ROTHWELL:         We’ve already experienced huge increases.  We get a lot of our hops from the USA, our container of key kegs that we used to package the beer cost an additional £800 to what it normally costs.  The . . .

DS:        £800 . . .

BR:        £800 extra, just because of the devaluation of the pound. We’re going to have to reconsider various things erm . . .

DS:        Like what?

BR:        The margins in beer are very small, so I can imagine a lot of people are going to struggle with it.  We just don’t know what’s going to happen.

DS:        Because their approach and their entire businesses is dependent on overseas ingredients – malt from Germany, specialist hops from the US.  Prices of both went up fast.

BR:        It’s already incredibly hard for small UK breweries to secure hops. Although we’re guaranteed the hops that we’ve got, they can’t guarantee the exchange rate.

DS:        One argument is it’s good for British hop growers?

BR:        Well, yeah, that is one of the things, but if you look at modern craft beer, everyone wants these US flavours that are coming out.

DS:        I predict a revival of Fuggle’s.

BR:        (laughs) Well, it’d be really interesting to see if in, you know, a few years we’ve got Fuggle’s IPA . . . is just dominating the market, because of this.

DS:        Fuggle’s – as many of you know – is a classic English hop. Meanwhile, in West Wales, another story was unfolding, the sounds of the pedigree Welsh pig.  Meet the owner of these pigs.

ILLTUD DUNSFORD:        I’m Illtud Dunsford and I’m the owner of Charcuterie Ltd.

DS:        As we now know, the majority of people in Wales voted to leave the European Union.  For Illtud, that came as a disappointment because the place where he lives, farmers and is building his business reveals a less familiar side of the EU story.

ID:         The farm’s in the Gwendraeth Valley in West Wales, and we’re classed as an Objective 1 area, so it’s seen as one of the areas with the most poverty really, in Europe, and because of that, because of its classification as an Objective 1 area, we’ve had funding over the last few years to invigorate the area, both in terms of jobs but also in terms of community. We’re a post-industrial area, we’re right on the edge of the South Wales coalfield, very, very high levels of disability, very high levels of unemployment. It’s hard to run a specialist business in an area like this, but it’s the right place to do it because we have access to widespread agriculture, but without that funding we wouldn’t create jobs.

DS:        Illtud’s business produces some of the finest cure meets in the country.  And the EU funding he received – a grant of £120,000 – was to build a new processing facility and create new jobs.  He’s done that.  And those jobs were going to help him sell his products into Europe.  That’s still his ambition, and so he is keen future negotiations with the EU are positive.  But when he turned on the television last Tuesday, he had a bad feeling.

NIGEL FARAGE: I said I wanted to leave a campaign to get Britain to leave the European Union, you all laughed at me – well I have to say, you’re not laughing now, are you?

ID:         (dry laugh) watching the response of the European Parliament to Nigel Farage, for somebody who wants to, or needs to have a good trade deal, that is not the way to approach it.  Who is the person that’s going to be doing this negotiation?  Because it has such wide-ranging impact on . . . on everything, all our lives. It’s just complete and utter uncertainty. We’re definitely on Plan B – Plan B, C, D . . . I guess it’s business as usual this, this week and for the next few weeks, er, while we, while we work out what the future holds. There was a great realisation a few years ago when one of our staff was talking about getting a mortgage, and . . . that was the key moment for me, that I realised how much responsibility I had as a business owner to my staff.  And since last week, it’s been my responsibility to them that we continue, that we forget about growth, that we forget about expansion, that it’s about securing all our livelihoods.  And it’s scary.

DS:        From West Wales, to a hotel lobby near Victoria train station in London.  I’d arranged to meet someone who’s been researching the implications of Brexit for the past two years, Professor Tim Lang of City University Centre for Food Policy.  Inside the hotel tourists were arriving, all were glued to television screens.

TOURIST:            Scary, yeah it’s just scary.

TOURIST 2:         Yeah.

T:           What’s going to happen to everyone. The, the whole economy in the world.

T2:         Yeah, how it’s going to bring all others into a recession.

DS:        Erm . . .

T:           Is there a plan in place?

DS:        Is there a plan in place? No, says Tim Lang, who is clearly having a bad week.  Because when it comes to food, having no plan translates as ‘we have a serious problem.’

PROFESSOR TIM LANG:  I think it’s deeply troubling time (sic). Our Centre wrote for briefing papers preparing for this, and the analysis we gave was very sober, saying this is an enormous impact on the food system if we choose to do it. We’re now in that reality. And what worries me mostly is that the political class is currently failing us.

DS:        The analysis Tim Lang mentioned consists of four research papers, covering a range of different aspects of the UK’s food system.  The Common Agricultural Policy and other EU food policies are far from perfect, he says, but his team’s conclusion was that they have helped to keep food prices relatively stable.

TL:         We then did a study looking at the big picture, of Brexit versus Bremain, and that made us even more concerned.  We thought the enormity of this really is not featuring in the debate.  Why? Why?  This is food.  This is what was one of the main motivations for the creation of the common market in the first place.  The Netherlands have had a famine in 1944, Europe had been devastated.  And then we did two other studies, one on horticulture in particular, because Britain is highly  exposed, we get . . . huge amount, big percentage of our horticulture, fruit and vegetable, from the European Union.  So, to summarise all of those papers, we concluded we could vote to leave and indeed we did, but if the people chose it a period of major reorganisation was needed.  And that was our final point.  We didn’t think the British state was ready for it, and what we’re seeing now in politics is a sign that we were absolutely right. There is very little civil service expertise, the politicians haven’t thought about it, there’s no Plan B.  The secretary of state even gave a speech in January saying there is no Plan B.  I mean, I nearly tore what her I’ve got left out of my head. There should be Plan B, there should be Plan C, D, E and everything.  So dear British consumer, think very carefully about this.

