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This election is a battle between the Tories and the broadcasters

2017 General Election, BBC Bias, Today Programme | 21st April 2017 | by David Keighley

This is an election like no other for the BBC. They have a mission.

Two weeks ago, as is laid out here, Today presenter Nick Robinson effectively declared war on Brexit with his statement that the Corporation would henceforward work flat out to find the problems with Brexit, and not bring balanced coverage of the Leave perspective. Of which, more later.

Since then, it has become painfully evident what he meant. The Corporation’s Article 50 coverage relentlessly highlighted the difficulties, with pride of place given to predictions by correspondents of decades-long wrangles, inflation of perceived problems over Gibraltar, the continuing need for the European Court of Justice and dire warnings that the British tourist and hospitality industry would collapse if the UK did not have continued access to EU labour.

In the same vein, after the general election was announced, Today’s business news – like a heat-seeking missile – sought out the views of the (ex BBC) DG of the CBI, Carolyn Fairbairn, on the need for continued free movement, reinforced an hour later by the ultra-Remain businessman Sir Martin Sorrell, who predicted that the real reason for the election was so that Mrs May could achieve a soft-Brexit in line with his own objectives.

To be fair, Andrew Lillico, a pro-Leave business figure also appeared, but there was no doubt which views were considered to be the most important.

So what will happen during the general election? This – despite what the Conservative Party machine might say – is effectively a second Brexit referendum, brought about because, as Theresa May has acknowledged, the Remain side are determined to thwart Brexit.

There are, of course, special rules for broadcasters during general elections. Broadly, they provide that much more attention must be paid to balance between the parties contesting the election.

But here, in this election, is an immediate problem. Those rules (as defined, for example by Ofcom in Section 6 of its programming code) are designed mainly to prevent imbalances between political parties.

That creates an immediate problem with an election so inevitably focused on a single issue: that the overwhelming majority of current MPs (most of whom will become candidates after May 3) were Remainers, and after the referendum vote want a strongly-limited and compromised form of EU exit.

Labour, for example, as exemplified by shadow chancellor John McDonnell on Today on Wednesday morning, says it now supports Brexit. But the form of Brexit it wants is continued membership of the single market, and qualified support for free movement. The Liberal Democrats and the SNP, of course, aggressively oppose Brexit – and make no bones about it.

The BBC, in this framework, has oodles of ‘wriggle-room’ to sidestep the election rules, and to continue to pursue vigorously its self-declared campaign to expose to the maximum the pitfalls of Brexit throughout the election period.

Of course, election coverage of the issues involved is also subject to the normal over-arching rules of public service impartiality. But it is precisely here that the BBC – as is clear in the Nick Robinson Radio Times piece – has interpreted the clauses relating to ‘due impartiality’ according to its own anti-Brexit ends. In the Corporation’s estimation, it is on a mission to spread ‘understanding’ about the exit process. In reality, that means something very different: the goal is to portray exit in the most negative light possible.

News-watch coverage of previous general elections has shown that, despite the supposedly strict general election impartiality rules, the BBC’s approach to EU coverage was seriously flawed. After the 2015 poll, it was noted:

…the analysis shows that the issue of possible withdrawal was not explored fairly or deeply enough…Coverage was heavily distorted, for instance by the substantial business news comment on the Today programme that withdrawal would damage British trade and jobs. The message of potential damage to the economy was supplemented by the provision of frequent platforms for Labour and Liberal Democrat figures to warn of the same dangers. The spokesmen from these parties were not properly challenged on their views.

Will this change in 2017? Fat chance. Subsequent News-watch reports have shown that this bias has continued, regardless of the June 23 vote.

The problem now is that – despite the new BBC Charter – the Corporation’s approach to impartiality in news coverage is mainly self-regulated through its own Complaints Unit. Ofcom only enters the frame if there is an appeal against the BBC’s own rulings, and that’s a procedure that takes months. News-watch’s complaint about the BBC’s fantasy race hate murder in Harlow took six months to grind through the BBC machine.

The Conservative Party under David Cameron fluffed the opportunity to achieve genuine reform of the BBC. Will that glaring failure now come back to haunt Theresa May?

Photo by secretlondon123

The gloves are off in BBC’s fight against Brexit

BBC Bias, EU Referendum | 28th June 2016 | by David Keighley

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.

Referendum Blog: June 27

EU Referendum Blog | 27th June 2016 | by David Keighley

BBC CONTINUES ‘PROJECT FEAR’: How is the BBC going to report Brexit? The early signs are not good.

News-watch, via its sister BBC Complaints website, has been inundated with submissions – many more than during the referendum campaign itself – that the Corporation is treating the Brexit vote as an aberration and a disaster.

One exasperated viewer of BBC1’s news bulletins wrote:

Every time I see any report about Brexit the people who are aired by the BBC are making horrible xenophobic comments. Brexit is being portrayed as the English being xenophobic when they want freedom of law-making among other things. This is not racism. This is not about Europeans at all, it is about the EU regulations and the fact that people want to have control in their own country.’

And a listener to Radio 4’s Any Questions? asserted:

I listened as always to BBC R4s any questions today and was disgusted, but not surprised, at the continuing derogatory bias against Brexit. Just two examples from the programme.

1. The audience was clearly selected to represent those in the population who either choose IN as their active vote or ticked IN because passively they were undecided, did not what to do, felt uninformed, ‘better the devil you know’, keep the ‘status quo’, etcetera. These people were clapping and whooping the Remain points and booing the Brexit side, while the later audience members, in their minority, demonstrated appropriate polite applause.

2. The panel representing the Brexit side were speaking of hope, trade with the world and an upbeat, honest stance. Conversely the Remain panel continue to childishly project fear, with talk of being ‘afraid’ and in a ‘dark place’, in a ‘dark wood’. This sort of unhelpful, inappropriate language does just not have a place, and Jonathan Dimbleby, as the chair, did nothing to address this. Deplorable.

Following on from this, R4 Today’s headlines this morning (27/6) were in full negative mode. Heavy stress was given to stories which suggested the United Kingdom could fracture (with potential exit by both Scotland AND Northern Ireland), and that business leaders would stop investing and cut jobs.

Sarah Metcalf, as the programme closed reflected the overall editorial tone. Yes, there had been a vote for exit, but in the BBC’s estimation, she opined, it was a ‘very confused’ voice.’

Which part of the word ‘leave’ on the referendum ballot paper would that have been?

Nick Robinson stressed after George Osborne delivered his holding statement on Brexit at 7.15am that he was dressed in a ‘funereal’ dark suit. Arguably, this also spoke volumes about BBC attitudes. Leaving the EU is tantamount to death rites; on hand to bolster the impression was a UBS analyst who thought that the coming months would be disastrous for the UK economy.

Maximum prominence was also given to the views of Michael Heseltine in wanting a second referendum, and declaring that dire consequences were inevitable. True, this was immediately balanced by counter views about the positive benefits of Brexit from a pro-‘exit’ businessman. But this ran very much against the flow of the rest of the programme, a begrudging inclusion and a fig leaf.

This overall, all-pervading tone of doom was set only hours after the polls had closed by Exhibit A: Friday night’s Newsnight (transcript below), the first edition of the programme not bound by the strict referendum balance guidelines.

How was it? The transcript needs to be read in full to appreciate the full range of negativity involved. But in summary, it seems that the Corporation has reverted to its a full pro-EU campaigning mode that News-watch has chronicled for the past 17 years. The programme can best be described as a continuation of the remain side’s Project Fear.

In this post-referendum world, Nicola Sturgeon and Kenneth Clarke, it seems, are now regarded as the revered patron saints of the martyred, wronged Remain side. In parallel, a goal appears to be to stress every possible negative about Brexit; no production effort is going to be spared, in demonstrating how ignorant and prejudiced are the grass roots voters who had the temerity to want ‘out’.

Of course the job of journalism is to explore the weaknesses in political stances. But Friday night’s this amounted to a declaration of all-out war on Brexit, complete with funereal music.

A comparison is that when David Cameron announced there would be a referendum on EU membership back in 2013, Newsnight covered his decision which contained 18 pro-EU figures ranged against one who was not. News-watch’s complaint about this went to the BBC Trustees’ Editorial Standards Committee who declared that because this was not a major news event,

Presenter Evan Davis was in full attack dog mode, and for good effect, uttered a theatrical, incredulous ‘wow’ when he detected (wrongly) that pro-exit MEP Daniel Hannan had rowed back from a campaign promise about immigration.

Davis gave maximum exposure to those who still opposed exit, and tried most in his interviewing to undermine the ‘exit’ side. For example, in the opening interview sequence dealing with political reaction to the poll, Kenneth Clarke – who revealed that his political career began because he wanted to join the then European Economic Community in the 1960s – Davis allowed Clarke to push to maximum extent his resentment about the referendum outcome and push his pro-EU ardour.

In the same sequence, Tristram Hunt was not challenged about his highly questionable contention that in reality, Labour supporters in places like Brighton and Exeter supported staying in the EU, and therefore, there was no real problem in Labour’s overall pro-EU stance.

In sharp contrast, Vote leave representative Suzanne Evans was subjected to sharp questioning about whether promises to fund the NHS out of the UK’s EU contribution would be kept.

In her contribution, Kirsty Wark, speculating about the possibility of the break-up of the UK in consequence of the vote, stressed that Scotland (unlike England, it was implied) had sent its sons and daughters all over the world and had welcomed many different nations from time immemorial. She gushed:

‘…we, in turn, have welcomed many different nations here – Russians, Italians, Poles, Pakistanis, and immigration just does not seem to be the same issue here as it is south of the border. Why do you think it is that immigration doesn’t seem to be such an issue as it is in England?

Followed by a Vox Pop contributor who said:
[blockquote]I think that Scotland as a race of people we are just more multicultural, our culture is more varied, if you think about sort of storytelling and music, anything like that, And I just think that we are more accepting of new ideas here.’
During the referendum campaign, the BBC subjected every utterance of ‘exit’ campaigners to fact checks, and usually concluded they were wrong. In this case, some facts about immigration in Scotland are relevant. ‘Multicultural’ or not, only 7% of Scotland’s population is currently foreign born, whereas the proportion in the UK is now 14%, the majority of them in England.

Thus Wark’s assertion was highly misleading. It seemed an overt attack on negative attitudes of ‘leave’ voters’ in England.

Transcript of BBC2, Newsnight, 24^th June 2016, EU Referendum, what now? 10.30pm

MARK CARNEY: Good morning.

DAVID DIMBLEBY: Well, at 4.40am, we can now say that . . .

MC: The people of the United Kingdom have voted to leave the European Union.

VOX POP MALE: I’ve got my country back! I’m not going to be here a lot longer, I’m nearly 80. But what I’ve got, I want to keep!

JOURNALIST (to Farage) Should Cameron leave?

NIGEL FARAGE: Not yet.

J: Now?

NF: Well, by about ten o’clock, I would say, would be about right.

DAVID CAMERON: I do not think it would be right for me to try to be the captain that steers our country to its next destination.

FEMALE JOURNALIST: Are you not worried about what you’re hearing this morning? About David Cameron resigning or the strength of the pound?

VOX POP FEMALE: No, no, not at all. Not at all. No, it’s a good thing.

MALE JOURNALIST: A letter of no confidence has been tabled with Jeremy Corbyn.

NICOLA STURGEON: We will begin to prepare the legislation that would be required to enable a new independence referendum.

MARTIN MCGUINNESS: Anybody that doesn’t think this is big stuff needs to get their head around it.

VOX POP FEMALE2: I’m kind of thinking of moving to another country.

MM: This is huge.

BORIS JOHNSON: It was a noble idea for its time. It is no longer right for this country.

VOX POP MALE 2: Chuffed to bits. We’re better off out. Because the French don’t like us and the Germans don’t like us.

VOX POP FEMALE 3: Shocked. Bewildered. I don’t know what’s got to happen next.

VOX POP FEMALE 4: We’ve got nothing. Nothing can get worse, now. We’ve got nowt, so what can get worse than it already is?

MC: Thank you very much.

