Press is guilty for failing to address real debate on Europe

With amazing chutzpah, the Times leader today complains of “the almost complete absence of any serious debate about European issues is a colossal indictment of the European Union”. Surely it is an indictment of the UK press, including the Times, that there is so little coverage of the European issues at stake in this election!

Only yesterday Gordon Brown, David Miliband and Glenis Willmott, the leader of the Labour MEPs in the European Parliament, gave a joint press conference on the European election campaign and the European issues involved. Every question asked by journalists (bar one) was about Westminster expenses and possible cabinet reshuffles. Not a single newspaper seems to have written up the press conference at all, nor covered the issues raised. And then they have the gall to blame the EU for their failure.

Meanwhile, in the Telegraph, arch eurosceptic Dan Hannan MEP displays just as much chutzpah. Not to be outdone by UKIP claims that 75% of our legislation is adopted at European level, Dan comes up with the figure of 84%! No doubt Roger Helmer will soon pop up soon to say that it’s 100%. May I remind readers yet again that the politically neutral House of Commons library says 9%.

But his cheek is also apparent in his claim that “David Cameron plans to give the European Parliament something it hasn’t had for 50 years: an official opposition”. This has all of Dan’s usual hallmarks: a nice sounding turn of phrase that catches the eye, but on closer inspection is totally meaningless.

Unlike most parliaments, where the executive has an inbuilt majority whipped into automatically supporting the government, the European Parliament is not in hock to any executive. The Commission cannot rely on any parliamentary majority to get its proposals through – they are invariably amended, often quite substantially (unlike government bills in most national parliaments) and often rejected. Nor can the Council of Ministers rely on automatic backing from the European Parliament as most MEPs come from parties that, in their own countries, are in opposition to their national government and therefore the ministers in the Council. That is why MEPs are not just lobby fodder – they actually determine the shape of the legislation before them.

Could Dan Hannan have meant it in a different sense, namely that this would be opposition to the EU as such? However, in that sense, it is rather like the SNP claiming that it is the only opposition in the House of Commons because it is the only party that wants to see the break-up of the UK. Dan does oppose the very existence of the EU (and NATO), but that is nothing new in the European Parliament: the extreme right and extreme left have always opposed the EU. So, far from “creating an opposition” to the EU, the Conservatives are merely joining an existing opposition, that majority of whose members are fascist or communist.

Mind your language as Tories relish latest Euromyth

A story that neatly illustrates the working methods of the eurosceptics has been in the headlines of several papers this week, not least the Express. An internal guidance document intended for the translation services of the Parliament, advising staff on how best to render certain terms and expressions in other languages in a gender neutral or simply polite way (and also when not to do so if it would lead to distorted grammar and garbled sentences!), has been seized upon by various Conservative and other MEPs to portray it as "the European Union telling us how to speak our own language".

Although clearly not intended for MEPs or the wider public, Philip Bradbourn, Conservative MEP, said "I will have no part of it. I will continue to use my own language and expressions" - as if anyone had ever implied the contrary.

Struan Stevenson, the pro-European Scottish MEP who frequently masquerades as a Eurosceptic in the press to keep his right-wing party members happy, said "They seem determined to tell us which words we can use in our own language. It's ludicrous. The thought police are on the rampage". This is on a par with Struan's previous claims that the EU wanted to ban bagpipes - no doubt great for getting coverage in the Scottish press but no step forward for the cause of truth and honesty in politics!

Chris-Heaton Harris meanwhile had the cheek to claim "This really is the sort of rubbish that brings ridicule on the European Parliament", which is exactly what inventing Euromyths is designed to do, and something Tory MEPs obviously enjoy indulging in for a bit of easy press.

EU scare stories coincide with Euro election build-up

First, Bruno Waterfield, Telegraph correspondent in Brussels, fills in a lull in interesting stories coming his way, by reporting that "MEPs" want to build a swimming pool in the parliament at taxpayers' expense. Never mind that the idea has already been rejected bt the Parliament's bureau. It is sufficient that one French Green party member continues to support it, for Bruno to generate his headline, which has inevitably been taken by many readers as meaning that the parliament has decided to waste money on a luxury - the opposite of what it really did. Already, newspapers across Europe, from Athens based "New Europe" to Scotland on Sunday repeating and embellishing the story.

Then, of course, several British tabloids report that MEPs could become millionaires if they were to divert their expenses into their own pocket. Never mind that Labour MEPs, recently followed by the Conservatives and the LibDems, have their accounts reviewed by independent auditors to make that impossible. Never mind that this story is a re-hash of one last year, about an alleged abuse by a number of MEPs, which spurred on a reform of the Parliament's own system. The key thing is to implant in the public mind the image of MEP = corruption. Expect more of this as Eurosceptics seek to discredit the whole Parliament ahead of June's elections.

Not to be outdone, UKIP indulged in their own distortions this week by saying that Parliament's President Pottering had endorsed their claim that 75 percent of legislation in our countries is EU law. He did nothing of the sort. EU law is, according to most studies, a much lower proportion (9 percent according to the House of Commons library, 6.3 percent according to the Swedish parliament, 12 percent according to the Finnish parliament and between 12 and 19 percent according to the Lithuanian parliament). But such low figures undermine UKIP's claim that we are creating a centralised superstate.

So they have misinterpreted a comment by Pottering that 75 percent of EU legislation (i.e. of the proportion that IS adopted at EU level) is adopted by the European Parliament (through the co-decision procedure with the Council of Ministers) and that this will rise to (nearly) 100 percent with the Lisbon treaty, to imply that he said that 75 percent of legislation in Europe is EU legislation.

UKIP (unless they are even more stupid than most people think) obviously know that that is not what Pottering was saying - it is clear from the context and in his original German (though not in the English subtitles used on UKIP's video). But again, why let the facts spoil a scare story?

Open Europe and 'biased propaganda'

Dropping into my inbox this week was an invite to attend an Open Europe event called ‘EU communication policy: biased propaganda?’.

A bit rich!

Despite styling themselves as an ‘independent think tank’, Open Europe consistently produces what can only be described as biased propaganda. By misleading and using selective quoting Open Europe, with a helping hand from the media, very successfully manages to misrepresent EU policies and structures on a regular basis.

Its polls, normally designed to highlight how unpopular the EU is, are so loaded they are essentially worthless, something journalist David Rennie pointed out a couple of years ago when he was working for the Telegraph.

They are of course of course perfectly within their rights to do this (and they certainly do it very effectively) but when they are so far removed from balance and objectivity themselves it is absurd for them to call into question the balance and objectivity of anyone else.

Shedding some light on the right wing paper’s panic over lightbulbs

Much hysteria about lightbulbs this week, as it was announced major stores were running out of 100 watt incandescent lightbulbs after retailers voluntarily agreed to stop selling them ahead of an EU ban on the sale of them from September.

The right-wing papers mourned the passing of the 100 watt bulb as if electricity itself was going to be phased out and replaced by candles, rather than by a more environmentally friendly, efficient and cost effective replacement as the Express's headline "EU's barmy idea to ban lightbulbs" suggests.

The Daily Mail began its report with, "Millions of Britons are finally waking up to the fact that their beloved light bulb will disappear for good after 120 years" as if the 100 watt lightbulb is revered as some kind of national treasure, only discussed with tear-stained eyes, a lump in the throat and accompanied by a stirring rendition of Jerusalem.

And depsite the Mail's headline, "Revolt! Robbed of their right to buy traditional light bulbs, millions are clearing shelves of last supplies", the comments section of their webpage suggests most people don't really care or are in favour of the newer lightbulbs. In fact such is the extent of the Mail's misjudged mania over the bulbs, readers take to mocking the story for its lack of logic and scant regard to facts.

The Mail reports that supermarkets and hardware stores are running out of the bulbs. Well of course they are, that's what they are trying to do! It is perfectly logical that 100 watt bulbs will be harder to find as stocks diminish. The fact the paper itself has 25,000 free 100 watt lightbulbs to give away hardly suggests they have become impossible to source items.

Then there is the implication that 100 watt light bulbs are cheaper. They may well be cheaper to buy but energy efficient bulbs last far longer and reduce the amount of electricity used, so in fact work out significantly cheaper.

The Mail's flag-waving about "Britons" and "their beloved lightbulbs" alongside the usual fingerpointing at the EU is made to look ridiculous by their accompanying piece entitled, "What Happens Overseas", which reveals that Cuba, Australia, the United States, Canada, Brazil, Venezuela and Switzerland have already or intend to ban 100 watt bulbs.

There is no doubt the odd person who is unhappy that, eventually, they will not be able to buy 100 watt incandescent lightbulbs but if we are to combat climate change then these are the sort of small changes we have to make. The fact you can save £7 of electricity per energy efficient bulb each year highlights this is not just an easy way to reduce the amount of energy we use but an easy way of saving some money. And somehow I doubt that at the current time few people will be planning to "revolt" about that.

Will Hutton on the euro

Will Hutton has written an interesting piece in yesterday's Observer on why Britain's best interests may be served by us joining the euro. Click here

Press hyperbole on pesticides detracts from a serious debate

The British press has been at its hyperbolic and inaccurate best this morning. The issue in question is on the proposed directive to re-classify pesticides that comes before the European Parliament's Agriculture committee this week.

The Daily Telegraph started the bidding, declaring that "plans to cut the use of pesticides in European farming could double the price of vegetables", a bid that was matched by the Scottish Daily Record. Not to be outdone, the Daily Express out-trumped them both by stating that "hard-pressed families' fruit and vegetable bills will triple under controversial EU plans", adding that "the number of crops grown in Britain is set to be slashed if bureaucrats give the go-ahead".

Now, if any of the so-called "journalists" that penned this copy had bothered to do their homework, they might have come to somewhat different conclusions.

First of all, we are talking about proposals to phase out dangerous pesticides in our food that carry significant health risks.

Secondly, any such pesticides would not be immediately banned. Instead, most of them would remain on the market until 2016 to allow safer alternative products to be developed, while the process of gaining authorisation for a new farming pesticide will be made much quicker and easier. Even then, if the 2016 timeframe is not sufficient to develop new products, the current proposals provide a further 5 year derogation, to minimise adverse effects on agriculture and crop yields.

In other words, the proposed directive is expressly designed to prevent any adverse effects on the agricultural sector that would lead to higher food prices. There are certainly issues with the proposal - my Labour colleagues and I are not happy with some over-zealous aspects which we will seek to amend - but it is a question of getting the right balance in the detail. What a shame that these newspapers chose to create a scare story that must have had families up and down the country choking on their morning corn-flakes.

More UKIP shambles

Just met a disgruntled UKIP MEP (or should I now say ex-UKIP?) who told me he would not stand for election again for this shambles, after their bun-fight in Bournemouth last week, described in glowing terms by the Independent. Mind you, his view was that Farage himself had planted this article to stir up party members against his (many) internal enemies. Who knows?

The Express plugs the Euro! Shurely shome mishtake!

I had a welcome surprise on Friday, when reading the Express (of all papers!) making a case for Britain to join the euro! While the new vastly reduced roaming tariffs will make it much cheaper for people to call and receive calls from abroad, the pound's weakness against the euro means that the maximum fee for UK mobile users will actually go up in terms of pounds. This is another, albeit smallscale, example of how Britain's status outside the eurozone leaves it vulnerable to currency fluctuations.