DS:        Those consumers will have been reading Tim – and this comes from you – history suggests that a country which only just feeds itself is in a potentially fragile state.  Now, aren’t you overstating it?

TL:         No, I’m quoting government figures.  54% of our food is home-grown, about 30% comes from the rest of the European Union, and the rest comes from around the world, coffee or tea for example. And when we look at the figures, the food trade gap is now £21 billion in deficit, so we think that’s, by any definition, fragile situation to be in.

DS:        On my phone, I have a question that’s come in from a Food Programme listener, I’ll just play you this and see if you can provide an answer.

ANGELA FIELD:  My name is Angela Field, and I wanted to know, as a result of Brexit, should we expect the price of imported foods to rise, and should we be looking to buy more from local producers and UK producers?

TL:         That’s a really good question, Angela.  One of the things on which there was absolute agreement among academics who looked was that food prices are highly likely to go up, because the pound, everyone agreed, and indeed it has now, would go down. Therefore imports will cost more.  Is that, the second part of your question, therefore a trigger that Britain produces more of its own?  In the long term, yes.  But who’s going to grow this? We rely upon foreign labour to produce the food, to grow it and to process it in the factories.  And as I’ve said in a Tweet, you know, those who voted for Brexit, are they now prepared to go and work picking Brussels sprouts and cabbage us, and lifting potatoes in Lincolnshire where I’m from?  Do they really want to do that?  I don’t see any sign of them wanting to do that?  Actually it’s eastern Europeans who are prepared to do it.  Come on, let’s get clear guys, this is, call it time here.  Do you want food from Britain?  In which case you’ve got to get going and doing it or not.

DS:        Another point being made is that at this point in time we are still one of the wealthiest economies in the world, we can spend our way out of this.  We can buy food on a global market post-Brexit?

TL:         Mr Gove, in an interview with the BBC, at one point said one of the things that he wanted to leave the European Union for was to open up trade with the rest of the world. So we can (fragment of word, or word unclear) in a throwaway remark he said, ‘We can get cheaper food from Africa’ – I thought Africa had a problem and it needed to feed itself? Is that option really moral and justified? I don’t think so. It’s a fantasy of free trade – very strange politics.

DS:        But not strange to people who spent much of their lives working hard to take the UK out of the EU.

TIM WORSTALL:              My name’s Tim Worstall, I’m a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London.

DS:        Which is a free market think tank and Tim Worstall was having a good week. For him, Brexit is mission accomplished.

TW:       I have actually been writing about this and working towards it for the last two decades.  Wonderful.  Superb.  First decent decision made in 20 years.

DS:        And among the arguments Tim has put forward for Brexit, either as a former speechwriter for Nigel Farage, or in his role at the Adam Smith Institute, many revolve around food.

TW:       I have a great interest in trade and food, obviously, is the most important thing that we human beings have traded over the millennia.

DS:        When you envisaged this moment arriving, did you expect a period that we’re currently going through that is instability, uncertainty and a degree of panic?

TW:       Yes.  There will be a large number of headless chickens running around, and after a few weeks, a month or two, everyone will realise the sun still rises in the morning, but now we get to make our choices.  That’s the only difference.

DS:        On a Skype line from his home in Portugal, Tim Worstall predicted that when things do settle down we can all look forward to a stable, more secure and affordable food future.

TW:       The bigger problem I think that people have got here is that they really just don’t quite understand how markets work. We do not buy food from the European continent because we are members of the European Union. It’s some farmer, it Georges or Jacques or Joaquim or somebody who sells something to Sainsbury’s, and why would that change just because we’ve changed the political arrangement?  Whatever tariffs food faces after Brexit will be determined exactly by the British government.  We get to decide what our import tariffs are.  Why are we going to make the things we want to buy more expensive for ourselves?  So, obviously, you know, we like buying continental food, great, we won’t have tariffs on continental food.  What’s the difference?

DS:        What would you say to people who point to the fact that we have some of the cheapest food in Europe, in fact, the proportion of the income that we spend on food has decreased.

TW:       Yeah, well, I mean that’s, that’s just . . . part and parcel of getting richer.  Food is what called a . . .

DS:        (interrupting) But that, that has happened under EU membership.

TW:       We have to pay quite large tariffs to import food from outside the European Union.  I think it’s something like 30%-35% on sugar at the moment. Okay, so, we’re outside the European Union, we now decide that we want to buy sugar not from the European Union, we don’t have to charge ourselves 35% on importing sugar from Guadalupe or Martinique or wherever, we’re fifth, sixth, seventh, whatever it is, richest nation on the planet. Here in the UK, or you there in the UK, should be growing the high value stuff that Britain grows really well. I mean, our grass-fed beef, for example, is some of the best in the world.  People line up to buy joints of it.  But it’s simple stuff like turnips or wheat.  Why should we even think about trying to grow it in the UK when there’s the vast steps of the Ukraine, or the American Midwest or the Canadians, at hundreds of dollars a ton, and ship it to us? Why would we bother to make this cheap stuff when we’re a high income, high cost nation.

DS:        And his post-Brexit food vision isn’t based on some theoretical economic model, it actually exists.  To find out more, over to Dave Harrison of Beef and Lamb New Zealand, the organisation that promotes the country’s meat exports around the world.  He remembers the 1980s when the subsidy system came to an end.

DAVE HARRISON:            About 40% of our farmers’ income was coming from subsidies back in those days.  But the government had essentially run out of money, and so overnight it had to go. They were there one day and they weren’t there the next. It was a really difficult time for New Zealand.  Once you’re not being paid to produce, which is what we were being paid to produce, and in those days we had 70 million sheep in New Zealand, and so now we have half that number of sheep, our farmers are focused on genetics, they’re focused on . . . you know, what you can do with feed on the farm.  Back in those days when we had 70 million lambs they were . . . small, and there was a lot of sheep that people don’t want to buy, they don’t want a, like a small leg for a Sunday roast.