EVAN DAVIS: So, what now? It’s the biggest financial story since the crash, a huge political story, a once in a generation foreign policy shift, all in one day – not to mention the constitutional uncertainty around Scotland. We can keep calm, but carrying on as before, not really possible. The enormity of what happened has been sinking into voters on both sides today. We mustn’t over interpret the result. If a mere one in 50 of all voters had switched from Leave to Remain, we’d be having a different conversation. But we mustn’t under-interpret it either, and all that it represents. Is this, for example, the first vote ever to say it’s NOT the economy stupid, it’s immigration? Is the real story here a revolution? The latest of a wave of insurrections sweeping the West? A challenge to the established order and the political class? The discontented getting their own back? Or should you view it as an inter-generational struggle? The polls showing under 45s voted in and over 45s wanted us out. And there’s an aftermath of bitterness. One young man’s tweet: “I’m so angry”, he said. “A generation given everything – free education, golden pensions, social mobility – have voted to strip my generation’s future”. Well, for some, it comes down to nothing less than a culture war.

UNNAMED MALE IN STREET: So who’s corrupt and overpaid?

MAN HOLDING BANNER: Europe. Europe.

ED: Youthful urban liberals versus older social conservatives. The former worry that Britain will now turn its back on progressive values. The latter think it’s time for their voice to be heard again. It’s not as clean-cut as that of course, but that’s where the argument goes – what kind of country will we now be? Well, it’s for the history books to argue about the causes of this uprising. We’re going to do something different tonight. We’ll look ahead to what comes next. What’s next for politics in this country? The two major parties both looking battered, both with leadership questions to be answered. What’s next for Europe? How will the EU now choose to treat us? And how does our decision affect the EU? And what’s next for the UK, with Scotland voting so differently to England? Well, of the three “what nexts”, politics comes first, as it shapes everything else. At a turbulent time like this, it might be great to have a Nelson Mandela to take over, heal the wounds, articulate a vision for the country and negotiate a new arrangement with goodwill and good grace. Well, Donald Trump flew into Britain today, but he’s not available. David Cameron is on his way out. And Jeremy Corbyn? Many in Labour want him out, too. It is an awful time to be a mainstream politician. I’m going to be talking to some of them in a minute. But first, I’m here with our political editor, Nick Watt. I mean, Nick, in Westminster this morning, shock and awe?

NICK WATT: Well, they were absolutely shell-shocked in Downing Street by this result. They had a simple thought, Project Fear would deliver them a second referendum win but instead what you saw power and authority seeping away from Number Ten a Number Eleven Downing Street. You might have thought, for example, on a day like this that the Chancellor would calm the markets, but no, that job was left to the Governor of the Bank of England and you just had a couple of tweets from the Chancellor. In the case of Number Ten, We were talking to one Whitehall source who, likened Number Ten to doughnut, whose centre of the shell has fallen apart. And this source went on to say, no communication from Number Ten, we assume they must have gone to the pub. (moves into package report) As dawn broke today, Britain awoke to the most momentous shuffling of the political order since the Second World War. (Newsreel from Suez Crisis) Suez, the devaluation of sterling, the defenestration of Margaret Thatcher.

MARGARET THATCHER: We are leaving Downing Street for the last time . . .

NW: Arguably, they were all trumped today when Britain stumbled out of the EU. Overturning four decades of assumptions about Britain’s place in Europe was of an order of such magnitude that it made the resignation of a sitting Prime Minister a second order issue. David Cameron’s voice cracked as he announced his departure.

DAVID CAMERON: I love this country. And I feel honoured to have served it. And I will do everything I can in future to help this great country succeed. Thank you very much.

NW: Any hope the victor had of a Roman-style triumph were soon crushed, when Boris Johnson was greeted by protesters as he left his house. (Michael Gove) The Prime Minister’s nemeses looked funereal at the depth of what they have achieved something.

BORIS JOHNSON: I want to begin this morning by paying tribute to David Cameron, who has spoken earlier from Downing Street, and I know that I speak for Michael in saying how sad I am that he has decided to step down but obviously, I respect that decision.

NW: Johnson owns the next few months but his hopes of reaching Number Ten might hinge on whether his assurances of a seamless transition to life outside the EU come true. Gove insists he has no interest in leadership but a fellow Leave campaigner is not so sure.

JACOB REES-MOGG: The Conservative party has so many talented people, dozens come to mind but my top three would be Michael Gove, Boris Johnson and Andrea Leadsom.

NW: Do you think the next Conservative prime minister will have been a Brexiter?

JRM: Well, the Prime Minister has stood down because he feels that having backed Remain he cannot implement the will of the British people expressed in a referendum – that surely applies to anyone else who supported Remain.

NW: Within months the circus will have moved on. But for the moment David Cameron finds himself as something as a hostage to his former allies as he accepts their timetable for a British exit from the EU. David Cameron had hoped to end his Premiership as one of the great Conservative social reformers but instead, he finds power ebbing away.

CATHERINE HADDON Institute for Government: I’m not sure whether we’d call it a zombie government, but certainly it feels a bit more like a caretaker government for the next few months. We have a government that had a massive legislative agenda, deficit reduction, prison, NHS reform, Universal Credit, all sorts of things, and a lot of it has been on hiatus already because of the EU referendum. Now, partly because of the leadership campaign, because you have a Prime Minister who’s effectively an interim Prime Minister for the next few months, and because of summer, and all of the concerns about the EU and what will happen there with negotiations, even more will probably be in abeyance for the time being.

NW: You wait and age for a leadership crisis, and then two come along at the same time. A few hours after the Prime Minister announced his plans to resign, two veteran Labour MPs said they would lay the ground for a challenge to Jeremy Corbyn. Others share their concerns.

CAROLINE FLINT Labour: I understand that motion, and I understand the concerns of Margaret and Anne and other colleagues of, you know, looking at the result of yesterday. We went into this referendum campaign expecting 70 to 80% of Labour supporters and voters to vote Remain – I think we barely got 50%. And if he cannot demonstrate after this massive test that Labour can retrieve ground and he knows how to do it, there are more problems ahead. We could have a general election within six months, and at the moment, based on the outcome of yesterday, it’s not looking good for Labour and not looking good in terms of Jeremy’s leadership.

NIGEL FARAGE: We’ve got our country back (cheering)

NW: It was Independence Day for the winners, but the most unashamedly pro-EU party said that Britain should not give up on its European destiny.

TIM FARRON Liberal Democrat: We heard Nigel Farage, rather ungraciously, before the result, when he thought he’d lost, saying there could be a second referendum. I’m not going to go saying that, erm, if things change, as the months go by and public opinion significantly changes then, you know, we must make sure we keep all options open, we mustn’t shackle ourselves to the corpse of a Brexit government.

NW: For some, the European dream will never die, but for another generation at least, Britain’s European journey is at an end.

ED: Nick Watt. Well, here with me, the former Tory Chancellor Ken Clarke, Suzanne Evans from Vote Leave, and Tristram Hunt, the Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent, which actually voted to leave the EU with one of the biggest margins in the country. Ken Clarke, it’s, you know, what, 46 years in politics, all . . . devoted to the European project, you must feel gutted?

KEN CLARKE: I do. Well, I started in politics as a very active Conservative student politician, supporting Harold Wilson’s first bid to join the European Community, so it’s slightly ironic that 50 years later this neurotic argument’s still going on, and we’re actually leaving the European Union. But erm, I actually am quite deliberately sort of trying to control my er . . . annoyance and my anger and my distress about the whole thing, er, because at the moment, er, you know, we’ve now got to decide what we do next, which I think is what your programme’s about. We have a caretaker government, we have no policy of any kind on what our relationship is going to be with the outside world tour Europe in particular, we don’t know what we’re going to do about the immigration, but we know, a lot of people were told to be very frightened about it, and so I think I have to count to ten and decide, well, what the devil do we do now after this extraordinary, very narrow result, it could have gone either way.

ED: (speaking over) Can I . . . can I just ask you one other . . . sort of personal reflection. Ed Miliband last year stood in an election against your government and he said, ‘I am better for business, because I’m not going to risk the nation’s departure from the European Union.’ You now, looking back, must’ve thought . . .

KC: (speaking over) Oh I think . . .

ED: . . . it would have been much better if Ed Miliband had won the 2015 election.

KC: No, I don’t think that, but I mean (fragments of words, unclear)

ED: (speaking over) But we wouldn’t be here if he’d won the 2015 election . . .

KC: (speaking over) All politicians of my generation think referendums are an absurd way of running a modern, sophisticated country, but I, there was no point in my emphasising that once we’d . . . gone out and said we were going to have one, and there’s no point in my emphasising that now, because we had one, and we are where we are. I think everybody on both sides, and I’m sure people on both sides feel as passionately as I do . . . the country at the moment is in a period of great uncertainty, it needs a government, it needs a government that could start getting on with the business of running the country in several crises again, and it needs to decide, as we’ve got to negotiate with the European Union, what exactly do we want to negotiate .(words unclear due to speaking over) negotiating (words unclear due to speaking over)

ED: (speaking over) Right, what do we want . . . Very quickly, the other two of you – general election? Do you think a general election is required at this kind of time, Suzanne Evans?

SUZANNE EVANS: Personally, I’d say not. While I’m absolutely ecstatic at the result, I do recognise that nearly half the country voted the other way, and will be quite worried, and indeed, I’ve spoken to people today who do have concerns about where we go next, and I’ve been doing my best to reassure them, as of course have various other people today. I think a general election, for me, would bring in another level of uncertainty . . .

ED: Right . . .

SE: . . . which is probably best avoided.

ED: And just briefly, Tristram, general election?

TRISTRAM HUNT: I think there’s a high likelihood that if we have a new leader of the Conservative Party, they’ll want to develop their own mandate, so what whether we have an election in autumn, or whether we have an election in spring, and what they’ll have to go to the country on is what their Article 50 renegotiation strategy will be . . .

ED: (speaking over) What, what, what the plan is.

KC: I agree there is a serious risk of an election, er, and I, at the moment, can’t quite see how a government can be formed with a parliamentary majority, you know, to make the kind of changes that most of the Brexiteers have been talking about. They don’t know what they want really. I actually think to go into a general election would add to the risks to where we are, more uncertainty, more chaos, and actually another daft and dreadful campaign, which might produce . . .

ED: (speaking over) Okay . . .

KC: . . . a very indecisive result . . .

ED: (speaking over) I don’t want to get stuck on this . . .

KC: . . . it would be disastrous.

ED: I’m so sorry, we haven’t got much time, I do want to talk about who should be the next Prime Minister. Before we hear your view, Ken, who should be the Tory leader, Tristram, who do you think it should be?

TRISTRAM HUNT: Who the next leader of the Conservative Party . . .

ED: (speaking over) Yes, yes.

TH: . . . er, should be (words unclear due to speaking over)

ED: (speaking over) We’ll talk about the next leader of the Labour Party . . .

TH: . . . from an outside . . . well, I think, from a Labour perspective, I think I regard Boris Johnson as a very, very successful celebrity candidate, who is a very, very clever man, who has used that intelligence to appeal to some very base instincts, who, alongside Michael Gove, would seek to deliver a very neoliberal Tory Brexit. Erm, so I don’t really want any of them, is that, is that an alright answer? (laughs)

ED: (speaking over) No, that’s okay, you’re allowed to say that. Suzanne Evans, do you have a view?

SE: It clearly has to be somebody who is passionate about Brexit and has a very clear vision . . .

ED: (interrupting) So it can’t be Theresa May, you would say?

SE: So it can’t be Theresa May, I would say, although I think it’s a shame, because she was clearly one of the front-runners, and I think had she come out for Leave . . . to me, I think Andrea Leadsom had been one of the standout stars of this campaign . . .

ED: She’s had a good campaign, for sure.

SE: And certainly if not as Prime Minister, then Chancellor for sure.

KC: Because nobody has the first idea . . .

ED: (laughs)

KC: . . . what the economic policy of the government is now supposed to be . . .

SE: It’s going to be the same as any other sovereign and independent, free country, Ken . . .