However, I fear that the Express was not intentionally intending to plug British membership of the single currency.

The tricky issue of balance in the media

An interesting take on media balance is to examine how the media has dealt with the MMR vaccine issue. There is almost universal consensus in the scientific community that the MMR vaccine is perfectly safe and that administering it to the children of our country has protected them for measles, mumps and rubella. But on the basis of some "research" (strongly challenged by other scientists and corroborated by none) by one man - Andrew Wakefield - a scare campaign has frightened many parents from allowing their children to be vaccinated. This resulted in a mumps outbreak affecting 42,000 people - yet mumps had previously been eliminated.

In the words of the Government's chief scientific advisor David King, the way that the media handled the issue was that "every time with the issue of the MMR vaccine we had one person, Andrew Wakefield, brought on board to oppose the rest of the scientific community, as if it was one on one". A supposed need to achieve balanced coverage ended up giving disproportionate support to an eccentric and discredited viewpoint with dire consequences for the health of our children, possibly involving some fatalities.

The question of balance always poses the question of around what dividing line. On EU matters, for instance, one could imagine a balanced debate between proponents and opponents of having tougher or looser social and environmental standards for our common market or a debate on whether the EU should take a tougher line with Russia or engage more with it. Yet even those parts of our media that are not signed up to a Eurosceptic agenda find the need to balance debate about Europe simply in terms of pro or anti European, rather than in terms of what policies Europe should follow. It is as if every debate on national politics - be it on the state of the NHS, education, the economy or whatever had to be balanced between a supporter of the existence of the UK and an opponent of its existence with the SNP or other opponents wheeled into every single debate in the name of "balance".

A Danish colleague told me that this used to be a problem in Denmark: whenever the EU was debated there would always be one speaker in favour of Danish membership and one speaker against with the result that EU policy choices as such were never discussed on their own merits. It was only when euroscepticism faded away (and Denmark was the country in which euroscepticism was the strongest in the 1970s and 80s) that discussions on EU affairs became better informed, more interesting and more relevant. Any chance of that happening in Britain?

A big hello to the silly season

As always, the coming of August brings the arrival of the silly season and like the first daffodil of spring, a Daily Express journalist has been in contact with me asking me whether there is anyone in the European Parliament campaigning to make the UK change its road signs to kilometres.

Now the journalist was quick to mention the permanent derogation Britain has been granted on the use of imperial measurements for road signs and as such knew any change would be solely up to the British government and parliament. Yet the journalist still wanted to know if there was anyone in the European parliament who wanted Britain to ditch miles, even though this would be entirely irrelevant to the current situation.

So, sometime in the next month expect some ridiculous "save our mile" campaign in the Express suggesting there is a plot to force Britain to use the kilometre - even though the newspaper fully understands there is absolutely no threat whatsoever to the British mile.

Ducking the issue

There’s a new Euromyth about Peking Duck. Previous claims that the EU was going to force a name change (in the same style as the Bombay Mix myth) have now been replaced in the Mail and the Telegraph, along with other papers, by claims the EU has banned Peking Duck altogether!

It will come as no surprise to anyone except the most gullible that the EU hasn’t banned Peking Duck.

What has actually happened is that Westminster council have discovered that some of the the special ovens used to cook Peking Duck emit too much carbon monoxide - and surely nobody needs to be told the dangers of carbon monoxide poisoning!

There are of course plenty of other ovens that do not break the regulations so any disruption to Peking Duck, however unfortunate, has really been quite minimal.

And while the facts are buried in the article the usual formula of nonsense is laid on top. Headlines scream of a ban, the blame is laid squarely at the foot of the EU and there is righteous indignation from a celebrity, Ken Hom in this case. But of course "Eleven restaurants must update their ovens because they release too much carbon monoxide" is not a news story and certainly not one that is the EU’s fault!

Tory revolt against Cameron's anti-sleaze show

Conservative MEPs are today in open revolt over the announcement made yesterday by their supposed leader David Cameron to reform the Tories' system of auditing their MEPs expenses, after it was revealed that a secret Conservative memo referred to his proposals as, amongst other things, "half-baked" and "a PR disaster that would "snatch defeat from the jaws of victory"

The story is all over today's papers and there is confusion over the source of the memo. The Guardian and Sun seem to think it came from the pen of arch-eurosceptic Roger Helmer, while the Telegraph claims that it was written by a group of several Conservative MEPs. Either way, it is hard to imagine that the author's identity will stay secret for too long. The memo is incredibly indiscreet; it is astonishing that Tory MEPs are threatening to sue the Conservative leader if he carried out his threat to de-select them!

The memo was found on a photocopier in Strasbourg. It says a lot about the incompetence of the Conservatives that they would leave such an explosive document in a photocopier for anyone to find.

Demonstrating a startling brass neck (even by his standards), Dan Hannan claims that Tory MEPs are actually the cleanest, and saying that Labour MEPs are keeping "schtum for a reason"! Well, the reason would be that since 2000, Labour MEPs have had their accounts annually reviewed by an independent auditor to make sure that they are in order and in compliance with the Parliament's rules. As Labour's leader in Europe, Gary Titley said yesterday, "Finally, after eight years, the Tory Party has caught up with the Labour MEPs' regime for dealing with expenses. The difference is that all 19 Labour MEPs have signed up to this, but the evidence is many Tory MEPs will have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into doing the right thing.”

I have to say that Lib Dem Norman Baker's line that "the words 'Tory and sleaze' go together as easily as cheese and sandwich" is also worth a chuckle (but it would rhyme better if it was 'sandwich and cheese')

The memo's release took the thunder out of Cameron's press conference given yesterday to announce a so-called 'deep clean' of his MEPs expenses. It wrecked his latest attempt to portray himself as taking a tough line with the sleazier elements of his party.

Sunday sceptics praise EU legislation

It was pleasantly surprising to see stories in several of the more eurosceptic Sunday papers giving a favourable write up to proposed European legislation.

The Sunday Telegraph praises the proposed EU cross-border enforcement rules of speeding and parking fines. The inability of British authorities to be able to trace foreign drivers costs us £10m per year in unpaid fines from around 180,000 offences. These proposals will enable police to chase foreign transgressors, who currently violate our laws with impunity, who have committed offences such as speeding, jumping traffic lights, drink driving and driving without wearing a seatbelt. It's an example of when a common set of rules and enforcement mechanism is eminently sensible.

Elsewhere, the Sunday Times and Mail on Sunday favourably reported the proposed Small Business Act which would increase the role of small businesses in framing European legislation and include measures to have common starting dates for legislation affecting firms and an annual statement of legislation coming into force. Surprising, but welcome, to see that they are praising EU measures to cut red tape and business burdens rather than recycling the usual scare stories about 'meddling Brussels bureaucrats'.

Although the Mail was less fulsome, pointing out that the Federation of Small Businesses feels the proposals are "too weak", if you were a Commission press officer you'd be forgiven for asking for a lie down at all the praise!

The way Eurosceptics work

If ever people needed proof that phoney 'think-tank' Open Europe is nothing more than a front for Better Off Out campaigners for UK withdrawal from the EU they should look at this opinion poll.

With great fanfare, Open Europe on Tuesday announced this poll undertaken by YouGov apparently showing that only 29% of people want the UK to remain a member of the EU. Needless to say, the Tory headbangers on Conservative Home have already loudly trumpeted the poll as proof that David Cameron should heed the Better Off Out brigade and pledge to negotiate British withdrawal from the EU.

Of course, polls such as these are designed to be spun by those commissioning them, but on closer inspection, the poll itself is based on a false premise, claiming that the EU was always based around "economic co-operation" but is now responsible for making decisions on "foreign policy, immigration and crime" (carefully ignoring the fact that the EU does not govern Britain's immigration or criminal justice systems, nor can it make foreign policy decisions without the agreement of Britain and all EU countries).

Therefore, the poll offers three choices - "the UK should stay in the EU", "the UK should stay in the single market but pull out of the political elements of the EU" or, "the UK should leave the EU altogether". Faced with this, 29% chose the first option, 38% the second and 24% the third. Notwithstanding the fact that the single market is political as well as economic (a market must have rules and regulations to ensure that it is free and fair, rather than be left free to unfettered market forces, and the adoption of such legislation is a political process), the option of remaining in the single market "but pulling out of the political elements" is virtually impossible to achieve. In other words, it is a meaningless choice.

Besides, the Europhobes don't seem to have commented on the statistic that only 24% want Britain to leave the EU - a lower figure than in virtually any opinion poll since the 1975 referendum.

So there you have it - loaded questions based on false premises with bizarre choices makes for a pointless poll that reveals nothing - but don't expect Open Europe to be asking for their money back. So much for the intellectual rigour and integrity you would expect from a genuine think-tank.

Staying with Eurosceptic nonsense, the Sun came up with an inspired scare story that the French presidency wants a British aircraft carrier to be at the heart of a new EU Navy.

This 'story' is similar to the Sun's claim on St George's Day that the EU was planning to destroy Britain by dividing it into five regions (lumping the South-East in with the North of France in new super-region). Needless to say the Sun were able to find a Tory politician desperate enough for publicity to lend the story some ill-deserved credibility, with Shadow Defence Secretary Liam Fox saying "the EU's military ambitions know no bounds" and "we should be told whether this madness emanates from Paris or Downing Street", and, surprise surprise, Open Europe's Neil O'Brien also adds his two penn'orth.

Whilst it would be churlish to say that they've not been imaginative, (a Sun hack has certainly earned his corn with this re-writing of the lyrics to the Village People's "In the Navy") the story is fabricated tosh. Indeed, buried at the end of the story lies a quote from the Ministry of Defence demonstrating that this story is a pack of lies. Still, there seems to be nothing you can do to stop Eurosceptic tabloids writing such nonsense. Maybe the Commission should tell the press that it intends to buy up News International - now that would be a story!

More on MEPs' expenses

The media focus on Tory MEPs' expenses has continued unabated since I last blogged on the subject a week ago.

Following the resignation of the Conservative leader in the European Parliament, their Chief Whip has also resigned. They can hardly claim it is a case of a few small rotten apples, when it is their leadership team itself that has had to resign!

As I said, the Tories might have avoided this humiliation if they had done what we Labour MEPs have done for the last eight years, namely have our spending reviewed annually by an independent accountant to certify that all has been used properly. They are now belatedly on board for that, as are - equally belatedly - the LibDems.

Some have suggested that this has all come out now because of in-fighting among the Tories who remain bitterly divided on Europe, but even at the best of times have a reputation for ruthless backstabbing. Certainly, some of the stories in the press appear to come from internal leaks. Some have suggested that Cameron will use the opportunity, not just to deal with wrong-doers, but to purge those who are not solidly behind his own leadership. Maybe. That is an interesting dimension to their troubles, but it should not distract us from the the fundamentals. The setting up of companies run by family members to siphon off public money for private gain is a serious allegation and if true should be punished.

Meanwhile, they are determined to do whatever they can to tar other parties with the same brush. They are distraught that, despite trying, they have not been able to find equivalent cases among Labour MEPs.