DS:        And so the livestock and the food produced changed.  And the country’s farmers were forced to rethink their business plans.  But should we expect a future in which food production becomes simpler, more vibrant and free from unnecessary red tape?  Well no, says journalist and food writer Rose Prince.  She spent her week reflecting on a story she investigated 16 years ago.

ROSE PRINCE:    In 2000, it became apparent that the small-scale abattoirs in Britain were closing down in huge numbers, which was a great problem for . . . farmers in areas where there was a long distance for their livestock to travel.

DS:        In fact, between 1985 and today, the number of abattoirs declined from 1000 to fewer than 200. And for the most part this happened without any real scrutiny by journalists.

RP:         It wasn’t seen as exactly a very sexy story for the newspapers.  You had to fight to get this told, past your editor.  The general consensus at the time, whenever you discuss donor’s regulations, that the fault was always Brussels and that Brussels were imposing all sorts of incredibly thick red tape all over the food industry and making it incredibly hard, particularly for the smaller producer, because, of course, regulations always cost the producer money to implement.  So, everywhere I went, I’d hear ‘Oh, it’s Brussels, it’s Brussels’.

DS:        But then, an opportunity came up to fully investigate the issue.

RP:         There were two committees of enquiry at Westminster looking into the meat regulations at the time.  I worked on one of them, as a committee member.  I learned from this information-gathering on the inquiry that it’s not always Brussels, and that very often it is up to the government of whichever member state to interpret rules.  And the real problem is that I think our Ministry interpreted the rules in a way that was so own arrests to the producers, it was almost hostile.

DS:        The decline in abattoirs accelerated in the years that followed the outbreak of BSE.  And so a heavy-handed approach by government might come as no surprise.  But, for Rose Prince, the media’s handling of the story was shocking.

ROSE PRINCE:    There was a willingness to believe that it is all the fault of Brussels.  We would be reading stories about straight bananas and people absolutely loved to believe all of that.  When it came to more difficult subjects like the meat industry, if you went to an editor and said, ‘I really need to tell you that this actually not the case, and it’s our government to have the problem’ they weren’t that willing to go along with that. And I mean, this is where it’s been for absolutely years.  And is even now.

DS:        We’re quickly learning that the Brexit story, including its impact on food will take years, and more likely, generations to unfold.  But things are moving fast, and the head of the Cabinet Office, Oliver Letwin, is now leading a team that will shape future negotiations with the EU. Our food future has to be treated as a top priority, argues Professor Tim Lang.

TL:         In Mr Letwin’s new unit, which Prime Minister Cameron has said he’s setting up, there needs to be a big bunch of food specialists in there, or else people like me are very worried, indeed.  Why?  Because food security matters.  Food has a great capacity to create riots.  Food ought to be for health, for biodiversity, for good things in life, all the things the Food Programme has celebrated since Derek Cooper started it.  We want to maintain that, but we’re now in tricky waters.  Food has got to be in those negotiations, we’ve got to have specialists brought back out of retirement, because DEFRA has sacked huge swathes of its workforce, and we’ve got to make sure that the public health and environmental interests, and consumer interests are right in the centre of those we negotiations.

DS:        Finally, for people listening to this, saying Professor Tim Lang, please say something positive, what would you say to them?

TL:         I think this is potentially the most exciting and interesting time for food democracy in Britain, and I don’t say that lightly. These are times – so why do I think this is exciting? Because in Britain we have an extraordinary food movement, there has been a renaissance over the last 30 years of food thinking, experimentation, and we see this in the generation gap – why have young people voted so strongly for Europe? Because they’re Europeans in their food culture.  So I think there is an opportunity for progressive food movements to come forward and say we want a good food system for Britain.  If the political classes can’t deliver that, well we have to push it onto them.

DS:        Professor Tim Lang, in the podcast edition of this programme, you can hear more on the unfolding story of Brexit and our future food. Including Rose Prince’s take on why we should pay attention to something that at first glance might appear trivial – the 73 British foods that come under the EU’s Protected Name Scheme, from Stilton cheese to Yorkshire rhubarb, Scotch beef to Welsh lamb.

RP:         If we, through leaving Europe, lose the right to participate in the Protected Food schemes, it will be a tragedy. It’s good for our industry.

DS:        And you’ll also hear from chef Angela Hartnett, and reactions to the Brexit vote from inside the restaurant world – a UK industry with a workforce of more than 600,000 people.

ANGELA HARTNETT:       The one thing that comes through more than anything in the restaurant industry is movement of people. My restaurant, 70% are Europeans – easily.

DS:        That’s all in this week’s special edition of the Food Programme’s podcast, and we will of course be following events and bringing you up to speed as this story unfolds. For now, I hope the next time we ask ‘how has your week been?’ the answer is a positive one.

Photo by GinkgoTelegraph

On yesterday’s Today programme, Sarah Montague spoke to BBC science editor Tom Feilden about what Brexit would mean to the scientific community.  She said the scientific community was not exactly unified but there was ‘very overwhelming support’ for the EU, ‘not least because they argue the UK gets out more than it puts in.

Feilden said that with ‘one or two’ notable exceptions, the community was devastated with the result of the referendum, and threw in that there were ‘no two ways about that’. He ad,ded that he had spoken to Nobel laureate Sir Paul Nurse who was shortly to be director of  the Francis Crick Institute. He had described Brexit  as the worst disaster for UK science.  Feilden stated:

…the real underpinning behind that is . . . these days, science is not about one bloke in a garret, you know, thinking away about a problem, like Einstein did, and coming up with a solution, it’s a collaborative venture. And the UK has thrived and played a leading role in this wider collaborative, cooperative atmosphere within the European Union. Erm . . .