KC: (speaking over) and nobody has the first idea what, what we’re saying about immigrants and what we’re not, there’s a danger the country is going to fool around with another leadership election, having . . .

ED: (interrupting) Well it has to.

KC: . . . having, it does, it does. But (fragments of words, unclear) we need a balanced government, we need it being headed by somebody of balanced views, not just somebody who’s good at photo opportunities . . .

SE: (speaking over) Are you suggesting none of the Brexiteers who fronted the campaign are balanced?

KC: (speaking over) We need . . . we need people who can settle down to the serious business of government.

ED: Theresa May, was that Theresa May? Just give us the name, give us the name . . .

KC: (speaking over) The whole referendum campaign . . . when, when it was, the whole referendum campaign, when it wasn’t bashing immigrants, was all the Boris and Dave show, and if the British, now they’ve caused a crisis for half the Western world, decide to have a real fun Conservative leadership election again . . .

SE: (speaking over) Half the Western world? This is hyperbole, Ken, are you going to give us the name . . .

ED: Are you going to give us the name?

KC: I’m not going to give you a name.

ED: (speaking over) Okay, right, let’s turn to Labour, let’s turn to Labour because Tristram Hunt, the Tories are fighting each other, Labour seems to be fighting with its voters, and that must be a much, much more serious place for the party?

TH: I think this referendum exposes some pretty big tensions within the Labour Party and the labour movement and where you see, for example, in Stoke-on-Trent, 70-30 out, and you contrast that with some of the vote in Brighton or Bristol or Norwich or Exeter, other Labour areas, we’ve got this divide between our traditional, working-class Labour communities, who felt real pressure under globalisation in the last 10 years, felt pressure on wage levels from immigration, erm, feel discontent about the level of change, versus, as you said in your intro . . .

ED: (speaking over) I understand the problem, which you’re describing . . .

TH: (speaking over) Yes . . .

ED: . . . but (exhales) I mean it’s an enormous problem for a political . . .

TH: (speaking over) It is.

ED: . . . to find that its base, or half of the base . . .

TH: Yeah.

ED: . . . is basically completely at odds with it and . . .

TH: Well . . .

ED: . . . it doesn’t view the world in the same way at all.

TH: But we have had these problems in the past, and Ken will know that there are any number of books written called, you know, ‘What’s Wrong With Labour?’, ‘The End of Labour’, ‘Will it Ever Come Back’ you know, in the 60s and 70s, and if you have someone with a convincing vision of Britain as a social democratic future, who people trust and want to put their country in the trust of, well then you can overcome these problems, there’s no doubt about that.

ED: (speaking over) And Jeremy Corbyn . . . Jeremy Corbyn, does he meets that requirement, that, that, that . . . that job description?

TH: Well, Ken said an interesting thing about the serious business of government, and we now face really serious, tough and difficult times. This is a national crisis, and the job of opposition rather like John Smith during the Maastricht Treaty is to provide strategic vision and forensic detail. Now, Jeremy Corbyn is very, very good at energising the base and making those who are already convinced of Labour ideals feel better about themselves, whether he is the man to make sure that Labour values, Labour values are at the core of a renegotiation strategy (words unclear due to speaking over)

ED: (speaking over) (word or words unclear) that was a very long way of saying, ‘No, he’s not the right man for the job,’ is he?

TH: (speaking over) No, no, no, no, no . . . no, no, there’s a serious point here. Whether he’s the man to have the Labour values at the core of the renegotiation strategy, I’m not convinced he has those capacities.

ED: Right. We’ve got it. Erm, Suzanne Evans, there’s a problem with trust in politicians, isn’t there, and that’s been one of the reasons why you’ve actually done very well. When exactly are we going to get the £350 million extra a week, spent on the National Health Service that you promised in your campaign . . .

TH: (speaking over) Nigel Farage said it was a . . . yeah, he said it was a lie this morning.

ED: . . . when is that going to happen?

TH: It’s gone, already . . .

SE: We actually promised £100 million a week for the NHS . . .

(barracking from others)

ED: I saw one thing, ‘£350 million for the NHS’

TH: (speaking over) On a big bus, I saw it on a bus.

SE: We said, ‘£350 million we could spend on our own priorities, like the NHS’ . . . and they (words unclear due to speaking over) made a specific . . .

TH: (speaking over) And universities, VAT . . .

SE: . . . proposal to say £100 million for the NHS, and that is exactly the kind of cash injection that the NHS needs, and it’s fantastic to have this money . . .

ED: (speaking over) (fragment of word, unclear) When are we going to get the hundred . . . when are we going to get the £100 million a week extra on the NHS?

SE: When we leave the European Union. So, let’s say that will be two, three years time?

ED: Do you not think that there’s just a possibility that the very things that brought the mainstream politicians into such disrepute and low regard and the lack of trust and nothing they say is believed is now about to hit you and all of those who made that case?

SE: No, I don’t (fragment of word, or word unclear) the British electorate made the decision, they looked at Project Fear . . .

ED: (speaking over) But there wasn’t, there wasn’t a little asterisk . . .

SE: . . . and they looked at Project Hope . . . and they chose Project Hope.

ED: . . . saying read . . . read . . . there wasn’t an asterisk saying, ‘Read this bus very carefully, because we’re not saying £350 million a week.’

KC: But Evan it (words unclear due to speaking over)

TH: (speaking over) It said, it said, it said . . .

KC I mean, both sides, the campaign was dreadful . . .

SE: Yes. (word or words unclear) awful . . .

KC: So the public got angry and confused, and were no better informed when they finished than when they started, which is why a lot of old people in particular were so angry with the politicians, anti-establishment and they . . . it’s a protest vote, a lot of this. The worst thing they did was all these Syrian refugees . . . Britain has complete control over how many Syrians come here and how don’t (sic) how many don’t. We did on Wednesday, we do now, it’s nothing to do with the EU, whether they’re admitted and settled here. They had a whole poster, showing thousands of them streaming in . . .

ED: (speaking over) We have to, you know, we have to leave it there, let’s not go back over the campaign . . .

TH: (speaking over) It was disgusting.

KC: No, I’d rather not go over the campaign . . . We, we need, we need (fragments of words, unclear) the right man to reunite the party and the country, we need a policy and the sooner the better.

ED: Thank you all very much indeed. Well, of course, alongside the politics is economics. Famously, we like to describe ourselves as the fifth largest economy in the world. Today, we actually came close to being the sixth. The pound has fallen, you see. So when you convert our pound-based national income into dollars, it isn’t what it was. Well the financial gyrations were considerable, some companies’ shares were pummelled in the expectation that things will get difficult. Our business editor, Helen Thomas, is here. Helen, take us through some of those gyrations.

HELEN THOMAS: So, you heard about the meltdown, there is ample cause for concern but there are the odd crumb of comfort out there. So, the pound, our best barometer for the overall confidence in the UK economy. So, you can see here it surged higher last night as hopes built for a Remain victory and then it plunged, an absolutely huge move for a currency.

ED: (laughter in voice) Currencies don’t move like that.

HT: No. No, but later in the day it found a level, it stabilised around 1.37 to the dollar, stock markets, similar story, so here you can see a very, very dramatic drop at the open of the markets . . .

ED: It’s on the left there . . . Just on the left, yeah . . .

HT: . Both for the FTSE 100 and the more UK-focused 250. Banks and property stocks very hard-hit but as you can see, the markets then came back and recovered. Now . . . so what we didn’t see was this sort of downward panicked spiral that would indicate a total loss of confidence in the UK. Having said that, it was a really tough day and that reflects investors marking down their outlook for the UK.

ED: Now, that’s all the sort of the acute crisis – some might say the worrying thing was not getting through the next week, it’s sort of the longer-term.

HT: Well, and we may be in this sort of slow, grinding process of figuring out what the economic going to be. Now, we know some of the areas of concern because the Bank of England helpfully told us last week. So . . . so they said, erm, while consumer spending has been solid, there is growing evidence that uncertainty about the referendum is leading to delays to major economic decisions. And they mentioned a commercial and real estate transactions, car purchases and business investment. Now, the concern is that those areas that were already slowing, the shutters just come down. And most economists I’ve spoken to do think we’re in, you know, we’ve got a slowdown in store, possibly a recession, the question is, how severe? Now let’s, let’s leave aside any risk of an outright crisis, erm, you can still have a pretty ugly outcome, if business investment and hiring dries up very quickly, erm, you can see her, business confidence was already falling into the vote, so in that scenario unemployment starts to rise, people worry about their jobs, banks pull back on lending, partly because they’re worried about loans being repaid, that hits confidence and consumer spending. Meanwhile, a weak currency means higher inflation, and the Bank of England, which targets inflation may not feel it can react aggressively to try and stability economy.

ED: It does get a bit confusing. Is there any sort of more sanguine . . . more sanguine . . . scenario you can paint?

HT: Yes, it still probably involves business investment falling on the back of the vote, but a weaker pound could boost exports, erm, and more importantly, the Bank of England might say ‘We’re not going to worry about inflation for now, we’re going to look through that,’ they could cut rates, they could stimulate the economy in other ways, maybe they’ve got enough tools left in their toolkit to do that. The irony is, the governor, Mark Carney, who’s had a pretty hard time of late, he is crucial to how this all plays out.

ED: Helen, thanks. Well look, the next of our ‘What nows’ is Europe itself. After the French Revolution other royal families worried about how to keep their heads, and there’s perhaps a bit of that on the continent. And worry they might about keeping their jobs – if any eurocrats were still harbouring dreams of creating a European superstate, Britain has shown that the old concept of the nation state is not going down without a fight. And critically there is now the looming question of what our relationship with the EU might be. Our diplomatic editor Mark Urban is in Brussels. Good evening, Mark.

MARK URBAN: Evan, look, the thing that is defining attitudes here is a fear of contagion. Now, we heard Marine Le Pen, some Dutch Eurosceptics and others as well in Europe welcoming today’s result, but none of them are in power right now. And none of them is in a position to deliver an in-out referendum in another European country any time soon. But the attitude that seems to be dominant here, we have certainly heard some of the big hitters in the Brussels machine voicing this attitude, is that Brexit should happen not just quickly but in a very tough or exemplary way. In other words, they want the other countries in Europe that may be watching to see the Brits go out on very tough terms. Fascinating insight tonight from Wolfgang Schreiber, the German finance minister, very influential, a leaked Brexit plan of his suggested trade terms and an association agreement not like Norway, as some people had been discussin in the UK, not like Switzerland, more the sort of deal that Turkey or Canada might be negotiating in the latter case. So very tough terms, all to do with trying to head off a risk, which even last night, almost nobody in this town really had got to grips with the idea of what was about to hit it. (packaged report) (French and German radio chatter) In the city at the heart of the EU, they woke up to the day that ever-closer union died. Across the airwaves and in many languages, that dread news sank in. With markets plunging across many countries, the woman styled ‘Queen Europe’ by some called for calm.

ANGELA MERKEL (translated): What the outcome of this watershed will mean to us in the coming days, weeks, months and years will depend on us. If we, the other 27 member states of the European Union, are capable and willing not to rush into any quick and easy decisions which would only further disunite Europe. But if we’re capable and willing to assess the situation calmly and soberly in order to come to a joint decision on this basis.

MU: At the Commission, leaders of the European institutions met to calibrate their response. And, very soon, it became clear that there would be no further offers to Britain. We are already hearing voices here from the other 27 members of the EU that they should force the pace of Brexit in order to protect their own economies and political systems. And now we’re going to hear from the bosses of the Union’s big institutions, and it’ll be fascinating to see to what extent they think the Union should drive a tough exit bargain with the UK. For the man running the European bureaucracy, even the words to describe this moment seemed to stick.

JEAN-CLAUDE JUNCKER President of the European Commission: The British people expressed its views on their er (five second pause) next situation. We now expect the United Kingdom government to give effect to this decision of the British people as soon as possible. However painful that process may be.

MU: As for what it meant for the remaining 27, watch this.

REPORTER: Is this the beginning of the end of the European Union?