We are now being bombarded with letters and calls from journalists, and queries from various campaign groups. Fortunately, we can reassure people quite easily thanks to our auditing rule and the fact that we all fill in our Declaration of Members' Interests, which includes whether any family member is employed. We publish the guidelines given to our auditors and we publish the resultant certificates on our websites. We also publish how we make use of the staff allowance in terms of employing staff in our constituency and parliamentary offices.

Despite all this information being publicly available, the anti-Europe campaign group Open Europe, which masquerades as a think tank, has now appointed itself as the policeman-cum-prosecutor of MEPs, has sent each Labour MEP a questionnaire, and denounces all those who fail to fill it in. Too lazy to read the published information on our websites, they expect MEPs to spend their time co-operating with an organisation that has no interest in improving the system, and certainly makes no distinction between genuine problems and invented ones, but simply in promoting Euroscepticism by means fair or foul. We'd rather spend our time, given that we are in order with our spending, on doing our job on behalf of our constituents.

For anyone who is interested in my expenses I suggest they look at the relevant page on my website.

Some interesting links

I took part in this week's Record Europe in which we discuss the relationship between sport and the European law. You can catch in on the BBC Parliament's channel or watch it on the internet here. The debate starts just under five minutes into the programme.

Another link well worth taking a look at is Nosemonkey's EUtopia post on the media and why he thinks that he was shortlisted for UACES-Reuters Reporting Europe Award for his blog on the EU. Far from being chuffed with being up for the award Nosemonkey worries he was shortlisted because of the distinct lack of any journalism from the major papers on the EU. It's a thoughtful piece that all too easily highlights the UK media's weakness of reporting the EU and the ignorence this then leads to.

Two other bloggers, Jon Worth and Jan Seifert, have set up a website which is campaigning for just one president of the EU, called Who Do I Call, in tribute to Henry Kissinger's infamous question "Who do I call if I want to call Europe?". It's online at www.whodoicall.eu and argues that appointing the same person to be President of the Commission and President of the European Council would offer greater democracy and efficiency while obviously offering one clear figurehead of the EU to the rest of the world.

Tories scrape the barrel on St George's Day

I had always thought that the media 'silly season' was in August, but the Tories seem to be trying to bring it forward a few months with this nonsense that was picked up by some very lazy journalists in the Sun, Mail and Express.

In what can only be described as a deeply cynical attempt to get some media coverage on St George's Day, the Conservatives have shamelessly recycled a story they used two years ago claiming that the Government is colluding with an EU plot to create transnational regions in order to create a united European state.

Sadly, it seems that a few journalists were too lazy to check the facts and swallowed it hook, line and sinker.

A quick internet search shows that the Sun and the Mail ran virtually identical stories in September 2006. Indeed, it looks as though the Conservative press officers were so lazy that they couldn't be bothered to make up a new quote for their Regional Affairs spokesman Eric Pickles! In September 2006, Pickles was quoted as saying "Eurocrats could literally wipe Britain off the map". Today he says "Gordon Brown literally wants to wipe Britain off the map". I don't think I'm alone in sensing a bit of déja vu here!

On the substance (what little exists), the Tories' claims refer to a map of Europe used for the INTERREG programme which is, as the acronym suggests, an inter-regional structural funds programme designed to help regions in different countries work together in order to maximise funding opportunities and tackle common problems. For the purpose of the programme, the map defines a "North Sea" region, an "Atlantic" region, a "Transmanche" region, a "North Atlantic" region and an "Ireland/Wales" region.

But, of course, Hartlepool and Hull do share a number of common problems and interests with the likes of Zeebrugge and Rotterdam - they are ports, share the same stretch of water and have similar environmental concerns. Indeed, inter-regional co-operation is not a conspiracy - it is common sense and a map showing which regions of Europe are working with each other is no more a threat to Britain than is a geological map showing both the Kent coast and Northern France as chalk.

Of all the euromyths I've come across, this has got to be up with the most scurrilous.

Anyway, let's hear a few bars of Jerusalem! Happy St George's Day everybody!

The truth about migrants and crime

An interesting if wholly unsurprising report from the Police confirms that migrants to the UK from eastern Europe are not responsible for waves of crime.

As you would expect, levels of crime from eastern European migrants are in line with the rate of crime of the general population.

You can read in more detail about the report on the Guardian and Telegraph websites.

Of course there is one set of people who will be astonished by this news, Daily Mail readers. While researching this blog I couldn’t find a mention of the report on the Daily Mail’s website anywhere, a paper that has previously claimed that eastern European migrants are responsible for one in 10 crimes.

But I wanted to be sure so searched through the Daily Mail's site via Google for mentions of “Immigrants” (you can do it like this). There are thousands upon thousands of hits, none of them mentioning that migrants are in no way responsible for waves of crimes!

Edit on April 17:

It seems the Mail were just a little slow on the uptake. Instead of a screaming front page headline the story is dumped on page 12 of Thursday's paper. Incredibly, and without a hint of irony, James Slack's analysis piece asked, "Who claimed there was a migrant crimewave in the first place?"

And if you think that's astonishing, how about the Express who defied logic and all the evidence to the contrary by plastering Thursday's front page with "IMMIGRANTS BRING MORE CRIME" before going on to quote the report which said, "the evidence does not support theories of a large-scale crime wave generated through migration."

In between the bluster, the blind prejudice and underlying hatred, the Express did find one rise in crime which featured migrants in the report. It was a "huge surge in the exploitation of migrants."

Media ignores Lords report on treaty

The excellent House of Lords report on the Lisbon Treaty, which I mentioned last week, was also referenced by Peter Preston in this week's Observer.

He noted, that the press coverage of this report was meagre to say the least.

The Mail, Telegraph and Express all failed to acknowledge its existence but more surprisingly Preston couldn't even find coverage from the BBC, giving the lie to those who claim it is pro-European. The Guardian covered it briefly and Peter Riddell went into a little more detail on it in an opinion piece for the Times.

Always quick to give ample coverage to shrill, sensationalist and highly inaccurate Eurosceptic claims about the Treaty, most of our media just ignores an authoritative, detailed analysis by an expert committee of our national parliament.

Miliband builds on government's increasingly pro-European stance

Patrick Wintour focused on David Miliband's Mansion House speech in yesterday's Guardian, suggesting the government is entering into a new pro-European era, following the Lisbon Treaty’s smooth path through the Commons.

Miliband is arguing that rather than being a threat to the UK's foreign policy or economy, a strong EU will enhance both as it increases our links with countries within and outside the EU.

Wintour is right to assert that the government is becoming increasingly braver with regards to actually talking about Europe, something it has sometimes been reluctant to do in the past. Wintour mentions Gordon Brown's recent visit to Brussels but at Labour's Spring Conference he also made it clear that it is only within the EU that Britain can achieve its objectives on climate change, development, trade and security – all areas where he noted Europe was leading the way.

As Denis MacShane has said before all this suggests that Europe has once again become a major dividing line between the parties, and crucially it is one that works to Labour’s advantage.

It's that time of the year again…

The Daily Mail has a fondness for publishing stories claiming that the Britain is bailing out the rest of Europe by paying through the nose for the EU budget.

This week they duly claimed that "every household in the UK will be expected to pay almost £400 a year for the privilege of EU membership".

A good line - but based on decidedly warped mathematics. Leaving aside our contributions to the EU budget, which is anyway capped at around 1% of EU GDP, the common market is worth £160 billion to our collective GDP - equivalent to roughly £1500 to every family in the UK.

Similarly bogus is the Mail's claim that Tony Blair "surrendered" the British rebate at the budget review in 2005. The rebate remains part of the budget and will actually increase by 13% (compared to an increase of just 6% for the EU budget as a whole) from an average of £3.9 billion per annum to £4.5 billion. Besides, let's not forget that the rebate exists to offset the imbalance that would otherwise leave Britain paying more than our fair share, not to provide us with a windfall which would leave us paying less than our fair share.

Indeed, claiming that Britain gets a raw deal from the EU budget simply does not stand up. According to a recent House of Commons library report on the EU Finances Bill, in per-capita terms, the UK is not one of the highest contributors to the EU budget. In 2006, the UK paid €68 euros per head. By comparison, the Netherlands pays €241 per head, Denmark €127, Sweden €124 and Germany €100. France and Austria paid €50 and €40 respectively.

Moreover, in structural funds (designed to regenerate the poorest regions of Europe) the UK receives a third more than France, 20% more than Belgium, nearly twice as much as the Netherlands and more than eight other countries. The UK received €3 billion in structural funds (an average of €50 per head). This is one euro per head less than Poland receives. Put plainly, the world's fifth largest economy, receives only €1 per head less than one of Europe's poorest countries.

Besides, while some may baulk at the idea of UK taxpayers providing money to the accession countries, the fact is that investing in economic stability in Eastern Europe benefits us all by increasing the total volume of EU trade, investment and jobs. For example, Britain's bilateral trade in goods with Spain and Ireland (two of the poorest EU countries 20 years ago) is now worth £40bn per year.

It is one thing for the Daily Mail to be sceptical of our EU membership, but it is fatuous for it to suggest that we are paying through the nose for the privilege.

A look at the media's reaction to the Commons vote

Over the past few months some of the papers, especially the Telegraph and Sun, have given a disproportionate amount of coverage to the Lisbon Treaty and particularly their campaign for a referendum, so how are they reacting now the country will not go to the polls?

Predictably!

The Mail complained that Wednesday's vote, "will go down in history as the day our politicians surrendered most of what was left of Britain's sovereignty and trusted the nation's future to a European superstate" while the Telegraph’s increasingly hysterical Iain Martin maintains that "when the entire story is told by historians, future generations will be surprised that the Euro-fanatics who plotted to sell out British sovereignty and democracy avoided being sent to the Tower for treason." - no less! Meanwhile, the Sun's George Pascoe-Watson is confident that, "it won't take long for the entire country to see just how much power has been surrendered to Brussels."

So no surprises but if their extravagant claims about the death of British democracy were true then surely it would be an issue of such extreme importance to our country that it would deserve to dominate their column inches and their websites for some time.

Well actually, the Daily Mail almost instantly returned to baiting women about their weight, digs at immigrants and a story about an England rugby union player being dropped for going to a nightclub. The Sun quickly dumped the story off the front page of their website and was far more concerned by Prince Harry, his girlfriend, Paul Burrell, and a quirky haircut at a fashion show. The Telegraph was just as swift to re-focus on Burrell and the rugby though it did also manage a nod to ID cards.

Could this return to other news be because the British public isn’t stupid enough to believe the nonsense they preach? Or are we simply not that interested in Britain's membership of the EU?

An article in the Times argues the latter point is especially true. It first considers the differing and difficult relationships Britain’s political parties have had with Europe and goes on to strongly argue that these concerns are not shared by the vast majority of the British public. It states that just 2 to 7% of voters list Europe as a concern, meaning it comes well behind crime, immigration, health, defence, the economy, environment, housing, drug abuse, tax, pensions and public morality.

This relaxed attitude to the EU is a mark of the failures of the Eurosceptics, as illustrated by this blog on the Telegraph website which praises Open Europe for playing a "blinder" adding "when it seemed that nobody cared, Neil and his colleagues worked overtime to devise ways of keeping the matter in the public eye."