Montague asked if it was therefore the freedom of movement that was the principle concern. Fielden agreed and said it boiled down to that the UK had been able to attract the best brains to the best universities, so that the UK had become a ‘scientific powerhouse’ and a ‘leading light for science in Europe’.

Montague suggested that they were also worried about money. Feilden again agreed with her. He responded:

They, they, they, basically the two concerns come down to: we pay in quite a lot of money into the scientific kitty, if you like for Europe, but we get out a lot more in terms of the grants, and that’s because we’re doing so well at science. And the second is this idea of free movement. Those are the two key things, that it is a collaborative venture and people have to be able to move around and come and share their ideas and do their good science here at universities here.

Montague finally asked if anyone had any ideas in the new world, whatever it looked like. Feilden responded:

Well, that’s part of the problem. I mean (fragments of words, unclear) and I spoke to Sir Paul, he talked about a political vacuum, about nobody being in, nobody knows what the plan is, there was no preplanning ahead of the referendum result. And I think, you know, we’re going to hear some initial thoughts from Jo Johnson later today, because there isn’t a plan and the plan depends so much on what deal we can strike with the European Union over the coming two years.

At 7.49am, Montague  said that Sir Paul Nurse, the Nobel laureate, had said that research in the UK was facing its biggest threat in living memory. She explained that UK universities and research centres received billions from the EU and relied on the free movement of people; a quarter of the scientists working at Cambridge ‘were from the EU’. Montague said the science minister Jo Johnson  would be making a speech setting put what would happen next.  She added that Dame Anne Glover had told her of her fears. Glover said that exit would affect funding streams such as Horizon 2020 and would limit the ability to get the best minds to come to the UK and to contribute to science, technology and engineering. Montague said that countries like Turkey had access to the money even though they were not in the EU. Glover said that they had to pay for access and were the poor relatives – they could not influence anything. Montague asked if we were getting more out of the EU than was put in. Glover replied that this was substantially the case, the UK put £5.4bn in and got £8.8bn out. Montague asked if the funding could be protected and free movement of people to get better control of immigration that would satisfy scientists. Glover replied:

Not really, because . . . we want free movement of people, that’s what we rely on to get the best possible advantage from Horizon 2020. And there’s a precedent here in that Switzerland was a full associated country of Horizon 2020, as soon as they voted in a referendum to restrict immigration in Switzerland, overnight they became a non-associated country, and could no longer have access.

Montague suggested that she was doing down Britain’s brilliant scientists and asked what would really happen. Glover said that they would still be here, but the problem was that science was ‘truly global’ and if papers were published with only British scientists on the by-line they would not have the same impact – papers needed international co-authors. Montague suggested that if the UK was out of the EU it could still work with European partners and others from the rest of the world. Glover replied that a funding mechanism would have to be found. She declared:

We have a perfect system at the moment, and that’s going to be undermined or denied to us as part of leaving the European Union.

SM: And on that costing, how much would the UK government need to put in to make up for the loss?

DAG: I think that UK government would have to fund UK science just shy of an extra £1 billion per annum. Now, we could provide that funding, but we still wouldn’t have the minds, so that won’t be addressed just by the UK government putting in a lot of funding.

Montague then introduced Professor Angus Dalglish, who she said was a spokesman for Scientists for Britain’ which had campaigned for Brexit’. She asked him if damage would be done to scientific research by removing free movement of people and limiting funding. Dalglish said this was hysterical. Science was not restricted by borders and leaving the EU would not limit the collaboration that had always gone on.  He added:

What they’re talking about here is the funding which is the money that we pay in and get out, and it’s very focused on, that sum of money which was mentioned there, which is for the peer-reviewed funding. They’ve . . . she didn’t mention the fact that there’s a large structural fund thereto, which we pay a fortune into and get very little out. And the Scientists for EU freely admit that an enormous amount of that money cannot be traced, it just goes on corruption and waste, which I think largely defines . . .

Montague interrupted to ask what size it was and what it was for. Dlaglish said it was 57 billion and Britain got 2 billion out, of the 57 billion, the UK contributed about eight billion. Montague asked if therefore there was a net gain of six billion that could be spent across the board. Dalglish replied: .

Yes, I do. And that, that’s just a part of the budget that goes on scientific related issues, and there’s all the other budget money, erm, that we put in, that we don’t get back. And as you quite rightly say, a lot of other countries participate in these programs without being in the EU, and really, can you tell me that in the European Union, the top ten universities, the top eight are UK, er, one of them is Switzerland, not in the EU, so in the top ten universities.

Montague pointed out that Glover had suggested that when Switzerland had tried to restrict immigration, they had been excluded from the fund. Dalglish said the next step would be to negotiate. Britain was the fifth biggest economy and there would and had high scientific standing. Montague interrupted to say that there was issue of free movement of people. Sir Paul Nurse and probably the majority of senior scientists in this country of all the universities thought ending that  would be bad not just for funding but free movement itself, ‘the ability of people to come and work here’.  Dalglish said people would still want to come – there would be freedom of labour as opposed to people, and there would be no restrictions on people who came for jobs Montague riposted:

Why not, why are the rules about freedom of movement not going to apply to scientists, if they apply to everybody else?

Dalglish said the subject would be settled by negotiation, the UK would not stop essential workers from the EU such as doctors coming to the country, and suggested there had been a confusion between the movement of people and the movement of labour. Montague replied:

. . . so, on the numbers, because a lot of people would say, ‘Look, the numbers have to come down’, you would say, from what you’re suggesting, numbers don’t necessarily have to come down, it’s just who we get in?

PAD:      No, we’ve always suggested that one way round this is a points-style system, like they have in Australia, and then people come immediately back and say that’s to increase immigration, but the same thing can be used here to decide the quality of people who you have, in. And I think that this idea that we won’t get the best brains if we’re outside the European Union is clearly not true.  I can think of half a dozen really top people who are here from Australia and New Zealand, and they’re not in the European Union, so I do not think that for people of really high calibre it’s going to make any difference to [them] at all.