JCJ: No. Thank you. (applause)

MU: Blunt but very much to the liking of the non-British journalists and officials. So Europe is in the deepest of crises, as consultations begin prior to a Brussels summit next week. And there are already suggestions by many players here that any deal should be exemplary, with the UK denied access to the single market.

GUY VERHOFSTADT MEP Prime Minister of Belgium, 1999-2008: It is a consequence of the British vote because the single market, or the European Economic Area, includes also the free movement of labour. (laughter in voice) That was the problem in the referendum. So I think that the only way to establish a new relationship between Britain and the European Union is using a trade agreement. Like Europe has trade agreements with a number of countries.

MU: There’s a statue just outside the Commission. It shows a step into the unknown. And on the day that the Brexit earthquake hit this town, it has rarely seemed more apt.

ED: Mark Urban there. Well, earlier I was joined by Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s former chief of staff. Did he think the decision to leave was irreversible or was there a still a route he could see where Britain would retain some kind of membership of the EU?

JONATHAN POWELL: Well, I think this was a vote against something rather than a vote for anything. It was a vote against our current relationship with the EU but it wasn’t a vote for what sort of new relationship we should have. So I must say I think David Cameron is right to delay the start of negotiations until there is a new Prime Minister. But I would go further than that, I think any new Prime Minister needs a mandate for a negotiation. He has to set out what he is for, what sort of new relationship are we going to have with EU? Are we going to be Norway? Are we going to be Canada? Who are we going to be? I think that’s very, very important that they get that mandate from an election. So I don’t think you can really start negotiations until there has been an election, not just the choice of a new Tory leader.

ED: OK, but that raises lots of issues. So, hang on, is it possible a party could go into an election saying ‘we are in, we’re just going to ignore the referendum and we’ll just negotiate us to remain?’

JP: Of course you can, that’s what elections are about. You go for an election in a mandate, one of the many reasons Mrs Thatcher was against referenda was because she thought you should decide this in representative democracy through an election. But the main point here is this is a vote against something, it’s not a vote for something. The Brexiteers were completely divided on what they wanted, no one knows what they mean. So someone has got to set out a positive mandate and they’ve got to get a vote for it.

ED: Right, now look, a lot of the Europeans are saying they want this to happen quickly. The path you are describing, and indeed the path that the Leave campaign has been describing is one that takes, well, one that takes quite a lot of time. We will be waiting months before the negotiation gets going. Do you think we can really keep our European partners waiting that long?

JP: I think we’ll have to. I mean, David Cameron has already set out the timetable as far as he’s concerned. It’s only us who can start Article 50, not them. So I totally understand why they wanted to be quick, because the uncertainty is hurting them, not just us. But in the end they are going to have to wait for us and I think we would be sensible – A, to have a negotiating position, B, to have a new Prime Minister, and C, for that Prime Minister to have a mandate for his negotiating. This is really important about our future . . .

ED: Right . . .

JP: You can’t just go in there not clear what you want.

ED: Now, the other critical thing is, how hardball do you think they’re going to play with us? Because, already we’ve heard some reports saying the Norway option, forget it, you’re not going to get the Norway option, that’s not on the table. You are going to be properly out. Now what, what do you think the European Union, what line do you think they will take? How tough will they be?

JP: Well, they are not going to try and punish us because they want to have good relations with us. But the point is that they have their interests. They are going to meet at 27 without us next week to start working out what their position is. Their main priority is to keep the EU together, it’s to stop the EU disintegrating. So there are not going to offer us anything that will encourage the Dutch or the Finns for the Danes to leave. So they are not going to offer us a super deal outside the EU because otherwise they will start losing other people. So that will be the last thing they do. They’ve got to take care of their interests and we’ve got to fight for ours.

ED: And bluffing, do you think there has been some bluff over the last few weeks in the run-up to the referendum?

JP: Well, I kind of hope so. If you remember, Boris Johnson said before he became the leader of the Brexit campaign, he said his preferred option would be to have a new negotiation and a new referendum, and that the referendum would get us a better deal. So I’m hoping that he becomes leader of the Tory party, which I’m not hoping, but if he does then he will have that mandate, he can go off and make an negotiation and then have a new referendum. Remember, the Irish have done that twice this century. They voted against the treaty, had a second vote, and voted for it. Now, it seems very unlikely at the moment, the EU saying no to it, the Brexit campaign saying no to it, but that is one option when we go forward and when people realise quite how ghastly the alternatives are.

ED: We’ve been talking about Britain and its relationship with the EU. Let’s just briefly talk about the EU itself. How dangerous is the British vote for other countries . . . for the existence of the EU?

JP: Well, it is a threat to the existence of the EU because it’s going to encourage other Eurosceptics, and you can see who the friends of the Eurosceptics are, they’re people like Le Pen, people like Trump. Those sort of people are going to be agitating to break Europe up. And of course, European governments are going to resist that, so it is a problem for them. Even leaving that to one side, what’s going to happen to Europe without Britain is it’s going to become less liberal, it’s going to become more integrated and it’s going to become more German and that’s going to worry lots of countries in Europe. That’s why they wanted us to stay in. That’s an inevitable consequence of us leaving.

ED: Jonathan Powell there. Well, to pick up on that I’m joined by the journalist and broadcaster, the French journalist and broadcaster Christine Ockrent and one of the leading lights of the Leave campaign Dan Hannan. A very good evening to you. Christine, how does all of this look from France this evening?

CHRISTINE OCKRENT: Well, it looks pretty ghastly. But, at the same time, listening into the very interesting discussion you just had Evan, I think you shouldn’t underestimate the determination of the key member states on the continent not to let Brits play the fiddle, determine the timetable, and you know, we should just sit and wait for them to actually act. I think very much will depend on what happens on Monday when Madam Merkel meets in Berlin with François Hollande, er, the Italian Prime Minister and Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council. I think that you will hear what the tone will be and again, as has been said by your Brussels correspondent, there’s that series of meetings next week. And again, you know, the European Union had been functioning for 17 years before Britain was accepted in, so I think there’s a degree of arrogance at times, if I may, even at that late hour in the night . . .

ED: It wouldn’t be the first time . . .

CO: . . . and sort of thinking that we are going to disintegrate, er, after this rather ghastly result (fragment of word, or word unclear due to speaking over)

ED: (speaking over) Can I just push you, sorry to interrupt, can I push you? David Cameron is stepping down, going to take a good two or three months to elect a new Prime Minister, a new leader of the Conservative Party, no one really feels that David Cameron can do the negotiation, you’re going to have to wait three months before this starts, aren’t you?

CO: Yes, but you think that people in Brussels will just sit and wait? I think the process is going to be so complicated, the economic and financial costs, we’ve seen nothing today, of course, the pound lost a great deal of value, and the markets will be shaken for quite some time, so I think there will be a lot of work being done in the meantime, and, you know, it’s not going to be done by a snap of the finger, but again I think on the continent there’s also this idea that the British people, especially the older generation, the ones who really have deprived the young ones of all the benefits of Europe, they are going to feel the brunt, and that is something that on the continent will be closely watched, especially by those Eastern European countries which, may I remind you, Britain wanted so much inside the EU . . .

ED: Indeed.

CO: . . . and now complains about immigration from Eastern Europe.

ED: (speaking over) Christine, let me put your points . . . let me put your points to Dan Hannan. Dan Hannan, firstly, they don’t want us to take all this time and sit around thinking about it, they just want us to get on with it, and that’s a perfectly reasonable request, isn’t it?

DANIEL HANNAN: Well, you’ve already answered that point, Evan, we have to wait until there somebody to do the negotiations, so it can’t start until that’s taken place. I think getting this right matters much more than the time, and by getting it right, I mean, being fair to our friends and allies on the continent, as well as getting a deal that is in our own interests and it would be crazy to rush into something . . .

ED: (speaking over) (fragments of words, or words unclear)

DH: . . . after 43 years at the expense of getting something that’s mutually satisfactory.

ED: Jonathan Powell said we need to have an election (fragments of words, unclear) we haven’t yet worked out what the plan is, what the model is, do you agree with that?

DH: No I mean (fragments of words, unclear) one of the reasons that Brussels is so unpopular is that it’s seem to be contemptuous of public opinion, it swats aside referendums, it’s incredible that less than 24 hours after the result, we’ve already got people trying to undo it. But what I would say, if I may sort of temper or soften what I’ve just said a little bit, although, plainly, we have a verdict that says we are going to leave the European Union, it was a narrow majority, 48% of people voted to stay in . . .

ED: Yeah . . .

DH: . . . Scotland voted to stay in . . .

ED: (speaking over) Almost 50-50, yeah.

DH: . . . right, Northern Ireland, Gibraltar voted to stay in, we have, we who are on the winning side have to be cognisant of the extent to which opinion is divided, we have to try and carry as many Remain voters with us, and that may well mean that quite a lot of the existing arrangements remain in place, that we try and find a status that both Leavers and Remainers can live.

ED: (speaking over) But you know, look, I’ve heard you talk about this, and it sounds like you Daniel Hannan, I don’t know whether you’re speaking for Vote Leave or for Boris Johnson or for anybody else, it sounds like you are veering towards something closer to the Norway option . . .

DH: Well . . .

ED: As a compromise between the 48 and the 52?

DH: I mean, I . . .

ED: In the single market, yeah?

DH: My issue with the EU has always been the lack of sovereignty, the lack of democracy (fragments of words, unclear) you know, of course there are economic issues as well . . .

ED: (speaking over) You could take Norway.

DH: It wouldn’t be exactly Norway, obviously, we’re a very different country, we’re 65 million rather than 5 million, but the idea of staying within a common market, but outside the political integration I think that is feasible, yes.

ED: And that means free movement of people.

DH: It means free movement of labour, it doesn’t mean EU citizenship with all the acquired rights.

ED: I’m sorry, we’ve just been through three months of agony . . .

DH: Well, hang on . . .

ED: . . . on the issue of immigration, and the public have been led to believe . . .

DH: (speaking over) (fragment of word, or word unclear)

ED: . . . that what they have voted for is an end to free movement.

DH: Here is a very, very important point. From the moment we joined, we had the right to take up a job offer in another member state, you had a legal entitlement if you presented your contract . . .

ED: (interrupting) But why . . .

DH: . . . now, that changed with Maastricht, when EU citizenship was introduced, people were given legal entitlements to live in other countries, to vote in other countries and to claim welfare and have the same university tuition and so on. That bit, I think, is going to change, that means we can deport people . . .

ED: (speaking over) Why didn’t you say, why didn’t you say this in the campaign?

DH: (speaking over) Listen, I said that at every single meeting . . .

ED: (speaking over) Daniel Hannan, why did you not say in your campaign that you were wanting a system, a scheme where we had free movement of labour . . .

DH: At every . . .

ED: (speaking over) Completely at odds with what the public think they have just voted for.

DH: (speaking over) I have just spent four months addressing rallies virtually every day, and at everyone, I would say, ‘Do not imagine that if we leave the EU that means zero immigration from the EU, it means we will have some control over who comes in and in what numbers . . .

ED: (speaking over) You’ve given the impression, you’ve given the impression . . . you want to take back control . . .

DH: (speaking over) (word or words unclear) it’s all there on YouTube, you can see it on there.

ED: Your, your campaign has given the impression that we will not be able to get immigration down to the tens of thousands if we are out . . . inside the EU, I think most people would say that gives the impression we will get it down to tens of thousands if we’re outside the EU.

DH: No, we’ve always been clear, we want a measure of control, it will be for a future parliament to determine the numbers, and to determine, you know, how many students, how many doctors, how many family reunifications, whatever, but I don’t think anyone has ever tried to put a number on it, that’s obviously going to depend on the state of the economy . . .

ED: (speaking over, word unclear, ‘Well’ or ‘Wow’) Dan Hannan, thank you very much. Christine Ockrent, thank you, I had meant to come back to you, we’re out of time, but I hit a . . . nerve there with Dan Hannan. Thank you so much, thank you. Okay, there’s one other potentially momentous area to look at tonight. It’s the UK itself, time to dust off those old dis-united Kingdom clichés that were so popular during the Scottish referendum. And let’s go to Scotland now, Kirsty is in Edinburgh tonight, Kirsty can give us a flavour of the talk in Scotland about a second referendum there. Kirsty?