So there you are, the Eurosceptics admit no-one is really interested in their cause and their campaign was little more than a marketing exercise which failed in its attempts to sell Europhobia to the masses, a view backed up by the media's own desire to stop banging on about Europe as quickly as possible.

Eurosceptics admit they are "a small hardcore going nowhere"

The utter failure of the campaign by British Eurosceptics against the Lisbon Treaty was amply demonstrated by their protest yesterday outside Parliament. This demonstration was, after all, billed by some hardline Eurosceptics as 'the last chance to save Britain' (no less!). However, they organised the protest on the wrong day - the key vote they were targeting in the Commons will take place next week - and the so-called "mass" protest was attended by a mere few hundred people.

This has been the hallmark of the campaigning against the Lisbon Treaty: plenty of bluster about the treaty spelling the death of Britain and the end of the world as we know it, (and avoiding the real substance of the treaty), but total failure to make more than a small minority believe them enough to go out and back their campaign.

Despite backing from a media that is notoriously hostile to the EU and despite having a great deal of financial muscle, the motley crew of UKIP/Open Europe and the Conservatives have failed to make their message resonate with the British people. I never thought I would say this, but the analysis of the protest on the EU Referendum site is pretty close to the mark when it states that "Euroscepticism remains in the doldrums, a small minority of hardcore activists who are going nowhere".

Tory's emergency mythmaking

Britain has 999. Belgium has 100. France has whatever. Difficult for tourists and business travellers alike to remember every emergency number from every country they visit.

So, someone has the idea of having a common number that will work everywhere, not replacing 999 etc, but as an additional number that will put you through to the same switchboard. No problem remembering several different numbers. EU countries all agree to introduce such a system. Useful.

Then, along comes a Tory MEP, desperate for some publicity and media coverage, (Chris Heaton Harris, News of the World letters, 24 February), saying "They must be bonkers if they think we are going to drop 999 in favour of 112. This is another example of an idea pushed by Brussels which nobody wants"

Yet he must surely know perfectly well (it takes about 30 seconds to look at the relevant document, and he - and his staff - are paid by taxpayers to be on top of European legislation) that no one is suggesting to drop 999, and that, far from being an idea nobody wants, every EU country thought it was a good idea.

But why should a Eurosceptic MEP let the facts get in the way of a good story?

Britain's not being "forced" into anything

We all know combatting climate change means switching to clean, renewable energy. We know that Britain doing this alone would be futile. Our country gets other EU countries to agree with us to work together to reduce C02 emissions by 20 per cent by the year 2020 - hailed at the time as a great example of British leadership in Europe.

How is this now rendered in ouur Eurosceptic media? Yesterday the Mail screamed that,"Brussels demands thousands more turbines across the UK", while the journalist, David Derbyshire, followed that article up with one today which stated, "Britain will be forced to generate 40 per cent of its electricity". Similarly the Telegraph went with "EU to set Britain 'ambitious' 40 per cent renewable energy target".

All of these imply that these targets are an unwelcome imposition by the EU instead of an agreed (and British-led) common endeavour.

Sun gives up on a referendum?

Another sign of the Eurosceptic anti-treaty campaign floundering: the Sun has apparently given up on its circulation-destroying obsession with a referendum on the EU.

Previously, its campaign for an EU referendum was flagged up throughout its website with the left-hand column of nearly every page linked to a dedicated site calling for a referendum. And while MRSA, Weird, Royals and even the US election primaries now enjoy the same treatment there is no sign of a link to their referendum page anywhere.

This of course follows the news that everytime the Sun led on its campaign for a referendum, droves of readers left the paper on the racks and relatively few people signed its petition.

Mail's dream 'manifesto' comes unstuck

After 25,000 people signed a Downing Street petition calling for Jeremy Clarkson to be made Prime Minister, the Daily Mail decided to draft a manifesto (or a list of all its hateful prejudices) on his behalf. No surprises then that this made the list (though only at number 17): "We fought the last war for our independence, and now we're under the heel of the unelected eurocrats of Brussels. Under my rule, Britain will withdraw from the EU, so we will no longer be governed by a bunch of sausage-eating Germans, French cheese-eating surrender monkeys and kebab-swallowing Greeks."

However the Mail must have missed Clarkson's article for the Sun last year, in which he outed himself as federalist when he wrote, "I also like the idea of a giant European state tempering American stupidity and Chinese economic might".

Hardly the talk of a rabid Eurosceptic!

Facetious Farage ignores the facts

I laughed when I saw that Nigel Farage had put out a press release complaining that there was insufficient television coverage of his attempt to disrupt the ceremony signing the Charter of Fundamental Rights last week in Strasbourg. He considers this to be an act of censorship - though from what I saw of the written media, his little protest got ample coverage, even on some front pages. In terms of censorship, let us not forget, it was he himself and his allies (including Mr Le Pen's Front National, various right-wing Polish parties and several British Conservatives) who were trying to shout down the Portuguese Prime Minister so that he couldn't be heard and to disrupt parliamentary proceedings - behaviour that in any national Parliament would have led to their suspension.

In a similar vein, it was strange to see that Bill Cash has complained of "the deliberate playing down of these arguments in the media" - referring to Eurosceptic arguments in the British media! Does the man live on another planet?

No surprises as papers produce myth-laden stories

Must of the British press was again displaying its utter contempt for factual analysis, truth and objectivity in its reaction to the signing of the EU Reform Treaty in Lisbon. Just look at the following lies and distortions:

* "Armed police from France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and the Netherlands will be able to come over here and take away British citizens" (The Sun, 18th December, Fergus Shanahan)
* "Britain ceased to exist politically on Thursday" and "ceased to exist in most other ways years before" (Mail on Sunday, 16th December, Peter Hitchens)
* "Mr Bean signs away our freedom" (Daily Express)
* "A further surrender of British sovereignty" (Daily Telegraph, 16th December, Michael Grove)
* "Another nail in the coffin of Britain's history" which "gave away more power to unelected Brussels bureaucrats" (Sunday Express, 16th December, Neil Hamilton)

And I could go on!

As revealed by former Telegraph correspondent David Rennie, these are invariably articles and headlines written in London rather than by Brussels correspondents for the papers in question. Their authors have neither read the texts nor verified their allegations. Their aim is colourful alliteration rather than factual accuracy or any meaningful contribution to political debate. But they all contribute to the drip-drip portrayal of the Union as being adverse to British interests, anti-democratic and incompetent, precisely the opposite of the reality.

In praise of the Western Morning News

For a newspaper in the Daily Mail group and which regularly allows UKIP MEPs and other Europhobes free reign in its letters page, the Western Morning News editorial yesterday was an extraordinarily well-argued comment in favour of the Reform Treaty. There was a precise explanation and evaluation of what exactly the treaty contains, a rebuttal of the myths that have prospered and an articulate attack on a local Tory MEP heading for the House of Commons.

The editorial asked: "If the Reform Treaty is going to crush our sovereignty so much, why is it that an ambitious politician like the South West Conservative MEP Neil Parrish is bidding for a Westminster seat even though the powers of MEPs are going to be increased?"

They then quote an answer from the man himself: "People keep asking me why I want to make the leap to Westminster. I tell them I will sincerely miss serving the South West in the European Parliament but ultimately for anyone who loves political service, the Commons is the place to be." Maybe – but if so, this hardly tallies with the line that Westminster is being reduced to a parish council!

The Guardian chose the same day to take a lighthearted look at the variety of myths propagated since the arrival of EU migrants from eastern European countries. EU migrants have been blamed for the quality of service in restaurants, a shortage of £50 notes and even accused of eating swans and poaching carp! It also points out how statistics are used to denigrate migrants, by never bothering to explain that things like a rise in foreign cars involved in accidents is entirely logical because there are now more foreign cars on the road.

As if to prove certain attitudes towards migrants the Daily Telegraph’s Village Britain series concluded with the headline "Village Britain: Half the population is foreign". The article actually says that 10 per cent of the population of Boston are migrants, with the "half" claim coming from someone pruning flowers in an entirely different village! The article goes on to acknowledge that migrant labour hasn’t taken jobs from local people, has helped the area boom and that there is a history of migrant labour in the area (Irish migrants and unemployed miners have done the work in the past). So, why then the sensationalist headline?

Drastic differences of interpretation

David Miliband's speech at the College of Europe in Bruges provoked a wildly disparate response from Friday's papers, which reinforces the point David Rennie made on coverage of the EU - rarely is it accurate, let alone balanced.

In what was a comparatively modest speech looking at the future of the EU, the Daily Express, delved deep into its chest of conspiracy theories and raged against Miliband's "project for the Islamification of Europe". The Daily Mail decided he had "grandiose ambitions for a new EU empire" but the Independent took precisely the opposite view, accusing him of wishing to "diminish the EU".

The Guardian praised his "meaty" speech and was relieved to hear talk of an “outward-looking EU” but the Independent complains it wasn’t ambitious enough.

Hmmm. So plenty of coverage but few actual quotes and a rag-bag of claims, mostly unfounded and from the usual suspects. If you want to find out what Miliband actually said, his speech is up on the Foreign Office’s website here.

Depressing state of the press

The poor quality of UK press coverage of the EU is something I've often moaned about. Those who think I exaggerate should read the recent article by David Rennie, who was until recently the Daily Telegraph correspondent in Brussels, so cannot be accused of coming from a pro-Europe stable.

In his article in E!Sharp magazine he says:

"British press reporting on the European Union is getting sharply worse. This matters more than you might think. When barmy Brussels stories first became a staple, they usually contained at least a speck of truth, which was then spun into an overblown confection like so much candy floss. Lately, however, once-serious newspapers have printed several stories that have not been checked at all or - strikingly - have been flatly denied by EU or government press officers, but published anyway."

He goes on to ask:

"Why are things getting worse? Here are a few hunches. British newspapers are turning their backs on Europe. While the Brussels press corps is growing overall, the number of full-time staff correspondents from the UK is shrinking steadily. The worst pieces are almost always written from from London, unsullied by contact with arguments from Brussels."

He also quotes some of the same examples that I have blogged on such as the Sunday Express' article on "a new EU police force" which he rightly describes as a "slab of tosh" pointing out that the opening sentance of the article succeeds in "cramming three claims into 17 words and getting all of them wrong", and the News of the World story on the Queen being removed from British passports - which, he points out, the Daily Telegraph repeated after the government had pointed out that it was not true.

My colleagues from other countries often tell me of their incredulity at how outright untruths find their way into headlines in some British newspapers, even when the papers themselves know the story to be untrue. And it is hard not to conclude that this drip drip drip of falsehoods denigrating the EU does not have an effect on public attitudes to Europe (just look at the comments section on the Telegraph's passport story).

Amid a fairly quiet weekend for the British media, one event was conspicuous for its failure to attract press coverage - the Pro-Referendum Rally in central London. Even sympathetic newspapers (i.e. most of them) could not bring themselves to talk up a poorly attended flop.

Not even the Sun gave the rally much of a mention, preferring to do a front page splash on another royal family scandal. This may have something to do with concerns that the Sun's circulation has, so I hear, fallen by 160,000 each day it has led with demands for a referendum.