ANALYSIS: Today’s approach assumed from the outset that there was massive support for remaining in the EU from the scientific community.  In doing so, yet again, the BBC was amplifying to the maximum extent the dangers and negativities of Brexit.

But how strong was support for ‘remain’ in the academic community? Professor Dalglish in his comments above underlined that at least some scientists and academics think strongly that Brexit will not affect funding or the range of research.  The organisation he represents, Scientists for Britain, has a website which explains why and also challenges the numbers that think EU support is vital for the science community.   It specifically claims that numbers supporting ‘remain’ have been exaggerated.

Tom Feilden, in his overview report (broadcast at 6.10am), seemed to totally reject this. He said that with ‘only one or two exceptions’ academics supported staying in the EU.

He did not say how he had arrived at this conclusion. One possibility is that the Times Education Supplement published about a week before the poll a survey of the views of academics about the referendum.

If so, Feilden was on dubious territory. Of the 403,385 staff working in higher education in 2014-15, only 1,082 responded to the survey. That equates to around 0.27% (fewer than one in three hundred) of the target group. More than 99% of academics did not feel motivated to vote or were not consulted. It could therefore be argued that the vast majority of academics do not actually care about the EU’s role in research.

Feilden might also have drawn on a release by the formal ‘remain’ organisation British Stronger in Europe, which claimed that 5,000 scientists supported ‘remain’. This was based on that the 5,000 had written to newspapers outlining their concerns. Thus undoubtedly happened and indicated that some of the scientists were militantly concerned.

But the question here is how representative or typical this grouping was. The initiative was pushed by BSE.  Those who signed the letter were clearly politically motivated, and for example, Sir Paul Nurse, one of the key figures behind the letter, is an active member of the Labour party.  These are important caveats which should have been pointed out to the audience.

But Feilden did not do so. He gave the impression instead that the scientific community was devastated and that this, that it was believed, was ‘the worst disaster’ for UK science.  He emphasised this by stating the claims expressed in the BSE letter (and later by Dame Anne Glover) that this was because their research was a ‘collaborative venture’ which would now come to an end.

Sarah Montague compounded the negativity by asking Feilden if (the possible ending) of ’freedom of movement’ was also a ‘principle concern’. Feilden asserted that such movement had allowed the UK to become a ‘scientific powerhouse’. Montague’s then asked if the loss of EU money was also a problem. Feilden noted that the UK paid money into the EU, but ‘got a lot more out’ because the UK was doing so well in terms of science.  Winding up, Feilden pointed out that Sir Paul Nurse, had also warned there was now a ‘political vacuum’  and there was no plan for what happened next.

Thus overall, Feilden put forward that Brexit would be deeply damaging to scientific research in the UK, said all but one or two researchers wanted to remain in the EU, and pushed hard Sir Paul Nurse’s agenda that this was a disaster without a plan of repair or way forward.

At 7.49am, in her interviews with Glover and Dalglish, Sarah Montague in effect picked up where Feilden had left off, and amplified his negativity about Brexit further. She first noted that Sir Paul Nurse, ‘the Nobel Laureate’ – thus emphasising his credentials – had claimed research was facing its biggest threat in living memory. Next she stressed that UK universities received ‘billions’ from the EU, and repeated the claim that this research activity relied upon the ‘free movement of people’ – further emphasising its importance by also pointing out that a quarters of research staff at Cambridge were from the EU.

In the pre-recorded interview with Dame Anne Glover, Montague put a couple of mildly adversarial points – such as that Turkish researchers received money even thought they were outside the EU – but the main aim of the sequence appeared to be to let Glover push that almost everything in this domain was now at risk, that Britain got far more from the EU than it put in; that the free movement of people was essential because science was ‘truly global’; and that Switzerland, which was outside the EU, could not have access to the EU funding because it did not accept free movement. Glover concluded – without challenge from Montague – that the current system was ‘perfect’ and it was now threatened by Brexit.

Montague moved on to Dalglish at this point. She did not tell the audience anything about him (unlike with Sir Paul Nurse) other than he was a spokesman for Scientists for Britain. She could easily have dug out that he is a leading oncology with a distinguished international career and sits on the European Commission Cancer Board, making him especially knowledgeable about the EU, but did not do so. She could also have explained more about Scientists for Britain in terms of its potential credibility but did not. The editorial effort was entirely the other way in underlining that the credentials of those who challenged Brexit were high and impressive.

That said, she allowed Dalglish to put across clearly that he believed that the EU money was not as crucial to scientists had had been claimed, that the UK did not get much money out of the structural research fund, and that reaction to the potential changes was ‘hysterical’; that the EU administration of the research budget was inefficient and even corrupt; that free movement of people was not actually the issue – what counted was that free movement of labour would continue after Brexit, allowing academics to come to the UK. Montague pushed the discussion towards the critical importance of the ending of free movement of people issue, but Dalglish was able to put across his counter views.

The main issue here overall was therefore the undoubted bias of Feilden and Montague in their explanation and determination of the issues being considered. They both in different ways underlined the strength of the scientific community’s concern about Brexit and the related allegations that the UK was going to suffer to disaster level. Dalglish vigorously disputed this, but by the time he appeared the potential importance of what he said had already been undermined – it seemed from the set-up that he was a lone voice against the undoubted and incontrovertible weight of academic opinion.

This was thus another part of the BBC’s continuation of Project Fear about Brexit – greater credibility and weight was given to those who were warning of the consequences, and arguably this was a continuation of the BSE fight against Brexit.

Transcript of BBC Radio 4, ‘Today’, 30th June 2016, Scientists and the Referendum, 6.12am

SARAH MONTAGUE:      The Science Minister, Jo Johnson will be speaking to leading scientists today, not least to consider what Brexit will mean for the scientific community and research.  Tom Feilden is our science editor, and Tom, the science community in a way, not entirely unified, but very overwhelming support for the EU, not least because they argue that the UK gets out more than it puts in?