KIRSTY WARK: Well, first of all, after such a decisive vote in Scotland to Remain, this country feels a bit like it is in limbo, people are actually bewildered and some of them devastated that England voted to leave the European Union and now Scotland, in a way, is unable to move forward. Nicola Sturgeon says that an independence referendum’s highly likely, but she can’t afford to lose again. And she herself has said there is no guarantee that people who voted ‘no’ in the first independence referendum and voted to remain in the EU would vote independence for Scotland. So, there are so many questions. What would the impact be on the Scottish economy, look what happened to the pound . . . to oil after the last referendum, would we really have a closed border and tariffs, when we trade 64% of our trade is with the rest of the UK? And what currency would Scotland use? All these unknowns – can’t use the pound, won’t use the euro. On the other hand, for many people in Scotland now, membership of the European Union is a fundamental, it is non-negotiable. So the SNP is looking for a period of calm. Nicola Sturgeon had absolutely no option but to address the question of an independence referendum straightaway this morning.

NICOLA STURGEON: The manifesto the SNP was elected on last month said this: The Scottish parliament should have the right to hold another referendum if there is a significant and material change in the circumstances that prevailed in 2014, such as Scotland being taken out of the EU against our will. Scotland does now face the prospect. It is a significant and material change in circumstances and it is therefore a statement of the obvious that the option of a second referendum must be on the table. And it is on the table.

KW: From here, the United Kingdom seems in a very different place and Scotland is very much another country. Now there is a greater period of uncertainty north of the border than there is in England. The mechanics of a second referendum or not clear, but it is unlikely that Westminster would deny Scotland a fresh independence vote because, from the Shetland Isles to the Borders, the majority wants to stay within the European Union. There is a sense of unreality here today. People cannot quite believe their southern neighbours would be such worlds apart.

VOX POP FEMALE: I cannot believe we have done this. I am very scared. Especially with the Tory government that we have at the moment, and I think especially in Scotland, we do not have much of a voice in the UK at all.

KW: Do you feel that we are very different in Scotland from England?

VOX POP FEMALE 2: Yes, there is going to be a split. With us being in and out, I think there’ll be a split.

KW: The roots of our relations with Europe are long and deep, the old alliance, the treaty between the French and the Scots was signed in the 13th century and Scotland has a long tradition of sending its sons and daughters overseas, all over the world, and we, in turn, have welcomed many different nations here – Russians, Italians, Poles, Pakistanis, and immigration just does not seem to be the same issue here as it is south of the border. Why do you think it is that immigration doesn’t seem to be such an issue as it is in England?

VOX POP FEMALE 3: I think that Scotland as a race of people we are just more multicultural, our culture is more varied, if you think about sort of storytelling and music, anything like that, And I just think that we are more accepting of new ideas here.

KW: Are you Scottish or French?

VOX POP MALE: Neither, I am Italian!

KW: Italian!

VPM: Working in a French van.

KW: And tell me, do you feel welcome in Scotland?

VPM: This morning, when I came out of my flat, I was feeling a little bit less welcome. But I think that they voted for staying, no?

KW: Yes.

VPM: So, I think I will try to feel welcome anyway because in fact I am welcome, maybe! (laughs)

KW: In six weeks’ time, the world’s eyes will be on Edinburgh for another reason: people will come from all over the world to the biggest international arts festival on the planet. And the festival was set up in the wake of the Second World War to encourage cultural relations between Scotland, Britain and Europe, to make sure that another war in Europe would be unimaginable. Nicola Sturgeon made it clear today that she wants to build a consensus in the country around a referendum. Now, it is possible that senior figures from other political parties would be part of a consensus. Preferring, finally, to live in an independent Scotland within the European Union, rather than in an increasingly dis-United Kingdom, divorced from the EU.

ED: Kirsty there, in Edinburgh. Now, Scotland and England is one division, young and old another. But there’s more going on too – there’s an anger in large parts of the country that have not felt blessed by the benefits of globalisation. In contrast to bustling metropolitan hubs like London or Manchester which voted Remain. And that schism has asserted itself to the shock of those at the top. Filmmaker Nick Blakemore has spent the last couple of days in Burnley, which voted two-thirds for Brexit, to see what was motivating voters there.

VOX POP MALE: We won’t lose control, we have lost control.

VOX POP MALE 2: For me it comes down to, when we vote somebody in, whoever gets into the government, they make the rules. And at the moment there is somebody above them. That’s why I’m going to be voting to leave.

VPM: What really gets me is this, I fought for this country in 82.

VPM2: Fair play.

VPM: This government now is going, immigrants, here you go, tick, you can all come in. I don’t want it, send them back home. We joined the EU for one thing, yeah? To have a better life, yeah?

VPM2: But . . .

VPM: Hang on . . . And then it comes to light, it’s not a better life.

VOX POP MALE 3: Vote for hope, that was the thing in the paper. Do not vote for fear, vote for hope.

VPM: You can’t vote for hope, there’s no hope nowadays.

TANYA THOMPSON Vote Leave Activist: We’ve had enough of the Tory scenario, the austerity, the cuts.

NICK BLAKEMORE: Why is that the fault of Europe?

TT: The minute this referendum is over and if Remain wins, that’s it, our NHS is gone.

VOX POP FEMALE: I think we should leave and give it a try and we should get our independence back because it’s just got absolutely out of hand.

TT: It has, I’ve got to admit, it’s the one thing, it came down to democracy, sovereignty, and the NHS.

VPF: There is good and bad. There is a lot of people come from abroad and they’ve done good for this country.

TT: Exactly.

VPF: I was born in Germany, I’m a foreigner myself.

TT: We are not little Englanders. We’ve always looked outwards.

VPF: England was the greatest thing I’ve ever known when I came over here and you were free and if you worked hard you got rewarded. Right?

TT: Correct.

VPF: I’ve never had a day’s benefit, I’ve never had anything out of this country. I’m 83 years of age and all I can get is single poll tax allowance. Not that I need it, I’ve got food in my belly, I’m getting by and I’m not complaining.

TT: Precisely.

VPF: When I look round there is a lot of folk worse. But I do object to people who have worked all their life, just stuff being taken off them.

VOX POP FEMALE 2: None of us know what the future holds. I think that’s why everyone is undecided.

TT: My main point is, you can’t base your argument on a country and an entire superstate that hasn’t got your best interests at heart. That is the be all and end all.

VPF2: That’s my main reason for leaving, who else is going to look after our country but us?

TT: Precisely.

DAVID DIMBLEBY: Here we go. Good evening, and welcome at the end of this momentous day when each one of us has had the chance to say what kind of country we want to live in. At 10pm the polling stations close after weeks, months, years of argument.

SARAH MONTAGUE: The BBC is forecasting that the UK has voted to leave the European Union after more than 40 years.

TT: Good morning.

NB: Hello.

TT: Come on in. I want to . . .

NB: Come out first. Tell me, what’s your reaction?

TT: I don’t know yet, I haven’t switched it on, I’ve put these out and I’m hoping I’m not going to look stupid. Fingers crossed I’m not . . .

NB: Well, the BBC are calling it for Leave.

TT: Really?

NB: Yeah.

TT: Seriously?

NB: You need to put the telly on. Tanya, just tell me what’s your reaction to that?

TT: I’m over the moon, I don’t know what to say. We did it. Everybody woke up in time. Everybody listened. Everybody understands, yes, it’s going to be rough at the beginning. But we’ve done it.

ED: Some views from Burnley. With me, two historians, David Starkey and Kate Williams, from the Times, Tim Montgomerie and writer and equality campaign Paris Lees. Paris, what’s your reaction as you watched that?

PARIS LEES Writer and Broadcaster: I recognise those towns, that’s where I’m from Evan, erm, and I think these people are going to be really upset when they find out that they’ve been lied to. I think it’s . . . it’s misguided, erm, obviously the people have voted with good intentions, but I think we are being led down a very dark path.

ED: Let’s just ask whether the nation is in some way historically unusually divided. Kate do you think we are in an unusual . . .

KATE WILLIAMS Professor of History, University of Reading: I do think we’re incredibly divided. I think this is the biggest historical event, the most divisive event since the Civil War and I think it’s the most historical event we’ve seen since the Act of the Union itself. I mean, we see divisions here between North and South, between young and old, between the fact that Scotland is going to have a referendum (fragments of words, unclear) Northern Ireland . . . concerns about . . . Martin McGuinness saying about joining together, and we know that a Scottish referendum is probably going to trigger questions about a referendum in Wales. So we’re seeing massive divisions, and when we actually see a petition getting a lot of people signatures saying that London might actually set up as a separate city state . . .

ED: I think it’s a joke though . . . (fragments of words, or words unclear)

PL: I’m not entirely sure it is.

KW: I’m not entirely sure, I think . . . but I think there is certainly, I mean, there is some joking in it, but there is some . . . that, I think, shows the leg (sic) the level of the divisions, it’s huge.

ED: You’re both, you’re both Remainers, and now you two are both Brexit supporters. David do you think the nation is historically divided at the moment?

DAVID STARKEY: It is, but I think eight is slightly exaggerating, I can think of Ireland, I can think of Roman Catholicism, I can think of all sorts of things that have split us – even the whole question of whether we fought the Nazis or not, you know, the country was hugely divided. I think the more interesting question is why this has happened. It seemed to me your Burnley film was absolutely right. What has happened is the European Union is a proxy, it’s a proxy for deep discontent with experts, with the political class and so on, and I think it’s also the fact that the political parties have been led for the last . . . nearly 20 years by leaders, Blair on the one hand and Cameron on the other that have thought it was very clever to kick their supporters in the goolies.

ED: (fragments of words, or words unclear) if it’s a proxy, was it the right thing to get out of it, if it (laughter in voice) was just a proxy?

DS: (speaking over) Yes . . .

ED: You’re implying it’s like let’s just kick something, and that’s, the EU’s over there and let’s do that . . .

DS: Well . . . I think, I think an awful lot of people actually voted on that basis. And it’s very important we recognise that, which of course also allows for the kind of point that Daniel Hannan was making, that perhaps we could begin to reunite as a very real possibility. And I think that what we’ve got to do is something which no recent government has had the courage to do, we’ve got to rediscover a sense of national interest. Britain has spent the whole of its time arguing ‘we’ve got to be good, we’ve got to support European rights because otherwise the Russians will misbehave’ we’ve really got to start to do a de Gaulle.

ED: Tim, the voters we saw there in Burnley are actually the ones political parties are finding it quite difficult to reach, any political party, aren’t they? (unknown speaker, words unclear) What, what is the . . . what is the answer to that, because they’re not natural Conservative voters, your party’s nowhere near them.

TIM MONTGOMERIE: Sure, and you talk about Britain being divided, but, you know, I’m currently based in Washington for The Times, and I’m of course seeing the whole Trump phenomenon over there, we’re all seeing the Trump phenomenon, and I think we’re sort of six, seven years after the global crash now, and I think immediately after the global crash people just wanted governments that stabilised the situation. But now there’s the hunger for reform and remedy. And I think we are seeing that right across the world . . .

ED: Can I just make one . . .

TM: . . . and today’s revolt, yesterday’s revolt by er, poorer Britons, and they were the overwhelming explanation for why we are leaving the European Union, that has to be heeded. This isn’t just a vote to leave the European Union, this is a cry for help for a huge proportion of our population, who think politics has stopped working for them . . .

KW: And it is a vote against austerity, I absolutely agree, but when you think of places like Wales has got 500 million subsidy, huge votes against austerity, they talked about poverty, we didn’t really see much talk about sovereignty in the same way, and the concern is that these people, it is not going to give them . . . any, it’s not going be (word or words unclear due to speaking over) for Burnley.

DS: (speaking over) But sorry, you see, Kate, you’re making a very elementary confusion. You’re assuming . . .

KW: No I’m not . . .

DS: Yes you are. You’re assuming that the economy is always what mattered. What this vote shows . . .