It was interesting to see the speakers list: Nigel Farage, Bob Spink MP (a Tory member of Better Off Out), Roger Helmer MEP, Neil Herron of the so-called Metric Martyrs and Councillor Steve Radford of the “Liberal party” (not the LibDems). In other words, a rag-bag of assorted cranks, all of whom are committed to Britain leaving the EU. Save for Mr Spink, not a single MP attended, although a sizeable contingent from the BNP were present amongst the demonstrators – who numbered a few hundred instead of the hoped-for thousands.

The high hopes of the Eurosceptics that they would be riding on a wave of popular protest seems to have fizzled out in a damp squib. Most people just aren’t screaming for a plebiscite on whether to replace the rotating presidency and reduce the number of commissioners! And perhaps people have realised that most campaigners for a referendum are not interested in the Reform Treaty, they just want Britain to leave the EU.

Interesting point by Peter Preston in today’s Guardian: if UKIP and some Tories got their way and Britain were to withdraw from the European Union, then the "route to the exit is littered with obstacles: four decades' worth of directives to unscramble and replace, funding promised or under way to be reappraised, fishing and agriculture deals to be haggled afresh, trade and immigration understandings to be understood again. This won't be like breaking your tennis racket and storming off court. This has to be a long, deadly serious business"

Not to mention that there would be precious little goodwill from our partners if we were to storm out slamming the door of the house we have helped to build over several decades. Nor could we rely on economic muscle: we represent a smaller percentage of their trade (under 10%) than they do of ours (62%). And once we were out, we would no longer have a voice around the table in making the common rules for the common market - our main export market which our producers have to adapt to anyway.

Seems to be a no-brainer – maybe that explains who is supporting it!



PS I see Mark Mardell has also blogged on this today for the BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markmardell/

With customary hypocrisy, the Eurosceptic press today criticised the EU for cutting subsidies that could lead to an increase to the cost of Christmas trees. Apparently, imports of the Danish grown Nordmann fir, which has been the most popular tree in British households since the early 1990s because it retains its needles for longer than other trees, are to drop because a ruling by the European Union to scrap subsidies under the Common Agricultural Policy.

About 300,000 Nordmann firs will now be sent to Britain this December compared with the 1.2 million last year.

An interesting story - I hadn't realised that the Telegraph and the Express were in favour of the CAP subsidy! The ingenuity of newspaper editors to shape a story to give the EU a clout never ceases to amaze, but "EU ruins Christmas" is a new one in my book.

I came across this interesting piece by Peter Preston in the Observer on Sunday. A recent opinion poll by Ipsos-Mori showed that just 3% of Britons feel that the EU is the biggest political issue facing our country. It is not surprising that the vast majority of people are more concerned by the state of the NHS, education, pensions and the environment than in an EU treaty that makes some slight re-adjustments to the EU institutions.

Except if you read the Sun that is. Last Tuesday the Sun devoted a full six pages to a set of rabid and frequently factually inaccurate diatribes against the proposed Reform Treaty, with Gordon Brown mocked-up to look like Churchill adorning the front-page alongside the slogan "Never have so few decided so much for so many". The Sun has also published opinions polls claiming that Labour would be nearly 20 points ahead of the Tories (equivalent to a landslide election victory even bigger than in 1997!) if the Government holds a referendum on the treaty. The ferocity and single-minded determination of the Murdoch press has been considerable.

However, it does not appear to be shared by their readers. As the political jamboree of party conference season comes to an end, around 100,000 readers have signed an on-line petition calling for a referendum. According to the Newspaper Marketing Agency website the Sun's readership is just over 8 million readers, which amounts to less than 1.5%.

As Peter Preston very succinctly puts it, "never in Sun history, you might say, have so few rallied round after so many scarifying appeals".

So, the former footballer and TV presenter Ian Wright backs the European Constitution (despite it no longer being on the table), albeit in a roundabout way when he says in The Sun: "Apart from that, I think signing up to the Constitution would be a great idea".

What is the "apart from that"? Four things the constitution would not have done (and the Reform Treaty certainly doesn’t do). He says "I don't want the EU to dictate our foreign policy (it wouldn’t), I don't want them deciding on how we police our borders and who we let in, (they wouldn’t) I don't want the EU to have the power over our courts so they can decide how long murderers get. (it wouldn’t) And I don't want the Euro" (a totally different issue).

As his fears are all placated, I trust that it is his last comment ("great idea") that applies and that he will be campaigning to resurrect the constitution, or at least, support the Reform Treaty.

I was delighted to speak, along with David Miliband, Gary and Mary Creagh (with an impromptu contribution from Neil Kinnock) at a packed LME meeting at Labour Party Conference yesterday.

The thrust of the debate was on how Europe could help achieve environmental targets, fight climate change, amplify the effectiveness of development policy, boost economic growth, help combat trans-national crime and so on. The proposed Reform Treaty was also mentioned, but aroused little controversy, with no-one opposing it or calling for a referendum. The Sun's bus, spouting fumes and causing traffic jams as it drives up and down the road outside the conference centre, and displaying posters predicting the end of the world as we know it if the treaty is approved, has not impressed delegates.

I wonder how much The Sun has spent on its attempt to sabotage the reform of the EU. Double decker advertising hoardings, thousands of leaflets and the first six pages of today's issue, must constitute one of the most blatent attempts ever to bounce a government into following the agenda of a media baron.

A good example of how eurosceptic media shamelessly and deliberately distorts stories was inadvertently provided by the Sunday Express. This concerned the so called "European Gendarmerie Force" (EGF). The Sunday Express duly reported that "there were no circumstances in which the EGF could be deployed in Britain" as it is in fact not an EU initiative but "an initiative of five EU Member States. It is not an EU proposal or agency and has been set up outside of EU structures. There is no connection with the European Reform Treaty". So, nothing to do with the EU, "Brussels", Britain or the new treaty, but a cooperation between five states which want to do this among themselves.

However, this accurate description came in the very last paragraph of an article with the headline "fears that Brussels riot squad could soon pound the beat on British streets" and which reported that "Brussels has set up a new EU police force" which is "the first police organisation to come under the direct control of the EU and is seen by some as another step towards the creation of a superstate". It quotes unnamed critics as warning "that the force could eventually patrol the streets of Britain".

It then goes on, totally unabashed, to say that "the best ways to stop these fellows demonstrating their skills on a high street near you is to make sure that people in Britain know what is going on, put pressure on politicians to hold a referendum before ratifying any EU treaty covering justice and home affairs."

Breathtaking hypocrisy!

A very good leader in today's FT is online here.

It is a very simple argument in favour of the new treaty, and explains very clearly why a referendum is not needed.

The Telegraph published a bizarre insight into the world of Euroscepticism recently in this article by Ruth Lea.

She wondered "who will raise the alarm" about Brussels "being out to clobber the City". Perhaps the reason no-one has, is that there is nothing to be alarmed about.

"Brussels", after all, is simply where we meet our fellow members of the EU to negotiate on common rules for our common market. The idea that the rest of them are out to get us is uttertly ridiculous, especially as they all benefit from a well-performing City!

By all means, work hard to get the details of the Financial Services Action Plan right. If we do, the City will reap substantial benefits. But to brand the whole idea as a "Brussels" plot on the basis of figures from "Open Europe" - an anti-EU campaign group - and to dismiss the constructive approach of the government as biased is standing the world on its head!

A constituent emailed me yesterday asking me if I had heard about a new play in London by Richard Bean. It’s apparently a farce with the central character a Labour MEP.

My interest piqued, I googled away to discover that it had received a bit of a savaging in the press, mainly because it was so absurdly Europhobic!

And which bastion of liberal, pro-European England was it that criticised the play most fiercely? Why, it’s the Evening Standard whose reviewer was “repelled by the loutish simplicities of its Europhobic politics”!

Nicholas de Jonhg’s review also reveals the play includes “the odd vibrator, handcuffs and a prosthetic hand”, the line “Your wanking hand is on fire" and the sight of an MEP with a vibrator in his mouth, which suggests the play isn’t set in Constitutional Affairs Committee, Working Group E.

The Times review concludes with “Yuk”.

One vaguely positive review I found is the Telegraph’s, which enjoyed the gags about the EU and, incredibly, managed to shoe-horn a dig about the Reform Treaty in, which is obsessive even by my standards!

I was very amused to read the one performance that came close to salvaging the show was Richard Moore’s, who played a “boorish”, "curmudgeonly", “no-nonsense Yorkshireman”, UKIP MEP. I wonder who their inspiration was?

Two weeks ago the Sun was battling to save Britain from surrender to Brussels, yet this week, along with the Daily Mail and Yorkshire Post, they are hailing proposed new Europe-wide regulations on women’s clothes sizes.

Indeed Sun fashion editor Erica Davies, presumably tapping away in a quiet corner of the office hidden from the prying eyes of avowed Europe-hater George Pascoe-Watson, declares it is “the news every seasoned shopper has been waiting for”.

The Daily Mail headline reveals there will soon be a “dress size system that will really measure up” and happily acknowledges that the European Committee for Standarisation is responsible, without a diatribe following swiftly after.

The Sun’s article is perhaps not that surprising as its black and white attitude to everything means it will eventually come down in favour of Europe, especially on what is a sensible answer to on an issue which many women have found particularly irritating. But it is the Daily Mail that really impress, simply because their story informs people neutrally about what is planned. There is no hint of bias or mention of “creeping red tape” just a factually accurate story on something that will have a small but positive effect on people’s lives!

As for the actual story itself, the proposed regulations will end respective manufacturers sizing their clothes on their own terms. Currently a women’s size 12 in one store can be a size 14 in another and a 10 in another, meaning people have very little idea what size they actually are. The new regulations will mean clothes are labelled in actual measurements of wastes, hips and busts Europe-wide so people will know what size they are whether they are in Meadowhall or Madrid.

Of course, whether the measurements should be imperial or metric is a debate for another day! A bit contentious that one apparently.

British Eurosceptics, who let us not forget, are a highly organised and well financed network, are working themselves up into a frenzy over the European Council discussions on replacing the Constitutional Treaty with a pragmatic set of amendments to the current European treaties.

The Eurosceptic press is full of articles and leaders spitting bile about Europe, and claiming that “Blair is just hours from betraying Britain” (Express), “Blair to surrender” (Telegraph), that Blair could “sell us down the river to the faceless EU politicians and bureaucrats who run Europe. There is no middle road at this travelling road show of snake oil salesman and three card tricksters..” (Sun)

Charming!

Tory politicians are equally at it. Hague contributes to the Sun’s diatribe, while Heathcoat Amory tells outright fibs when he says that “80 percent of our laws are imposed by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels”. He knows perfectly well that “bureaucrats” don’t make European laws – ministers from national governments and elected MEPs do – and in any case the figure of 80 percent of our laws coming from Europe is contradicted by the House of Commons library estimates of nine percent.

The Telegraph reports “EU reform chaos as Blair and Brown fail to agree” while the Financial Times reports the opposite “Brown and Blair find rare unity on defending 'red lines' “.