TOM FEILDEN:   Well, I certainly think it’s fair to say that the scientific community, with, as you say, one or two notable exceptions was devastated by the result of the referendum, there’s no two ways about that.  I spoke to Sir Paul Nurse yesterday, that’s the Nobel laureate, he’s going to be boss of the new Francis Crick Institute, former president of the Royal Society.  He described it as ‘the worst disaster for UK science . . . ever.’ Erm, and (short laugh?) (fragments of words, unclear) the real underpinning behind that is . . . these days, science is not about one bloke in a garret, you know, thinking away about a problem, like Einstein did, and coming up with a solution, it’s a collaborative venture.  And the UK has thrived and played a leading role in this wider collaborative, cooperative atmosphere within the European Union.  Erm . . .

SM:       So it’s freedom of movement is their particular concern?

TF:         Yeah. I mean, basically, what it comes down to is we’ve been able to attract the best brains to the best universities, some of the best universities in the world and have really been able to become a scientific powerhouse here in the UK, a leading light for science in Europe.

SM:       They’re also worried about money though, aren’t they?

TF:         They are. They, they, they, basically the two concerns come down to: we pay in quite a lot of money into the scientific kitty, if you like for Europe, but we get out a lot more in terms of the grants, and that’s because we’re doing so well at science. And the second is this idea of free movement.  Those are the two key things, that it is a collaborative venture and people have to be able to move around and come and share their ideas and do their good science here at universities here.

SM:       And does anybody have any ideas as to how to address those concerns in the new world, whatever the new world looks like?

TF:         Well, that’s part of the problem. I mean (fragments of words, unclear) and I spoke to Sir Paul, he talked about a political vacuum, about nobody being in, nobody knows what the plan is, there was no preplanning ahead of the referendum result.  And I think, you know, we’re going to hear some initial thoughts from Jo Johnson later today, because there isn’t a plan and the plan depends so much on what deal we can strike with the European Union over the coming two years.

SM:       A story we’ll be returning to, not least at ten to eight this morning, Tom Feilden, thanks very much.

Transcript of BBC Radio 4, ‘Today’, 30th June 2016, Scientists and the Referendum, 7.49am

 SARAH MONTAGUE:      The Nobel Laureate and former president of the Royal Society, Professor Paul Nurse has said research in this country is facing its biggest threat in living memory.  UK universities and research centres receive billions from the EU, and the scientific community relies on free movement of people.  A quarter of the scientists working at Cambridge from the EU.  The science Minister, Jo Johnson, will be speaking to scientists today who want to know what happens now.  Dame Anne Glover was the first and last scientific adviser to the President of the European Commission, she is now at Aberdeen University.  And she told me about her fears.

DAME ANNE GLOVER:   My concern will be that a negotiation to leave the European Union will somehow affect our ability to be able to access both the funding stream, which is Horizon 2020, to influence the strategy of what that funding is focused towards, and will limit our ability to get the best minds in the world to come to the UK and to contribute to science, engineering and technology here.

SM:       But there are countries like Turkey and Israel who have access to Horizon 2020 funding, and they’re not part of the EU.

DAG:     They have to pay for what they get, they cannot influence anything done in Horizon 2020, so they’re really poor relatives.

SM:       And the argument is that . . . what, as things stand we get more funding out of the EU than we put in?

DAG:     Substantially, when it comes to research.  So, if we look at the last funding programme, we got about €8.8 billion out of that program, and our proportional contribution was €5.4 billion.

SM:       If there was some way to protect that, but to change freedom of movement, so we have better control of immigration, would that satisfy scientists?

DAG:     Not really, because . . . we want free movement of people, that’s what we rely on to get the best possible advantage from Horizon 2020.  And there’s a precedent here in that Switzerland was a full associated country of Horizon 2020, as soon as they voted in a referendum to restrict immigration in Switzerland, overnight they became a non-associated country, and could no longer have access.

SM:       Okay, say the worst happens, and we lose these things you’re talking about, what difference would it really make, because a lot of people would say, ‘hold on a second, you’re doing the UK down here, we have brilliant scientists, we’ll still have brilliant scientists.’?

DAG:     Yeah, and you’re absolutely right, we still will be able to science.  But science is unusual, because it is truly global, and so if I publish a paper but just with other UK scientists, all the evidence says that that paper will have less impact than if I publish with international co-authors.

SM:       But you absolutely made the point, science is global, sites will still be global if we are out of the EU and we can still work with European partners as well as the rest of the world, surely?

DAG:     But we have to find a funding mechanism to allow us to do that.  We have a perfect system at the moment, and that’s going to be undermined or denied to us as part of leaving the European Union.

SM:       And on that costing, how much would the UK government need to put in to make up for the loss?

DAG:     I think that UK government would have to fund UK science just shy of an extra £1 billion per annum.  Now, we could provide that funding, but we still wouldn’t have the minds, so that won’t be addressed just by the UK government putting in a lot of funding.

SM:       Dame Anne Glover, talking to me earlier. Well, here in the studio is Professor Angus Dalglish, who’s a spokesman for Scientists for Britain and campaigned for Brexit, good morning to you.

PROFESSOR ANGUS DALGLISH:  Good morning.

SM:       Do you accept these arguments about the damage that would be done to scientific research by removing free movement and limiting the funding?

PAD:      No, I don’t.  I think it’s rather hysterical actually, because science . . . er, scientists are rather like fish, they don’t really know where the waters are, territorial boundaries, etcetera, and er, I really don’t think it would interfere with the collaboration that we’ve always done.  What they’re talking about here is the funding which is the money that we pay in and get out, and it’s very focused on, that sum of money which was mentioned there, which is for the peer-reviewed funding.  They’ve . . . she didn’t mention the fact that there’s a large structural fund thereto, which we pay a fortune into and get very little out.  And the Scientists for EU freely admit that an enormous amount of that money cannot be traced, it just goes on corruption and waste, which I think largely defines . . .