KW: But austerity is tied up with the economy.

DS: (shushes her) What this vote shows it that it’s culture that matters . . .

ED: It can be, it can be.

DS: . . . and it can be . . .

PL: Well, it’s the lack of politicians connecting with voters, if you look at Jo Cox, she was doing a good job of it, the SNP in Scotland is doing a good job of it, so I think that Labour and the Conservatives both need to put their hands up and . . . admit that they’re just not getting it right.

DS: But sorry, you’re point about those voters in Burnley, they are, at the moment, they’re floating voters. A Conservative leader who was as clever as Disraeli – remember, it’s Disraeli who turns, captures the working man’s vote in 1867, and there’s the possibility now of a Boris, or another charismatic Tory politician who invents the national interest . . .

ED: (laughs) Alright, let’s ask the Remainers whether you think Boris is a healing, a healing person . . .

PL: I think Boris, his speech it was, it was just extraordinary. That wasn’t a victory speech, I think he realises that . . . he’s got it wrong and this is really, really, really serious. And I just hope that we can actually have another referendum, because I think a lot of people would actually . . .

DS: (speaking over) Loser – bad loser.

KW: Jonathan Powell was saying . . .

PL: (speaking over) Well, I’d rather . . . I think actually I’d rather be a bad loser, I’ve got more important things to worry about than how . . .

KW: (speaking over) I’m not sure it is about losing, because people actually feel that they have been lied to, and that’s what . . .

PL: People have been lied to . . .

KW: There’s so, there’s so much more voter regret than I’ve ever seen before, most people (words unclear due to speaking over)

DS: (speaking over) You’re now having a clear illustration of why the vote went why it did.

TM: I think people are going to be surprised with Boris Johnson. He’s probably the likely next Prime Minister of this, this country. Actually, you look at his record, he was championing the were living wage before other Conservatives . . .

ED: (speaking over) Immigration amnesty . . .

TM: Same sex marriage, he opposed the tax credit cuts that you’re just one proposed, he’s much more of an interesting Conservative than people think.

ED: (speaking over) We’ve talked a lot about the sort of, the, the Burnley divide, and the metropolitan elite, Paris, what about the generational divide, because that is really quite striking. The under 45’s would have clearly voted to stay in, and the over 45s clearly voted to take us out.

PL: Well there was a great headline on Vice today, er, which said, ‘Grandma, what have you done?’ And I think that a lot of millennial’s will be feeling that this morning, I think it’s incredibly selfish and I personally will not

TM: (speaking over) Why selfish?

PL: . . . forgive or forget. Because . . . the older generation don’t have to live here as long as the younger generation.

DS: So, why don’t we introduce, for example, a cut-off point (laughter from TM and ED) beyond which you can’t vote. Are you . . .

PL: (words unclear due to speaking over)

DS: (speaking over) Your sense of sublime self entitlement . . .

PL: No . . .

DS: . . . are we going to have those under 35 with two votes? (words unclear, multiple speakers talking at once)

PL: Young people . . . young people have already had so much taken away me (sic) I don’t need you to take away my airtime as well, Mr Starkey. So what we’re actually looking at is a generation of people who . . .

DS: (speaking over) You haven’t and my question?

PL: Well, you’re not letting me, because you’re interrupting me, because you’re a privileged white man who just wants to speak over me, and this is the problem. Young people are getting very sick of it, sick of being spoken over, sick of being patronised and we have to pay for our education (others speak over unclear) the way your generation didn’t have to, you know, we’re just, everything that gets taken away, young people are being cut out, firstly I think there’s a lot of frustration, and, you know, for young people, Europe’s just somewhere where we go on holiday and go clubbing. You know, we don’t have this xenophobia.

KW: And the young vote is going to be vital in Scotland, of course, the Scottish referendum included 16-year-olds, they were massive in the turnout, and I think that this (fragments of words, unclear) I notice Nigel Farage saying, ‘Well, we can engage with the Commonwealth’, but I’ve been watching the Australian media who have been saying today, ‘Why are we still linked to this country, it’s going to be so diminished, they’re going to lose Scotland, possibly Wales, and the Commonwealth is probably due for the chop as well.’

ED: Is this . . . this is not what you (fragments of words, unclear) be careful what you wish for is the kind of message (fragment of word, unclear)

TM: I, I think at the moment, in our relationship with Europe, we have a situation where people from Africa, Asia, Australasia are actually second-class status when it comes to coming into Britain, we prioritise European . . . the problem isn’t Little Englandism, it’s Little Europeanism, Britain now has the opportunity to open ourselves to the world.

PL: There won’t be a Britain, this time in 10 years.

ED: And that is about it, what a 24 hours . . .

KW: Thank you.

ED: . . . it’s been. Normally we’re meant to be the quietly stable nation that doesn’t do revolutions cut people’s heads off, but today we’ve been rocking the world. That’s all we have time for tonight.

Photo by (Mick Baker)rooster

BBC attacks on Farage continue as campaign nears end

EU Referendum | 21st June 2016 | by David Keighley

Last week in BBC Watch, it was noted that as referendum polling day fast approached, that in 17 years of monitoring the BBC’s coverage of the EU, one factor had scarcely changed: the casting of Nigel Farage and the party he leads as xenophobic incompetents.

By both implication and direct association, that means – as a core feature of the BBC’s worldview – those who oppose the EU are prejudiced and irrational.

The Corporation’s treatment of Farage this week has taken this negativity to a new, menacing level. It is clear, unequivocal evidence of deep prejudice against the ‘exit’ side Last Thursday, Farage unveiled a campaign poster based on a picture of immigrants on European soil that was aimed at drawing attention to the problems caused by the EU’s attitudes towards the issue. Controversial? Yes. Unsubtle? Maybe. But without doubt, a depiction of a legitimate aspect of a debate in which control of immigration has played a central role.

Two hours later, 150 or so miles away, a gunman with mental health issues cruelly killed the MP Jo Cox. Despite the dangers of ascribing rational motives to the deranged, the left instantly hijacked the murder to create political capital, and this has continued relentlessly to the extent that it now defines the ‘remain’ case.

David Cameron, the Kinnocks, John Major, Jeremy Corbyn, George Osborne and legions more of that ilk, each in his own way – as (it seems) an official part of the ‘remain’ campaign strategy – have shamelessly suggested that Cox was slain as a result of an intolerance and ‘hatred’ of a type that that fires Farage’s opposition to immigration.

Any fair-minded analysis would say that this is arrant nonsense. Even if Cox’s killer was pursuing an extremist agenda, it would not mean – as the remain side has now assumed and is projecting en masse – that the whole of the case against immigration is discredited and illegitimate.

For the BBC – with its clear statutory duty to be impartial – the Cox killing should have set major alarm bells ringing about the special need to achieve balance in the referendum debate. Article 5:1 of the Corporation’s referendum coverage guidelines was written precisely to cover this. It warns that very rigorous steps should be taken to ensure no side obtains a special advantage from a major news event.

So did this happen? Absolutely not. Totally the reverse. Over the weekend, Farage came gradually under fire in BBC coverage for unveiling the poster. BBC coverage subtly amplified the idea that Cox was a victim of EU-related prejudice.

On Monday morning and then throughout the day this became a crescendo against him.

Starting with R4’s Today, editors seized on a story that they clearly then bracketed with the fall-out from the Cox murder (despite the 5.1 guideline): the alleged ‘defection’ from the Brexit camp by Baroness Warsi. A main fulcrum of the BBC’s writing of the story was the ‘xenophobia and hatred’ Warsi alleged Farage had displayed in the choice of the poster.

No matter that the Times story began to unravel before the ink was even dry on the first edition as it emerged that Warsi had never been part of the ‘leave’ campaign. This was an opportunity to kick Farage. It was not to be missed.

So first off, the headlines of Today made the Warsi claims about xenophobia the lead item. Then at 7.10am, Warsi was interviewed by Mishal Husain. She put it to her that she (Warsi) had never really been part of ‘leave’ but allowed her to wriggle off the hook and then gave Warsi ample space to ram home the nastiness and xenophobia of the Farage stance.

Nick Robinson interviewed Farage at 8.10am. From the outset the presenter’s tone was aggressive. Robinson’s rate of interruption was as high as it gets in such exchanges. The bottom line was that Farage was put firmly on the back foot. He mounted a vigorous defence but Robinson relentlessly pushed that the poster was based on what amounted to racism and was designed recklessly to inflame opinions.

The BBC1 News at one continued the Farage attack. There was a quote from Farage. He stated:

I will tell you what’s really going on here and that is the Remain camp are using these awful circumstances to try to say that the motives of one deranged dangerous individual were similar of half the country, perhaps more, who believe we should leave the EU and . . .

Deputy BBC publicity editor Norman Smith was almost apoplectic at this assertion. He demanded that Farage tell him who on the ‘remain’ side had said that. Smith then summed up:

Another incendiary intervention by Mr Farage, accusing the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of seeking to link the murder of Jo Cox to the way the Brexit campaign has pursued its arguments, suggesting that it has created an atmosphere which perhaps contributed to her killing. Now, privately those around Mr Cameron have reacted with contempt and fury to that suggestion, in public they are urging everyone just to focus on the tributes to Jo Cox this afternoon. But, of course, Mr Farage’s intervention follows that poster, the ‘breaking point’ poster, which Mr Farage this morning expressed no regrets about, saying the only thing wrong with it was the unfortunate timing. He unveiled it just a couple of hours before Mrs Cox’s killing. And all that after the former chairwoman of the Conservative Party announced she was quitting the Leave side because of what she called its nudge-nudge, wink-wink, xenophobic approach. And you sense a real gulf is opening up on the Leave side between Mr Farage and the official campaign – their fear that they become seen as indistinguishable from Nigel Farage’s much more abrasive and inflammatory campaign, and that his interventions undermine their attempts to presents a more optimistic, outward-looking approach.

That’s quoted in full because it illustrates the depths of the BBC bias. They decided to elevate the Warsi story to the main theme of the day, then gave her the headlines and a platform to chant her ‘xenophobic hatred’ line, Farage was given by Robinson a back-foot opportunity to try address some of the claims against him, but was severely constrained by the rate of interruption and Robinson’s clear aggression. During the morning, Farage explained that he believed the attacks against him were being in effect orchestrated by the ‘remain’ side. There is clear evidence in Will Straw’s BSE conference call that that they were. But Norman Smith’s assessment side-stepped that point. Instead, he described Farage’s approach to the whole issue as ‘inflammatory’ and both pessimistic and inward looking.

To the BBC, from the very beginning, Farage has been regarded as a xenophobic, dangerous maverick. This week they fully reverted to type. How much has their treatment of this issue swayed the referendum result?

Photo by Euro Realist Newsletter

Bias by Omission? BBC under-reports latest EU assault on Internet freedom

BBC Bias, EU Referendum, European Union | 7th June 2016 | by David Keighley

BBC bias comes in many forms. One of the most insidious is bias by omission, when the Corporation chooses not to report key developments or perspectives in areas of major controversy.

It is a major issue in the referendum campaign. For example, the Corporation barely touched the story about a poster – ostensibly designed to encourage ethnic minorities to vote – which crassly depicted those who oppose immigration as a bullying skinhead thug.

The reason? Covering the story would have unavoidably opened a can of worms in the ‘remain’ strategy.

Front-line presenters John Humphrys and Nick Robinson have both admitted that such bias has been particularly evident in BBC coverage of the immigration debate. The views of opponents of the unprecedented levels of mass immigration into the UK since 2004 have routinely been ignored by the BBC or, just as bad, dismissed as racism or xenophobia.

It has also applied for decades in the BBC’s general reporting of the EU. Until forced to change by the EU referendum rules, the BBC vastly under-reported the withdrawal perspective, and anything to do with the case against the EU, as Brexit The Movie so vividly confirms. Emphatically, you did not hear those arguments first on the BBC.

Although the BBC is now reluctantly giving the opponents of the EU some airtime, it is mostly through gritted teeth. The default-position is still almost invariably Brussels good, Westminster bad.