Some pro-European voices are allowed a few lines in some papers:

• “Unless Europe gets its act together, the world will continue to ignore it (writes Timothy Garton Ash for the Guardian)

• "Come 2009, when the US gets a new president, the EU must be ready to speak in a voice that will actually be listened to.". "The presidency's reduced package of functionally necessary institutional changes is a pragmatic, not an ideological response to the present impasse. We can see nothing in the German presidency's approach to these issues that conflicts in any way with British national interests." (Letter in the Financial Times from Lords Dykes, Hannay of Chiswick, Kerr of Kinlochard, and Peter Sutherland – none of them Labour, by the way).

• "There is no doubt that some provisions of the old constitutional treaty were misconceived, but there are other measures which should be retained in a new treaty, which are sensible responses to the EU's expansion from 15 to 27 member states in the last three years. The proposals to end the rotating presidency, to merge the two foreign affairs roles, to reform voting weights in the European Council and to give national parliaments a greater role in the decision-making process are among the measures that should attract support from those who genuinely wish to see the EU work better." (Letter from Lord Brittan of Spennithorne QC, Mr Roger Carr, Mr Guy Dawson, Mr Niall FitzGerald, Sir Philip Hampton, Mr Vijay Patel, Sir Mike Rake, Mr Roland Rudd, Mr Bryan Sanderson, Ms Rosemary Thorne, Mr Bill Thomas, Lord Tugendhat).

But the Eurosceptic papers appear not to want to publish dissenting letters or even factual corrections. We are in for a battle between the unelected press barons and the elected government on an issue on which the former have prepared the ground for years with their relentless depiction of the Europe as akin to the bubonic plague.

Over the next seven days the Sun has set itself the task of saving Britain from a “draconian new superstate”.

Thankfully they have kept things in perspective. Their urgent battle to save Britain from “surrender” is deemed less newsworthy than Michael Barrymore, Big Brother and a drunk soldier stripping off. Only then is Britain truly worth saving.

And as predictable as a soused squaddie in their birthday suit, is the Sun’s attempt to hoodwink (as they like to say) its readers into fearing any reform by publishing its own version of the treaty, which bears almost no resemblance to what is actually up for discussion.

The Sun’s version of the treaty includes:

"A PERMANENT EU President with 3,500 staff.
UNELECTED European judges getting unprecedented powers to set UK law.
BRITAIN surrendering its seat on the UN Security Council.
AN EU foreign minister representing the UK on international issues.
SLASHING Britain’s voting powers by a THIRD.
GIVING UP for good Britain’s hard-won veto on EU directives.
BOWING to EU laws on criminal justice and policing.
A RAFT of job-destroying shopfloor laws.
DESTROYING the City’s reputation as the world’s greatest money market.
HANDING the European Commission the power to meddle in any part of British laws it chooses.”

Every one of these 10 items is a tribute to the imagination of Sun journalists.

In fact, the EU will not have a permanent president but one that serves 30 months, instead of the current six, merely chairing summit meetings. The 3,500 staff it mentions is a statistic plucked from thin air.

European judges have never and will never be able to set UK law, they merely adjudicate when there is a dispute over EU laws previously agreed by government ministers and MEPs.

The claim Britain will have to surrender her seat at the UN is bunkum as is the preposterous suggestion that the treaty is out to destroy the City’s reputation or will cost British jobs.

If an EU foreign minister is introduced he or she will only represent Britain’s interests when we agree with the other 26 Member States on an issue. If there is a difference of opinion, like there was on Iraq, then there is no common position to represent. In either case Britain, like every other EU country, will continue to express its own views through its own foreign minister.

The current proposals would actually increase Britain’s voting power quite considerably, which just shows the Sun’s journalist can’t even add up.

The only point with a grain of truth in is the justice and policing veto, which will be discussed. Britain will want to keep this and it seems highly unlikely Blair will leave without some sort of veto or derogation in place.

The Sun is running a poll alongside the story which will inevitably conclude that 90 odd percent of its readers don’t want Blair to sign a new treaty, which they will then proudly proclaim is the voice of the British people. Which of course it isn’t, it is what Sun readers think of the imaginary treaty they have made up themselves, which I wouldn’t want Blair to sign either.

If the Sun gave as much importance to the bare facts as it does to bare bums, it might one day be able to claim it speaks for the British people over Europe. Until then it is helping to form opinions based on outrageous lies.

I came across this typically restrained piece by Melanie Phillips in the Daily Mail (don't worry, I don't make a habit of reading the Mail!). It appears that, aside from the usual diatribe, she has completely misunderstood a number of issues regarding a revised European treaty.

Aside from the usual bunkum about the treaty creating a new EU President (we already have an EU presidency which changes every six months - the treaty simply provides for a two-and-a-half year chair) she claims that merging the two posts of External Relations Commissioner and Council High Representative on Foreign Affairs, would mean the end of an independent British foreign policy! A new EU foreign affairs spokesperson would merely speak for the EU where there was a common position. She asks the question "what would happen if British foreign policy contradicted that of the EU". But, if Britain (or any country) objected, then there could be no common EU policy in the first place.

She recycles the tired Eurosceptic cliché that the EU is "anti-democratic" - conveniently ignoring the fact that the measures contained in a revised treaty would strengthen the role of the directly elected MEPs in the European Parliament (by making all EU legislation subject to approval by it and the Council of Ministers) and increasing the powers of legislative scrutiny by national parliaments. Besides, the EU is already the most democratically accountable of all the supranational organisations the UK is a member of including the WTO, NATO, IMF and World Bank, bodies which never seem to feature in her concerns about democracy.

Moreover, Phillips also reveals her own cynical double standards. She demands a referendum on a revised treaty only because it's the next best thing to a referendum on withdrawal from the EU.

I did chuckle when I read her description of the EU as "a failed, backward-looking project whose days are numbered"! In the words of Nobel peace prize winner John Hume, "the EU is the most successful example of conflict resolution in history", while Paddy Ashdown described it as "a political miracle". The EU is not perfect, but neither is any other political institution, and the reforms expected to be retained in a new treaty would enhance its effectiveness and its democratic accountability and help us to deliver the best policy results for our citizens on those matters when our countries are highly interdependent. If Melanie Phillips wants to see something that genuinely is "a failed and backward looking project", she should try reading her own columns.

Have just seen an utterly ridiculous press release from the Conservative leader Tim Kirkhope MEP, accusing Labour MEPs of being “in chaos” and contradicting the government’s position on the Constitutional Treaty in today’s vote in the European Parliament.

The Tories desperately cobbled together a press release with some outrageously selective editing of the report; once the report is read in full it is quite clear the press release is complete tosh.

The Conservative press release reads: “17 Labour MEPs voted in favour of the Brok report which committed the European Parliament to ‘reaffirm its commitment to achieving a settlement of the ongoing constitutional process of the European Union which is based on the content of the Constitutional Treaty, possibly under a different presentation’"

A quick glance at the actual report shows that the paragraph above (paragraph six) is cut off mid-sentence. It actually finishes “but taking account of the difficulties that have arisen in some Member States" – the key point which they deliberately cut out.

The Tories also conveniently ignored any mention of the following paragraph (paragraph seven unsurprisingly), which is also the exact position of the Labour government, namely to have an inter-governmental conference this autumn to negotiate a new treaty.

It will be interesting to see if this weak concoction actually makes the papers. Hopefully not, but if it does it will not have been the first time an absurd Tory press release from Europe has made column inches in some of the right-wing rags.

It's always interesting to see how newspapers are able to conjure vastly different headlines and stories from the same facts. One of the issues that gets the most hyperbolic reaction in the press is immigration. The Sun, Daily Mail and Express frequently talk of "floods" or "stampedes" of immigrants.

The release last week of Home Office statistics on the number of economic migrants from Bulgaria and Romania, who joined the EU at the start of 2007, needless to say, provoked a series of blustering headlines from right-wing tabloids none of whom can agree on the figures.

The Express ran with "92,000 east Europeans milk our benefits" adding that a "flood" of migrants had left taxpayers with a £102 million bill. The paper claimed that more than 4,500 "Eastern Europeans" were arriving in the UK. However, the Mail (which also cited "official figures") contended that the true figure was 120 Romanian and Bulgarian per day (fewer than 1,000 per week).

Meanwhile, the Guardian pointed out that "only 8,000 Romanian and Bulgarian migrants came to work in Britain the first three months after their countries joined the EU", noting that this figure was far lower than the claim made by certain tabloids that 300,000 would enter the UK. Indeed, the Scotsman continued in a similar vein, stating that "fewer than 200 migrants from Romania and Bulgaria applied for national insurance numbers to work in Scotland".

I'm sure I am not the only one to be slightly bemused by the disparity between these figures. Certainly, you could be forgiven for thinking that some sections of the right-wing press are fiddling the figures to fit their distortions about immigration levels.

How to switch sides when the facts don't match your line: The traditional Eurosceptic story is about small businesses being burdened by red tape from Brussels. Yet, when the Commission proposes to exempt small businesses from some of the regulations on food hygiene, the refrain switches to "an EU initiative that risks a dramatic rise in food poisoning". Instead of sticking to their usual line that it 'should be up to your own government to decide on how small cafes are run', the Times goes with the 'bash the EU' brigade for, this time, not being prescriptive enough!

So the EU is criticised for over-regulation and criticised when it exempts businesses from regulation!

Three assesssments of Blair's European legacy in today's press

The FT has a leader which refers to "Blair's eleventh hour championing of EU". It cliams that "The attempt to win over domestic opinion, to argue the pragmatic case (let alone with passionate conviction) why it serves British citizens to pool a small part of their sovereignty to meet the cross-border challenges of the era of globalisation, was all but abandoned. That is dereliction of political duty - and inexplicable. Britons have never been more familiarised and at ease with their European neighbours and many policy arguments inside the EU have tilted Britain's way. If Mr Blair had given half the time he devoted to Iraq to Europe, the position might be different. His belated attempt to resolve the constitutional mess might be more credible, his claim to be a champion of Europe less self-ascribed."


The Independent, also in a leader, refers to "a terrible failure to make the case for Europe". It says: "Mr Blair should not be trying to conceal what he is doing on Britain’s behalf in Europe. He should be up-front about it. If this institutional reorganisation is good for Britain, he should come out and say so unambiguously. His persistent failure to make the case for Europe has allowed popular prejudice and ignorance surrounding the EU to go unchallenged. The damage this does should not be underestimated. When it comes to the major challenges of our times such as climate change, peacekeeping and trade reform, Europe is indispensable. The unchecked growth of an anti-European mindset in Britain is diminishing our power to help to shape the world for the better."


Finally, with a different take, the Express, which claims that "Throughout his decade in Downing Street this Prime Minister has studiously avoided the verdict of the British people on the European Union. It can only be concluded that Mr Blair has failed to give the people a voice on Europe because he knows what that voice would say: no to greater integration, no to ridiculous European regulations and yes to a transfer of sovereignty away from Brussels and back to Britain. So it is disturbing to learn that in the few weeks before he quits office, Mr Blair is proposing to sign more powers away to the EU and will not give the British people a vote to either endorse or, much more likely, reject his proposals"

One would expect the Express to make such claims, but the other two are being a bit simplistic. Blair has frequently made keynote speeches on Europe (in addition to his Commons speeches at least four times a year after each European Council). Those Cardiff, Warsaw, and Brussels spring to mind, but there have been more), but they are simply not reported on very much in the press, nor, unfortunately, taken up much by others. Many of our newspapers give ample space to shrill Eurosceptic and xenophobic comments, but are reluctant to give space to the less exciting explanations of why the European Union is so vital.