SM:       (interrupting) Structural funding, how much? What sort of . . . what size is it and what’s it for?

PAD:      The size is about 57 billion (no denomination given) and we get less than 2 billion out of it.

SM:       How much do we put into it?

PAD:      About 8 billion, as far as I (word unclear due to speaking over)

SM:       (speaking over) So you’re saying there’s a net gain of £6 billion that we could get from that, which we could spend on, on, across the board?

PAD:      Yes I do. And that, that’s just a part of the budget that goes on scientific related issues, and there’s all the other budget money, erm, that we put in, that we don’t get back. And as you quite rightly say, a lot of other countries participate in these programs without being in the EU, and really, can you tell me that in the European Union, the top ten universities, the top eight are UK, er, one of them is Switzerland, not in the EU, so in the top ten universities . . .

SM:       (speaking over) But she made a point about Switzerland, which is that the mo— . . . when they voted to restrict immigration . . .

PAD:      Hmm.

SM:       . . . overnight they were effectively excluded from this fund?

PAD:      Well, one of the things I think we have to negotiate, we’re not Switzerland, we are the fifth largest trading organisation in the world, we’re probably the most important scientific voice in the world, we have more Nobel Prize winners, etcetera, and they impact on the rest of Europe, so I don’t see why we’re not going to have a voice if we just participate as we’re doing, and I don’t see (fragment of word, unclear due to speaking over)

SM:       (speaking over) (fragments of words, unclear) I mean, (fragments of words, unclear) there’s the funding, there is also this question of free movement, you have Professor Sir Paul Nurse, a Nobel Laureate, you have the majority, probably of senior scientists in this country, all the universities saying that this would be bad, and if not just for the funding but also for the free mood (sic) movement. That ability for people to come and work here.

PAD:      The ability for people to come and work here has always been the case, and I don’t think it’s going to be affected by this.  What we’re talking about is freedom of labour, as opposed to freedom of movement of people, and if we don’t . . . we will not have restrictions on people to come here for jobs, and for basically (fragments of words, unclear due to speaking over)

SM:       (speaking over) Why not, why are the rules about freedom of movement not going to apply to scientists, if they apply to everybody else?

PAD:      Well, they’re not going to apply, this is one of the things that’s going to be thrashed out in Brexit, they’re not going to apply to people who you really need.  You’re not going to stop people from the EU coming to be doctors or nurses etcetera here, when there’s a job to go to.  That’s not going to change. I mean, half the people who come here aren’t even in the EU, and that’s not going to change if they’re needed. So I think that that’s . . . there’s been a big confusion about movement, freedom of movement of people and freedom of movement of labour.

SM:       So can I . . . so, on the numbers, because a lot of people would say, ‘Look, the numbers have to come down’, you would say, from what you’re suggesting, numbers don’t necessarily have to come down, it’s just who we get in?

PAD:      No, we’ve always suggested that one way round this is a points-style system, like they have in Australia, and then people come immediately back and say that’s to increase immigration, but the same thing can be used here to decide the quality of people who you have, in. And I think that this idea that we won’t get the best brains if we’re outside the European Union is clearly not true.  I can think of half a dozen really top people who are here from Australia and New Zealand, and they’re not in the European Union, so I do not think that for people of really high calibre it’s going to make any difference to [them] at all.

SM:       Professor Angus Dalglish, thank you very much.

Photo by Trondheim Havn

The referendum has carved our country into two camps, sharpened existing divisions, and created some new ones. 

We heard the same slogan in the referendum too. 

Work out the British meaning yourself.

Leavers tend to believe in a strong unitary state, based at Westminster, ruling over the whole of the UK.

They dislike devolution and the EU in equal measure, and believe not so much in the old British Empire, but in what some have called the English Empire.

Those in the “Remain” camp tend to be more relaxed about more diffused sovereignty and identity, and with power either devolved down to the nations that make up our country, or up to supra-national organisations such as the EU.

Referendums tend to be a device to keep divided parties together.

This one has not only torn the parties asunder but divided the people.

It is hard to see how the political process over the next few months and years will serve to heal it.

We see ourselves as separate, and so we shall soon be cut out of councils and commission that are still shaping a continent. Some in Brussels may reflect smugly on how John of Gaunt’s speech in Richard II concludes: “That England that was wont to conquer others/Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.”

One might think that is trivial. But maybe it highlights something we rarely realise in our desire for hard power – the extent of our soft power.

Now we want to be outside the whole shebang. Don’t be surprised if the instinct of some is to make sure that we feel some discomfort on our way out.

Photo by The Nick Page

Many – including the writers of a Daily Mail editorial and the Mail on Sunday’s columnist Peter Hitchens – claimed that the BBC had changed its spots during the EU referendum campaign, and was bringing impartial coverage.

Clearly, there was – for the first time – an attempt at least to talk to the ‘exit’ side. But since the result was announced, any semblance of balance seems to have evaporated.

News-watch’s BBC Complaints website has been inundated since Friday morning with a deluge of submissions, all saying broadly the same thing: the BBC now sees its mission to undermine Brexit in any and every way it can.

Project Fear might have been masterminded by David Cameron and the Tory high command, but something similar now seems to being pursued with vigour by the BBC as it seeks to bring to light every reason it can as to why the electorate was wrong, and even – as Today presenter Nick Robinson claimed on Tuesday – that the referendum itself was ‘unnecessary’.