Evidence of this? As Andrew Marr illustrated vividly at the weekend ‘remain’ figures such as Sir John Major – who was given a platform to attack viciously his perceived opponents – often get much better treatment than ‘leave’ supporters.

Such negativity to the ‘leave’ case is abundant elsewhere. For example, Today presenters Justin Webb and Mishal Husain filed three-part special reports (from Cornwall and Northern Ireland respectively) about what were said to be the local ‘facts’ in the referendum debate. Both, it turned out, injected a central theme: the cardinal importance of ‘EU money’ to the deprived economies in each area.

Neither bothered to tell the audience in their relentless focus on EU benevolence the simple but vital fact that, in reality, ‘EU money’ is actually from the British taxpayer.

Compounding the glaring omission, Justin Webb seemed conveniently not to know that a recent official report commissioned on behalf of local ratepayers in Cornwall had found that the spending of £500m of this ‘EU money’ had been so questionable and inefficient that, for example, it led to the creation of only 3,300 local jobs at a staggering cost of £150,000 per job.

Such blatant bias by omission by the BBC in the EU’s favour extends heavily into other areas.

Take for example, the reporting of one of Brussels’ latest highly controversial initiatives: to combine with Microsoft and other web giants in rooting out what the European Commission calls ‘hate speech and xenophobia’.

The BBC web story about this enthusiastically declared:

‘Microsoft, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook have pledged to remove hate speech within 24 hours, in support of a code of conduct drafted by the EU. The freshly drafted code aims to limit the viral spread of online abuse on social media. It requires the firms to act quickly when told about hate speech and to do more to help combat illegal and xenophobic content. The firms must also help “educate” users about acceptable behaviour.’

What’s not to like? But hang on. Did no-one in the 8,000-strong BBC newsroom think to check out the potential threats to civil liberty and journalistic freedom involved in such a move? Seemingly not. There’s not a peep about such issues in the web story.

The reality – as the Spiked! Website eloquently explains – is that phrases as vague as ‘hate speech and xenophobia’ and ‘acceptable behaviour’ are a legal nightmare and a lawyer’s paradise. They can be interpreted with deeply sinister intent, and, for example, can be used by the EU to attack and attempt to silence those who disagree with its free movement of people and immigration policies. Indeed, that may be the central agenda here.

The background of this new move also speaks volumes about how undemocratic and insidious the EU is. The loosely-phrased laws against hate speech and xenophobia were first enacted by the European Commission in 2008. Has anyone ever been seriously consulted about them? No.

Yet since then, a vast continent-wide operation has gradually been set up to root these twin perceived evils out, including a European Commission against ‘racism and intolerance’.

The latest initiative with a Microsoft, therefore, is arguably a very substantial intensification of the Commission’s assault on those who disagree with its policies towards free movement, as the reams of explanation in the press release about the development clearly show.

And the BBC accepts this without a murmur. Why? Because, it still instinctively supports the EU, and will publish derogatory views about Brussels only if forced.

In this referendum, the BBC should be grasping every opportunity to explore EU-related issues, and especially the controversy surrounding them. Andrew Marr will call Boris Johnson ‘abominable’ for daring to raise Hitler in connection with EU operations, but he and his colleagues ignore EU actions that are patently and blatantly a threat to our fundamental, hard-won freedoms.

John Wilkes? He will be surely turning in his grave.

Referendum Blog: June 5

EU Referendum Blog | 5th June 2016 | by David Keighley

FEEDBACK BIAS: Radio 4’s Feedback, presented by Roger Bolton, ostensibly examined on Friday listeners’ concerns that BBC coverage was favouring the remain side in the EU referendum debate. Michael Yardley from Colchester said:

….I’m concerned about the way the referendum’s being reported by the BBC. It’s my impression that Remain gets better placement in BBC headlines. I also think there’s been a failure to emphasise that many fear-inducing statistical projections made by the Remain lobby are just estimates, guesswork.

Now Roger Bolton – who was editor of Panorama when members of his staff controversially kow-towed to the IRA at Carrickmore – has got form in terms of bias in the presentation of Feedback. In the week when the EU referendum was confirmed back in February, he noted that there had already been listeners’ complaints and observed:

We begin with the much-anticipated announcement of a referendum on whether the UK should remain part of the European Union. And some listeners are already lining up to shoot the messenger.

Before he had even explained what the complaints were, or given any of the complainants a chance to be heard, he was thus dismissing the idea of BBC bias – complainants were simply shooting the messenger.

Four months on, with the referendum now fast approaching, has he and his programme improved at all?

The first point to note is that Yardley’s main point, that ‘remain guests ‘get better placement in BBC headlines’, was not dealt with at all. BBC assistant political editor Norman Smith – who was asked by Bolton to respond to the various points raised by listeners and viewers, did not refer to it, and neither did Bolton.

In the absence of such a response, relevant here is a tally Craig Byers has been keeping on his Is the BBC Biased? website. He noted on 30/5 that in editions of BBC1’s News at Six programme containing headlines about the EU referendum, 21 had led with points from the remain side, whereas only seven were the other way round. That’s a ratio of 3:1.

The question that Smith did try to answer from Yardley was whether there was a ‘failure to emphasise that many fear-inducing statistical projections made by the Remain lobby are just estimates, guesswork.’ Bolton re-framed this and put it to Smith:

But I wonder if you’re also erm . . . finding it a little difficult to, er, how can I say? Take sides in the way perhaps BBC listeners would like you to take sides on matters of fact. Where one side makes a statement and another one, just, ‘Well that’s not true, it’s all rubbish’, whatever, but are you reluctant to go any further than simply say, ‘One side says this, the other side says the other.’

Smith’s response was extraordinary. He said first that the BBC so much leaned towards the need for impartiality, that they sometimes did not make judgment calls ‘that should be made’. He cited the example of the Leave side claiming that Turkey would join the EU, and asserted that this was ‘factually wrong’ but said that there had been a lot of debate inside the BBC about this, and that this was diluted within the journalistic commentary to ‘Remain has said this is wrong’.

He stated:

in other words, we attributed the assessment to the Remain side, when we could, of our own, say ‘No, that is factually wrong.’ But, because as an organisation, more than any other organisation, there is a massive pressure and premium on fairness, on balance, on impartiality, I suspect we, we hold back from making those sort of calls, and I do think that, potentially, is a disservice to the listener and viewer.

Bolton then asked him about the BBC stating what the ‘facts’ were in the debate. Smith said there was so much controversy and complexity involved in what were ‘facts’ that it was ‘very difficult to present viewers and listeners with a whole string of unequivocal, clear as daylight facts about the EU.’

The implication being clearly that this was something that was not happening because of the difficulties involved. Bolton did not press him further on the point and listener Yardley’s point was thus left dangling, there, only partly answered. What Smith did say was entirely in the BBC’s favour – in effect, they were so motivated by journalistic integrity they erred on the side of caution.

Is this true? Well, over recent days, BBC reporters have frequently noted that the economic part of the referendum debate is not the Leave side’s strongest suite, and when leave figures have tried to argue economic points, those same correspondents have stressed how many economists disagree.

In the same vein, the Vote Leave claim that EU membership costs the UK £350m a week has been subject to extremely close scrutiny on all BBC outlets, to the extent when on Today an 18-year-old ‘exit’ supporter mentioned the figure in passing, veteran BBC correspondent James Naughtie snapped at him in headmasterly tones and told him that he was definitely wrong (because the Commons’ Treasury Select Committee said so).

Various BBC programmes, such as Breakfast, have also wheeled out graphics to show how wrong the figure is.

Overall, Feedback was strongly biased against the complaint from Yardley, as it was against the Brexit side. It was dismissed without considering the key points he made, and with undue focus on erroneous claims made by the Brexit side. Such cavalier dismissal of complaints is endemic within the BBC.

Full Transcript:

BBC Radio 4, ‘Feedback, 3rd June 2016, Norman Smith and EU Referendum Coverage, 4.30pm

ANNOUNCER: Now it’s time for Feedback with to Roger Bolton who talks to Norman Smith about listeners views of the BBC’s EU referendum reporting. He reveals which programmes listeners would like to hear much more of and asks is Radio 4 too posh?

ROGER BOLTON: Hello. Three weeks to go to the biggest political decision for decades and the air is full of personal abuse, internecine strife and questionable statistics. Have you made your mind up yet and is the BBC’s European referendum reporting helping you decide where to place your cross? And who controls the agenda?

NORMAN SMITH: We are there to report what the main combatants in this referendum say, do, argue and if they keep going on about the economy and immigration then I’m afraid the gravitational pull for us to do so, I think is pretty immense.

RB: In feedback this week, the BBC’s assistant political editor Norman Smith admits that the BBC could be bolder in its coverage and that sometimes a desire to be impartial gets in the way. The immigration question has dominated the last few days of the euro debate and Pakistani immigrant families were at the heart of the latest instalment of the Radio 4 series Born in Bradford the presenter is Winifred Robinson.

Extract from ‘Born in Bradford’ and a comment on ‘From Our Home Correspondent’.

RB: But first, to Westminster. I’m standing outside the Houses of Parliament where party politics are the order of the day and which is usually the centre of political coverage. Not for the next three weeks. The European referendum debate that split the parties, split the countries of the UK, and the vote that matters will not take place in parliament but all over the country on June 23^rd. How well has the BBC has been covering this crucial debate which will decide our future for years, probably decades ahead? Here are some of your views.

MICHAEL YARDLEY: It’s Michael Yardley and I live near Colchester in Essex. I’m concerned about the way the referendum’s being reported by the BBC. It’s my impression that Remain gets better placement in BBC headlines. I also think there’s been a failure to emphasise that many fear-inducing statistical projections made by the Remain lobby are just estimates, guesswork.

LEON DEVINE (phonetic) Hi, this is Leon Devine from Worksop in North Nottinghamshire. The whole debate seems to more about the leadership issue in the Tory party rather than the issues behind the referendum. I think the coverage from the BBC has been more geared to generating controversy rather than illuminating some of the issues.

RB: One of the corporation’s key journalists covering the campaign is its assistant political editor Norman Smith and I’m going to the BBC newsroom in the Milbank building behind me, to put to him some of your concerns about the coverage. Norman Smith how long have you been covering this campaign, does it seem most of your life?

NORMAN SMITH: It has been, I suppose, the longest running story in British politics because it is the fundamental story of who are we? Are we’re part of Europe or are we something slightly different? It’s about identity, it’s about those fundamental questions of democracy and sovereignty so it is one of the defining political stories which has shaped our whole political narrative, certainly since I’ve been working as a political journalist.

RB: And yet, there has been criticism of the coverage of this campaign, some from our listeners, some from other figures, for example John Snow said that it erm . . . was an abusive and boring EU referendum campaign, he cannot remember a worse tempered one. Do you agree with him?

NS: I don’t actually, no. I know what he’s driving at, and that the level of invective, acrimony, even personal abuse, has been pretty ferocious, but I think also we have tapped into some of the big issues and big arguments. I mean, most obviously immigration is right up there in the headlights and we have delved into the arguments about levels of immigration, are they sustainable, what can we do about it and I think it’s also reflected in arguments about the economy. So I don’t accept that it has just been a sort of ‘he said, she said’ row, I think actually there has been quite a lot of grit to this debate.

RB: It has of course been a fight for the agenda, each side trying to choose the territory they feel is most favourable to them. You’ve got a dilemma, haven’t you? On the one hand, you’ve got to report the debates that . . . is happening, on the other hand, you have a wider responsibility to cover the issues that you may, and the BBC may believe are really important and should be taken into consideration?

NS: Hmm.

RB: How do you deal with that?

NS: I think there are limits to how far you can book the news agenda and say, ‘enough immigration’, ‘enough economy’, we think we really ought to be talking about the impact on agriculture or universities. We are there to report what the main combatants in this referendum say, do, argue. I don’t think it’s up to us to, as it were, go AWOL and say, ‘Well, fine, but we’re actually going to talk about this, because we think that’s what voters are interested in.’ I think we are to some extent bound to reflect their arguments, and if they keep going on about the economy and immigration then I’m afraid the gravitational pull for us to do so, I think is pretty immense.

