853 wrote: 4 May 2023, 1:43pmAnd what about the Pro-EU leaflet sent out by the government to all households, at an expense of £9.3 million to taxpayers? Where was the balance and impartiality in that?
And for those of you who don't beleve me:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-EU_le ... %20Ireland.
David Cameron's Government were overtly pro-remain. The only reason he called the referendum in the first place was political cowardice - he thought he'd win the referendum and quieten down his anti-EU opponents. Governments aren't supposed to be impartial - they're political beasts.
The main thing to notice in the Wikipedia article you've linked to is that the contents of the Government leaflet were fact-checked and the 15 claims found to be accurate. This is in sharp contrast to the Brexit misinformation. I don't need to point towards the dodgy double decker bus claims here - I've got personal experience:
I briefly worked with the European Commission on the development of a new Product Directive, which would allow harmonised standards for a particular type of equipment to be sold round Europe. Basically, this meant I was working with some extremely enthusiastic British manufacturers who wanted a standard that would allow them to sell their products from Portugal to Poland, without the local authorities stepping in and saying it didn't comply with their national standards. (This stuff involves very, very dull bureaucratic and technical detail, but is extraordinarily important to manufacturers - once they know their products have a huge market, they can invest heavily accordingly.) When the Directive we were working with made it to the UK Press, it was painted as 'Brussels red tape' - shackling our plucky British businesses. This was a bare-faced lie, and these large British firms were screaming loudly about it, as all the employer/manufacturer/trade groups have been throughout Brexit.
However, the lesson here is: simple lies beat complicated truths. Nobody wants to listen to me droning on about manufacturing and product standards, but Joe Public loves a good story about Brussels Bureaucrats Banning Bendy Bananas, regardless of whether it's true.
That's how the oligarchs who dominate our mass media ran rings around the remain campaign, and the murky world of social media was far worse. If you're trying to argue using the facts these days, you've already lost before you started.
If you doubt anything that I've just said, then I've got a challenge for you: now we're in the sunlit uplands of Brexit, can you name one bit of red tape that's been removed that has made your life in any way better?