Keeping track of the Corporation’s new mission is a major headache because almost every programme seems to have the same multi-pronged obstructive agenda:

• the vote for ‘exit’ was ultimately based on a form of senile dementia, coupled with hatred of immigrants, and thus on xenophobia and racism;
• that the young have been deprived of their EU birthright by selfish, reactionary pensioners;
• that Nigel Farage was the prime mover in an unleashing of ‘hatred’. Presenters such as Martha Kearney now routinely dismiss his approach with derogatory adjectives such as ‘sneering’;
• to report in close detail any sign of economic unease and magnify it to the maximum extent;
• to root out with tireless zeal all those who say that ‘Brexit’ is so difficult to achieve and such an inconvenience that it will require at best a snap general election and at worst a second referendum to deal with the issues involved.
• To support in every way it can the cause of those wanting a second referendum because basically the first time round the electorate did not know what they were voting for.

News-watch will write a full detailed report on this in due course. But meanwhile, Exhibit A in this barrage of negativity came on Newsnight last Friday night. It was the first edition to be broadcast after the BBC referendum guidelines were no longer in force. By golly, editor Ian Katz and his Guardian chums went to town.

Pride of place was given Kenneth Clarke, arguably the most ardent, embittered and vitriolic Europhile of them all (News-watch research shows that he has been delivering the same cracked messages for 17 years), to posit and push hard that the referendum result was not conclusive and had unleashed chaos.

The show was orchestrated by a hyperactive Evan Davis, who seized upon every opportunity to show that Brexit would not work. Star turns included Kirsty Wark, who emphasised that Scotland had voted ‘in’ because Scots were more multicultural and welcoming of immigration than England; and then ‘equality campaigner’ (and ‘transgender rights activist’) Paris Lees, who said it was clear that Britain was now being led down a ‘very dark path’.

There were ‘balancing’ guests such as ‘exit’ supporters Tim Montgomerie of the Times and Suzanne Evans of Vote Leave. They expressed differing views but there could be no doubt of what Newsnight’s overall goal was as the dust on the poll settled:  to establish that Brexit equals turmoil.

Exhibit B is an item written on Tuesday by James Naughtie – one of the Corporation’s eminence gris –  for the BBC website. It has to be read in full to be appreciated.  To cut a long story short, he compares the upheaval now underway to that when Henry V died, and en route betrays that he thinks the referendum ballot, in which 17 million Britons voted for ‘exit’ was a chance occurrence. A magisterial posting by Craig Byers of Is the BBC Biased? betrays the extent of his blatant bias.

Exhibit C is the pushing of the ‘Brexit equals racism’ agenda on multiple fronts. On Tuesday’s BBC1 News at Ten for example, it was stressed that the number of racist assaults had increased in the wake of the vote, and BBC reporter Ed Thomas went out on the streets of Leeds to show, first that local Latvian residents were under attack, and then, for good measure, found what he said was ‘a fascist’ with a swastika tattoo on his biceps to ram home that supporters of ‘out’ meant business.

In the same vein, Victoria Derbyshire assembled for her BBC1 show earlier in the day, a cast of interest groups and campaigners who were angrily determined to show the level of racism in the ‘leave’ vote.   Shazia Awan – who it was said had faced ‘racist abuse’ – stated (over caption overlays illustrating the alleged extent of the abuse):

‘Now, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and their alliance with Nigel Farage and taking donations from the BNP have caused this. Boris Johnson is not fit to be leader of the Conservative Party.’

Only time, and more detailed analysis, will show the full extent of this BBC bias. But these early signs are that for the Corporation, the poll last Thursday was an aberration to be fought on every possible front.  The gloves are off.

Guest post from Sue, of Is the BBC Biased?

“Many of our young women don’t feel safe on the street.”

Who said such a thing? Nigel Farage, projecting a post Remain, Cologne-like future? Nah. It was Jo Cox, in a video she made for her report about Islamophobia.Thankfully we don’t see many political assassinations in this country, so when one suddenly occurs the whole world is horrified.

It was truly shocking last week to see and hear reports of Jo Cox MP being stabbed and shot outside her constituency office in broad daylight, and later hearing reports that she had died.

To make matters even more poignant, she was a young mother and a relatively new MP, and she had made quite an impression in the short time since being elected.

Most people immediately wondered what others made of it and rushed to see what the media had to say. Perhaps because journalists and bloggers regard topicality as their primary duty, several of them duly dished up an instant response. You might say they were stunned into the opposite of silence. 

This isn’t the first time people have made absolute idiots of themselves in similar circumstances; they should have known better, and I bet some of them wished they’d kept quiet, or waited till the dust had settled before making rash and reckless remarks  – at least until we figure out what’s going on, as Donald Trump might say.

Initially no-one was sure if Thomas Mair had really uttered ‘Britain First!” and anyone with the slightest sympathy with the Leave  campaign wished it were not so.  The ‘Leave’ campaign suffered an unquantifiable setback because of Mair’s apparent far-right associations, just as the Remain campaign would have suffered had the cry had not been “(Put) Britain First”, but “Allahu Ackbar”.

I don’t really think this murder had much to do with the referendum. Mair was probably a closet Nazi all along, but nice and polite with it; a good son and mentally disturbed to boot. Paranoid schizophrenia, someone suggested, a theory somewhat borne out by his odd behaviour in court. Asked to confirm his name he replied:”Death to traitors, freedom for Britain” a Breivik-like outburst that doesn’t sound much like a cold-blooded political statement from a ‘sound of mind’ Nazi – that is if cold-blooded Nazis can be sound of mind. We might get to find out more about that in due course.

I’ve spent hours looking online and following links, and I’ve come across some of the most virulent and abhorrent antisemitic bile on websites that contain white-supremacist Jew-hating comments. I wonder if they contravene the Incitement to Racial Hatred act.

One article looks at Jo Cox’s pet projects and spins them furiously in one particular direction and details some of her anti-Israel / pro-Palestinian activities; the comments below take things to a truly shocking level.