RB: You see, again, criticism from some of our listeners, but also, I think, contained into academic reports suggest a degree of bias and concerns about who is appearing. Leon Devine says, for example, who tweeted us to say, why Tory politicians dominating the airwaves, while others, especially from smaller parties are ignored.

NS: I guess because the Tory story plays to a bigger narrative about who governs the country after the referendum. So there is, editorially, a pull because of all the question marks about Cameron . . . leadership.

RB: But I wonder if you’re also erm . . . finding it a little difficult to, er, how can I say? Take sides in the way perhaps BBC listeners would like you to take sides on matters of fact. Where one side makes a statement and another one, just, ‘Well that’s not true, it’s all rubbish’, whatever, but are you reluctant to go any further than simply say, ‘One side says this, the other side says the other.’

NS: Well, I, I think that is a valid criticism. There is an instinctive bias in the BBC towards impartiality, to the exclusion, sometimes maybe of making judgement calls that we can and should make. We are very, very . . . cautious about saying something is factually wrong. As I think as an organisation we could be more muscular about it. I’ll give you an example, which is one that cropped up, and there was a lot of debate within the BBC about it, was when the Brexit campaign suggested that Turkey was poised to join the EU, and that there was nothing we could do about it. Now that is factually wrong, but when we initially covered the story, I think we said along the lines of ‘Remain had said that is wrong’ – in other words, we attributed the assessment to the Remain side, when we could, of our own, say ‘No, that is factually wrong.’ But, because as an organisation, more than any other organisation, there is a massive pressure and premium on fairness, on balance, on impartiality, I suspect we, we hold back from making those sort of calls, and I do think that, potentially, is a disservice to the listener and viewer.

RB: But perhaps there is a larger problem that you face – which is . . . we in the country in a very long campaign, a lot of us haven’t made up our minds, in a way want you to tell us how to vote, want you to give us facts. And there are some facts, but in most instances, this is a matter of judgement, er, about the future, but about a value system about what we hold most dear . . .

NS: Hmm.

RB: . . . and you can’t tell us, the answer . . .

NS: (speaking over) No, I mean . . .

RB: . . . to those things, can you?

NS: I’ve done things for erm . . . telly and radio, along the lines of ‘EU Fact or Fiction’ and they are complete nightmares to do, because every fact is a matter of argument, there are, there are no sort of biblical tablets of stone which empirically prove one thing or the other, they are used as ammunition in both camps. And it is very difficult to present viewers and listeners with a whole string of unequivocal, clear as daylight facts about the EU. And I suspect that is the subject of huge frustration for listeners, as indeed it is, indeed, the journalists.

RB: Tell me, the answer to this honestly – are you enjoying this debate?

NS: It’s incredibly physically wearing, because it is honestly exactly like a general election, except it’s a general election which seems to have gone on even longer. But it is enjoyable, because it’s one of those moments in your journalistic life when you are on the cusp of history, because of the decisions we make are momentous, and they will affect not just me but my children and grandchildren, so you genuinely feel you are sort of there is history is being made, and that’s a huge privilege.

RB: My thanks to Norman Smith, the BBC’s assistant political editor. The referendum will continue to be a subject that listeners have strong views on, of course, in the meantime I’d be delighted to hear your thoughts on referendum coverage or anything you’ve heard on BBC radio lately, good or bad.

Photo by James Cridland

Referendum Blog: June 4

EU Referendum Blog | 4th June 2016 | by David Keighley

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

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

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

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

Webb then said to Buckley:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CG: Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Webb said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jenkin said:

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

FURTHER ANALYSIS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CONCLUSION

What was the underlying editorial approach to these three features?

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

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

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

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

Full Transcripts:

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

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

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

ALAN BUCKLEY: Good morning.

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

DONOVAN GARDNER: Good morning.

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

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

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

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

JW: And Donovan, what’s it like now?

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

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

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

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

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

JW: Oh . . .

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

JW: (laughs)

AB: But erm, the strange thing . . .

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

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

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

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

JW: Donovan you’re nodding?

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

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

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

AB: Yeah.

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

JW: Have you applied for any European money?

DG: Er . . . no. Erm . . .

JW: I mean would it be available to you?

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

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

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

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

AB: Hmm.

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

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

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

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

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

SM: Justin, thanks very much . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CG: Absolutely.

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

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

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

VPM: So partly-funded. (laughs)

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

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

VPF: It looks like it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NR: Justin splashing about in Cornwall there.

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

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

LOVEDAY JENKIN: Myttin da.

BOB SMITH: Good morning.

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

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

JW: (speaking over) I thought you would.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JW: Which is a report that says what?

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

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

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

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

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

JW: Loveday?

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

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

Photo by big-ashb

Referendum Blog: May 27

EU Referendum Blog | 27th May 2016 | by David Keighley

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

Nick Robinson said in introducing his item:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robinson concluded:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DONALD CAMPBELL: Yes, indeed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Razzall concluded:

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by kkalyan

Craig Byers: Here is the news. BBC bias revealed hour by hour

BBC Bias, EU Referendum, Immigration | 13th May 2016 | by Craig Byers

Thursday was ‘the big day’ at the BBC, and yesterday morning’s Today was all over Mr Whittingdale’s Charter Review report.

Did the BBC treat the story impartially?

Well, on Today there was Lib Dem peer Lord Lester QC sticking up for the BBC. And Labour’s Tessa Jowell sticking up for the BBC. And former BBC, Sky and ITV employee Professor Lis Howell half-criticising and half-sticking up for the BBC. And BBC presenter Nick Robinson not exactly firing, in ‘devil’s advocate’-style, on all impartial cylinders either.

They did have the SNP’s John Nicholson, for ‘balance’ though, demanding a Scottish News at Six – and getting a rough ride from Mishal Husain in the process. ‘Who wants that?’ was Mishal’s basic point. (A fair point, probably).

Impartial? Hardly.

And then came The World at One on BBC Radio 4. And that was even worse.

After a short review of events in Parliament came a discussion between the BBC’s Martha Kearney and Steve Hewlett of the Guardian/BBC Radio 4’s Media Show, which suggested the Charter review wasn’t as bad as the BBC and its supporters feared, but that there are still issues of concern for them.

Then came a much shorter interview with Peter Bone MP, a BBC critic. It was the ‘balancing item’ -even though it lasted barely more more than a minute (the shortest interview by far).

Astonishingly, Martha forcefully stopped him in his tracks as as soon as he raised what he described as his “main concern”: BBC pro-EU bias. Martha clearly wasn’t going there for anything in the world. Realising that, Mr Bone just laughed.

Then came Jesse Norman MP saying that the government’s plan is great and the BBC is great.

Then came Labour-supporting former BBC Trust boss Sir Michael Lyons (not that Martha even hinted at such a thing) attacking the Government for going too far but saying that there is a problem with BBC bias: bias against Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn. A somewhat-startled-sounding Martha Kearney not only didn’t cut him off when he raised it (in contrast to how she treated Peter Bone when he tried to air his concerns about pro-EU BBC bias) but actually went on to press his pro-Labour ‘BBC bias’ point with Lord Hall.

And Lord Hall was the big WATO interview.

He didn’t agree with Sir Michael about the BBC’s anti-Corbyn bias (you won’t be surprised to hear), saying that the BBC is impartial (you also won’t be surprised to hear) and that the BBC brings “light to controversy”.

Lord Hall sounded pleased with what the Government has announced. The BBC’s Martha (gently) pressed him largely from a pro-BBC, Wolf Hall director Peter Kosminsky-type standpoint rather than an anti-BBC Andrew Bridgen MP-type standpoint.

And that was that: Lots of pro-BBC types having their say, plus (very briefly) Peter Bone.

Impartial? Hardly.

Meanwhile over on BBC One’s News at One bulletin we got more of the same, plus three items on the EU referendum: Mark Carney of the Bank of England’s dire warnings of the economic dangers of voting to leave the EU came first. A little later came the Vote Leave/ITV spat over whether Nigel Farage should be involved in a TV debate with David Cameron. And finally, immediately before the sports news (i.e. as the last ‘serious’ news item), came the news that the ONS has finally conceded that immigration from the EU has been massively under-represented in the government’s official figures (not that the short BBC news item put it like that) – a point that many people have been saying might well give a huge boost to the Leave campaign.

So why did BBC One choose to ‘bury’ that story as a very short new item near the end of its lunch time news bulletin?

Wasn’t that Peter Bone’s point being proved?

Impartial? Hardly.

And then came BBC’s News at Six.

BBC One’s News at Six began with another pro-Leave point: Bank of England governor Mark Carney’s dire warnings about a vote to leave the EU:

A warning from the Bank of England: Leaving the EU could trigger a recession.

The bulletin’s reporting was ‘impartial’ in the BBC sense, in that:

(a) the bulletin kept using words like “stark” and “strong” to describe the governor’s comments.
(b) the BBC’s economics editor Kamal Ahmed, after laying out Mr Carney’s anti-Brexit case in detail, said that “many economists agree with the Bank’s gloomy prognosis” and then featured one such economist doing just that…
‘…balanced’ by (c) a clip of Norman Lamont saying, very briefly, that Mr Carney is wrong…
and then (d) BBC political reporter Alex Forsyth setting the context by saying that Mr Carney’s intervention is “undoubtedly a boost” to the Remain campaign as Mr Carney is “a senior, credible figure once again warning in no uncertain terms of the economic risks of leaving.

ITV’s early evening news bulletin also led with that pro-Leave point and, like Kamal Ahmed, ITV’s deputy political editor Chris Ship also laid out the governor’s concerns in some detail.

Unlike the BBC, however, Chris Ship also said “the truth is” that the economic forecasts aren’t great at the moment whichever way we vote, and his ‘talking heads’ included two people who disagreed with Mr. Carney: John Redwood and Wetherspoons boss Tim Martin – both making substantive points against the BoE governor.

ITV struck me as taking its ‘impartiality’ responsibilities far more seriously than the BBC there. The BBC felt outrageously one-sided in comparison.

And after giving us its Mark Carney coverage ITV then moved straight onto the EU immigration question – for many Brexiteers the big story of the day – and those ONS figures with Chris Ship giving us James Brokenshire on one side and Liam Fox on the other, plus talk of economists claiming immigration is good for us on one side and Leave supporters saying we can’t control our border on the side, plus mention of the “true scale” of immigration and the figures taking us into “unprecedented” territory.

The BBC, in contrast, didn’t move straight onto the EU immigration story. It moved on to other stories instead. And we had to wait until nearly the end of the bulletin again for the EU immigration story to appear. And, again, it was given short shrift.

The BBC newsreader, George Aligiah, introduced it as being a case of Leave campaigners “saying” and the ONS “clarifying”. It’s “quite complicated”, said George. Yes, it’s “not very easy”, said the BBC’s Tom Symonds. Tom said that “Eurosceptics say” it’s an underestimate but “the nation’s number-crunchers” have “tried to explain it today” as being just a matter of short-term migrants. He elaborated somewhat on the the ONS’s explanation, explaining their case in a tone of patient reasonableness. Then he said: Eurosceptics say this, the government says that.

‘BBC impartiality’ duly fulfilled. Story duly downplayed. For those who think that the government shamelessly ‘managed’ this story today (the ONS figures being released on the day the BBC was fixating on itself), this might suggest the government was ‘aided and abetted’ by the BBC here.

Is ITV biased? Is the BBC biased?

On the strength of this I’m definitely going with the latter.

Maybe the Charter review should have focused more on that.

This article first appeared on The Conservative Woman

Photo by Ben Sutherland

Referendum Blog: May 9

EU Referendum Blog | 9th May 2016 | by David Keighley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PH: They do affect us.

NR: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NR: (speaking over) Foreign Secretary . . .

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

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

PH: Thank you.

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

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

PENNY MORDAUNT: Good morning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NR: (speaking over) How?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PM: Certainly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NR: Okay.

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

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

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

NR: Thank you for your time.

Photo by DFID – UK Department for International Development

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