Sat in Bolivia awaiting the start of another busy day. Through a surprisingly good phone line, I check in with my office and am told the Independent is a sight to behold! Placed around a huge EU flag on the front page are 50 reasons to love the EU, with page two and three also dedicated to its benefits.

Denis MacShane has a column entitled “Why I’m an unashamed enthusiast for Europe” while the paper’s editorial also sings the EU’s praises.

The current edition of Time (using a very similar approach to the Independent) and the Economist also have a special 50th anniversary editions out now.

Eurosceptics have long followed the policy of Goebbels who said that if you tell a lie often enough people will believe it. One particularly insidious lie that they have been repeating since the 1970s is a fabricated quote from Jean Monnet to the effect that:

"Europe's nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose but which will irreversibly lead to federation."

Anyone with a passing acquaintance of Monnet's work would immediately be suspicious of such a quote. I have asked the Jean Monnet foundation in Switzerland whether there is any record of Jean Monnet saying anything of the sort, and they confirm that he didn't - this was an invention first made up in a British newspaper in the 1970s.

On the other hand, they have sent me a real speech by Jean Monnet, delivered on the 28th March 1953 to the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, in which he said precisely the opposite -

"Our Community will only develop well if all the measures that it takes are made public, explained publicly not only to the peoples of our Community but also to those who do not belong to it"

[The French original - "Notre Communauté ne se développera bien que si toutes les mesures qu'elle prend sont rendues publiques, expliquées publiquement, non suelement aux peuples de notre Communauté, mais aux peoples qui n'en font pas partie."]

UKIP have spent the past few months attempting to convince people that they are not just a one issue party and take an interest in domestic matters. However, in doing this they have not lost the capacity for spreading myth and outrageously distorting the truth.

The latest example is their Yorkshire MEP Godfrey Bloom "uncovering" that 11 schools in York use fingerprint recognition and getting his knickers in a twist that this is indicative of Orwellesque totalitarianism. With characteristic understatement, Godfrey said "it's like 1984", adding that "we really have reached a low when we are fingerprinting children at primary schools". The Daily Express described this as "a scandal" and an attack on civil liberties, while the Daily Star reported the 'story' under the lurid headline "Terror test for 5 year olds". All this conjurs up images of a police state.

The problem is that if Godfrey, the Express or the Daily Star had bothered to check out the facts behind the 'story' they would merely learn that the 11 schools are using electronic fingerprint recognition, instead of membership cards, for their library services. Moreover, all but one of the schools in question had informed parents in advance of implementing the system, while the school in question, Manor CE, introduced the thumbprint recognition scheme on the recommendation of the pupils themselves! Indeed, Manor's head, Brian Crosby, responding to the furore in the York Press, expressed amazement that anybody could be so upset by a school using such a library system, pointing out that it is much easier and quicker for pupils who don't have to worry about always carrying (and possibly losing) library cards and that the school's library system is not connected to any other network.

Mr Crosby adds that this new technology has allowed the school's learning resource centre to be transformed, is popular with students, and has helped them to achieve excellent literacy results, while the education authority in York has sent out a letter to schools supporting the system so long as parental approval is sought.

This is simply a case where modern technology is being used to assist children in their learning rather than a sinister attempt to condition them to hand over their privacy. Bloom's attempt to distort what is good news for schools, parents and pupils is yet another example of his party's breathtaking cynicism.

The recent enlargement of the European Union has seen a re-emergence of the debate on migration, and the effect on our economy. It's a highly emotive issue to many people, but I am pleased that, amidst the usual scaremongering by the right-wing press, there has been some sound reporting of the facts by the more responsible end of the British press.

Two reports I especially wanted to highlight:

The Independent:

"The feared flood of workers from Bulgaria and Romania failed to materialise at Heathrow airport yesterday as citizens of the European Union’s two newest member states appeared to prefer to stay at home. Flights arriving at terminal one from Bucharest yesterday carried visitors from the Indian sub continent and crestfallen representatives of certain newspapers who had been sent to the Romanian capital to chronicle the expected influx, only to find no takers. As one photographer for a red-top newspaper put it: “Complete waste of time. No one wanted to fly. We even offered to help with the fare”.

Of course, this did not deter the red tops who went ahead and printed stories of mass migration anyway.

The second was a speech, reported in the Times, given by leading economist David Blanchflower, (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2532521,00.html). Professor Blanchflower highlights how migrant workers have not generally taken jobs from British people, have helped keep the economy stable and that there is no evidence to support suggestions that Eastern European workers are keeping wages artificially low.

Of course, many people will have a view of whether immigration is a good thing or otherwise, and they’re entitled to it, but when one of London’s most respected economists, presenting facts and figures, disagrees with the views of a red top journalist, I know who I think is more credible!

Phillip Davies has stooped to a new low in his latest ranting, and shame on the Yorkshire Post for continuing to give his rabid views such credence and prominence!

You may have seen yesterday’s “exclusive” story. In line with cubed strawberries, straight bananas and banning church organs, apparently the EU is now “trying to brainwash children in the classroom”

The issue that Davies, Godfrey Bloom and chums have highlighted is that the European Parliament has sent information packs (entitled “The European Parliament – What’s that?”) to teachers, to help them explain its purpose and role. Shock Horror! There is no politics here, just a simple and informative guide on how the European Parliament works, and what its MEPs – from whatever party they come from – can do.

Our schools have citizenship classes to teach young people how the world around them works. They learn about how local Councillors make decisions on their behalf, how MPs make decisions on their behalf, and now how MEPs make decisions on their behalf, as well as how they can get involved in the democratic process. Whatever you think about your Council, the government or the EU, people need to know how they actually work.

Let’s be absolutely clear on this. The exaggerated success of the Eurosceptics comes from their uncanny ability to run campaigns of misinformation. The sole reason why Davies is so upset with this move, is because he knows that education is his enemy. The more people know of the EU, the less they will believe his stories.

For purposes of openness, tomorrow I will put an electronic version of the information pack on to my website so that you can all make up your own minds.

UPDATE : You can now read the information pack for yourselves here.

With blatant irresponsibility, the BBC website gives prominence to a trip to Romania by their European editor, Mark Mardell with, of all people, the leader of UKIP, Nigel Farage.

Giving such prominence to the leader of a fringe party with not a single seat in the House of Commons might in itself be questionable, but to do so and swallow his arguments lock stock and barrel, without even the basic checks, is inexcusable.

The thrust of Farage's argument is that, although Romania is due to join the EU next month, they plainly have no intention to play by the rules. Mark Mardell falls for this argument, reporting that "The first Romanian butcher Mr Farage talks to, enthusiastically cleaving pork chops on top of what looks like a large tree stump, is unaware that any hygiene standards will change when his country joins the European Union on New Year's Day."

Yet, even a cursory reading of Romania's accession agreement reveals that Romania is not due to apply EU phyto-sanitary standards for another two years. And surely the BBC should know not to accept as gospel stories about the EU coming from UKIP, a party whose very existence is founded on stirring up fears and telling tall stories about Europe.

Mark Mardell's account has a "comments" section where people are invited to place their views on his trip. I tried myself to make this very point, but the BBC moderator did not see fit to post my comment up. After all, let's not allow facts to get in the way of a good story!

Every year there are thousands of fires, caused by cigarettes left smouldering or thrown away without being extinguished, often causing fatalities. Yet it is now technologically possible to make cigarettes that put themselves out if they are left smouldering - a self-extinguishing cigarette! A law to make this compulsory in Britain would be quite useful, but its effect would be lessened by the fact that many cigarettes are brought in from abroad, notably from other European countries. So a Europe-wide law to this effect would be highly beneficial, wouldn't it?

Well, yes, and indeed, one is being considered. Yet has this received any media coverage whatsoever? All I have seen so far is one solitary article in the Independent on Sunday. The rest of the media have obviously chosen not to associate a good news story with Europe.

Am in Brussels at the end of the European Council (Summit) meeting. Do various radio and television interviews.

However, I also pop in, out of interest, to the briefing given by the Prime Minister's spokesman to the British press. This is a curious affair. In the room are British journalists present at the Summit meeting and down the line are the lobby correspondents in London. The Prime Minister's spokesman takes questions alternately from those in the room in Brussels and those down the line in London. Every question put by those in Brussels relates to the subject of the briefing, namely what is happening at the summit meeting on issues such as Turkey's accession to the EU, the future of the Constitutional Treaty, European energy policy and so on. All the questions coming down the line from London are to do with domestic politics and bear no relation whatsoever with the subject of the briefing. And so on, back and forth like ping pong.

I can also see clearly which stories will be in tomorrow's newspapers - and it wont be the European ones. So much for helping public understanding of what actually happens in Brussels.

The Sun has needlessly got its knickers in a twist over the Working Time Directive by claiming paramedics would have to finish their breaks before answering emergency calls. And who is to blame for this? Well the “barmy EU”. Obviously.

Of course anyone with any sense will realise this is patently quite ridiculous but the journalist responsible, Emma Morton, had few qualms about the truth and liberally dipped into the Sun’s big book of how to construct a Eurosceptic scare story to produce this shocker.

Even the most cursory reading of the working time directive would have revealed to Ms Morton that in the case of ambulance service workers and fire and civil protection services "derogations (ie exemptions) ....shall be permitted". In other words, ambulance crews are exempted out of the break provisions of the working time directive.

Still, the Sun has never let the facts prevent it from bashing the EU and Ms Morton slavishly follows the paper’s line with what appears no recourse to research.

Interestingly, exemptions to obligatory break provisions are also allowed for press journalists - and judging by the inaccuracies and distortions in Ms Morton's "story", perhaps she is due a lengthy break.


Addendum 16 December:

Although I wrote to the Sun pointing out their factual error, they did not print my letter, but instead printed another one yesterday from a James Cullen, saying how ludicrous these rules are and that they could mean the difference between life and death. He would be right, of course, if the rules actually said that - but the Sun is clearly not going to let its readers know the truth!

As frustrating (and predictable!) as an England batting collapse is the Express and Mail’s predilection for publishing at face value any old garbage sent out in a press release by Europhobic Tories.

Considering these papers would probably print “Brussels bureaucrats eat babies” given the slightest chance, it came as no surprise to see them indulge Conservative MEP Philip Bradbourn by running his claims that the EU intends to force thousands of people to retake their driving tests.

This is of course utter rubbish.

The draft directive on EU driving licences provides for Member States to keep their own rules for testing drivers. There is no requirement for people to be retake their test every 10 years, only for them to update the picture on their licence once a decade (as is already a requirement in Britain now for the new plastic cards). There is a proposal that drivers with certain medical conditions (such as serious neurological diseases and some angina sufferers) should be tested every 10 years for their suitability to drive, which is something quite different from retaking their test.

Bradbourn, the Tory transport spokesman, said: "The EU is trying to dictate to Member States what they need to do in terms of driving tests and licences."

More nonsense - and he knows it.

Legislation that is actually wanted by every country - and has been approved by the EU Council of Ministers with ministers from every Member State - hardly amounts to "dictation"!

And why do countries want it? Because it will replace over 150 different types of driving licences across Europe with a streamlined set of.... just one.! Because it will make forgeries more difficult. Because it will stop drivers banned in their country from getting a new license in another. Because it will raise standards among those who drive on our roads across Europe.

As with so much Eurosceptic myth making, the story is warped to demonise the EU for what is merely a common sense proposal.

While I was looking at this on the Daily Mail’s website (I must make clear I don’t buy the thing!) I stumbled over a story from 30th September, with the headline “Lives at risk as driving test fraud hits ‘terrifying’ new levels". So you might think the Mail would welcome measures to combat driving licence fraud - but, no, their obsession with attacking anything to do with Europe outweighs their own assessment on the issue.

And, as to Phil Bradbourn MEP, I first met him years ago when he was active in European youth and student organisations. He seemed to be an enthusiastic pro-European. Now, he prefers to play that down and pander to the Eurosceptics in his party. I suppose he expects this to help save his skin when re-selection of Conservative candidates comes up. Will it help his conscience?

For anyone used to the politically motivated diatribes against the European Union that pervades so much of our national press, it comes as a refreshing surprise to browse through written specialist and trade press where a quite different attitude to Europe is often on display.

Thus, I noticed that Electronics Weekly (8th Nov) says that:

"With the coming into force of the RoHS directive this year, the European Union can be proud that its electronics industry has, for the most part, responded admirably… electronic equipment now being produced will not have a harmful legacy for future generations. Europe's determination to implement green policies, when the easy option is to do nothing, also benefits the entire world as other countries try to follow Europe's lead and environmentally aware multinational companies are standardising on RoHS compliant products to sell worldwide'.

The journal Public Private Finance says (13th Nov) that, as regards recycling, EU pressure on Britain is highly beneficial - indeed, the UK "deserves to be punished. The UK's record on recycling is shameful. It dumps more rubbish on landfill sites than virtually any other EU country. Some 75% of local authority rubbish, about 26m tonnes, was land filled in the UK in 2003-4, compared with 38% in France and just 20% in Germany."

New Scientist, in a leading article (11th Nov), criticises the Common Fishing Policy, not on the usual grounds that it has restricted fisherman fishing by imposing tough quotas, but on the grounds that it has not been tough enough. It says:

"Early one morning next month, bleary-eyed European ministers will probably allow fishermen to take just enough of the few cod left to allow the depleted fishery to stagger on. If they followed scientific advice for a ban on cod fishing, the number of cod would grow, and after a few years catches would boom. But that would involve short-term sacrifice, and no minister will bite that bullet. We need mechanisms to make them. Europe pays farmers not to farm but to be stewards of the countryside. Why not do the same for fishermen?"

The Grocer magazine also carries an article on the Common Fishing Policy, contending that it is actually working, at least for some stocks, albeit not yet for cod.

Computeractive (9th Nov) praises EU plans to lower carbon emissions and cut the EU's energy consumption by a fifth by 2020. It supports suggestions that manufacturers should be - 'forced to label the energy efficiency of their products so consumers can decide to opt for low-energy models. The proposed regulations would impose EU standards globally because manufacturers seeking to sell their products in the EU would have to comply with these "minimum energy performance standards".'

Lloyd's List (8th Nov) praises plans to redefine sea voyages between EU member states as national rather than international as a 'huge step forward for the protection of EU seafarers jobs'.

Yet, not all is bliss for the EU in the specialised press. Marketing Week (9th Nov) quotes the European Automobile Manufacturers Association as campaigning to stop the EU from tightening laws reducing carbon emissions from new cars. It says that consumers prefer 'larger, safer vehicles' to 'fuel efficient' ones. And, "rather than have the EU regulate anything, let's have some more global warming", they might well have added.

“Babies for sale, sex slaves, bribery, mob killings, drug factories, organised crime ... now Romanian and Bulgarian mafias have Britain in their sights.”

Just another example of the calm measured tones the right-wing tabloids have been using to slur Romania and Bulgaria ahead of their accession to the EU next January.

Of course what makes this particular piece all the more galling is that it was in the Sun, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News International.

In September I blogged about another News International newspaper, The News of the World, and how three of their journalists had actively sought out Bulgarian prostitutes willing to travel to the UK so they could pen another shock horror story about the EU’s two newest members.

So remember, come January, if any of these terrible things the Sun so gleefully promises us do turn up in the UK it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that journalists from News International have invited them here!

I have written to the Director General of the BBC Mark Thompson after reading his article in the Mail on Sunday which explained why the BBC had decided to give more coverage to UKIP.

He said: “When I joined the BBC as DG, I thought our coverage of Europe was deficient. There was too little - and too much of what there was tended to view Europe through the lens of Westminster politics.

By the stopwatch, Eurosceptics may have had their share of the debate but there was too little curiosity about the different shades of sceptical opinion and too little seriousness given to those who believed that the right thing for the UK to do was to leave the EU altogether.

We've responded by appointing Mark Mardell in the new role of Europe editor, by delivering more consistent coverage of the work of the European institutions and by exploring the views of UKIP and other shades of Eurosceptic opinion more regularly and thoroughly."

This seems utterly bizarre to me and suggests that the BBC’s coverage before Mr Thompson became Director General was biased in favour of Europe, which it clearly wasn’t.

He himself admits that Eurosceptics received as much coverage but does not really explain why he felt the need to give more credence to UKIP, a fringe party who still haven’t got close to winning a seat in the House of Commons, even in a by-election.

I have also enquired if he will balance the BBC’s increased coverage of “shades of Euroscepticism” by covering more shades of pro-European opinions including federalists, neo-federalist, intergovernmentalists, status quo supporters, wideners and deepeners.

I await his response with interest (which I will of course publish on here!).

Sections of the right-wing press have leapt upon the new EU Employment Directive (relating to age discrimination) as (yet another) example of a European Commission 'diktat' with a Sunday Telegraph leading article claiming that the law has 'no democratic mandate at all'.

Before hordes of Eurosceptics start foaming at the mouth, it's worth pointing out that our Westminster government which was, last time I checked, elected, agreed to the directive in November 2000.

Indeed, all EU legislation is issued by the Council, a body which is made up of ministers from democratically elected governments of the EU's member states. The Council works on the basis of creating consensus rather than imposing 'diktats' onto reluctant member states. Its decisions are subject to the extra safeguard of scrutiny by the elected European Parliament and by national parliaments (in our case the Commons and the Lords scrutiny committees).

The Commission has no powers to dictate anything, merely the ability to propose rather than enact legislation.

It is disappointing that the Sunday Telegraph chose to use their editorial to peddle myth and factual inaccuracy.

Previously, on my blog (here and here to be exact) I have mentioned a couple of examples of journalists or newspapers caught in the act of fabricating totally untrue stories intended to make the EU look bad.

The latest paper caught out is the Daily Mail. Not so long ago they pictured a queue outside the British visa office in Sofia, Bulgaria. At the time I can remember thinking that it was a pretty short queue, certainly a lot shorter than anything you would expect to find at the British passport office, or at any pub in the country on a Friday. However, with trademark scaremongering the intrepid Mail journalists managed to whip up a front page story out of it.

Now though, Peter Preston, writing for the Guardian, reveals the picture was taken the day after a UK bank holiday, meaning the office was processing twice as many visas than on an ordinary day. So despite the queue already being pretty small, had the picture represented a normal day there will probably been fewer than ten people applying for a visa, which isn’t really worthy of an inch in a newspaper let alone a front page.

Preston also wonders why we aren’t welcoming Bulgaria and Romania with open arms. After all, less than 20 years ago they remained communist states devoid of democracy. Had someone said in 1986 these staunchly communist states – Romania run by Ceauşescu and Bulgaria a loyal Soviet satellite state – would be embracing democracy, freedom and working together with their western European neighbours it would have been cause for celebration.

As I mentioned in my blog in Lithuania, some times it is easy to forget just what the EU represents in terms of democracy, stability and prosperity to nations that have been less fortunate than the UK.

Another interesting story I read in Tribune, and have not seen mentioned in the rest of the national media, is about the arrest of two men from Lancashire found with bomb-making equipment.

Robert Cottage, a former BNP candidate at the last local elections in May, and David Bolus Jackson have both have been charged with possession of an explosive substance for an unlawful purpose.

Raids of their houses uncovered BNP literature, rocket launchers(!), a nuclear biological suit, and incredibly 22 chemical components which could be used for bomb making, thought to be the largest such haul ever discovered in Britain.

The apparent media blackout on the duo’s arrest stands in stark contrast to the unfortunate Iraqi Kurds who were splashed across the front page of a certain tabloid in 2004, accused of a suicide bomb plot to blow up Old Trafford. In fact their only crime was supporting Manchester United with the story a hysterical fabrication. They were never charged and there was never any evidence to suggest they were anything else but football fans.

An interesting insight to our media.

With the tabloids having already filled their boots with the Tory-inspired map myth this week, Telegraph writer David Rennie has uncovered another scurrilous attempt by the tabloids to simply invent a load of nonsense about the EU.

You can read the full story here but to summise, an unamed British tabloid sent three hacks to Bulgaria to try and find a prostitute who would be willing to travel with them to the UK when the country joins the EU. They are also alleged to have spent some time looking for people capable of forging passports.

Now their cover has been blown this story shouldn’t see the light of day but it is another example of just how low some of the British press will sink to discredit the EU.

The latest ridiculous story in the British press claims that the EU plans to break up Britain, with amongst other things Kent becoming part of France.

The story originates from a disgraceful press release put out by the Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party, Eric Pickles, in which he says: “I fear Eurocrats could literally wipe Britain off the map”.

He claims that Britain is to be broken up into a series of transnational regions and will no longer exist. The Tories knew full well that the tabloids would lap this up, and as expected it made several papers.

However, if you actually look at the press release’s references it transpires that this so-called plot is nothing more than the old Interreg regions – which is merely co-operation between different regions who share similar problems, such as the Atlantic regions and was actually set up when the Conservatives were in government. Presumably if they saw a geological map of Europe, they would claim that Scotland was being merged with Austria because they both have granite.

Sadly, the Conservative Party, which is trying to portray itself as a serious party, has found itself aligned with UKIP, caught wilfully misleading the British public.

Click here to read the one-minute speech I made on the subject in Strasbourg.

The immigration debate shows no sign of abating with even the Murdoch papers taking up wildly differing positions on the topic.

The Sun gives the Tories plenty of space to call for restrictions on EU immigrants, particularly if Romania and Bulgaria join in 2007, accompanied (at least online) by a picture of an apparently homeless EU migrant from one of the A-8 countries. This is a fine example of how the right-wing media works when discussing topics like immigration. To look at the picture you would think homelessness is an often-encountered problem for migrants who come to the UK. Yet,those who read the Sun from the day before will know that a mere 453 people out of 447,000 have been given homelessness assistance. So the picture is representative of 00.1% of the migrant population from the A-8 countries, or roughly one in every thousand! Predictably, the Sun fails to include this illuminating statistic alongside its emotive picture.

By contrast, the Times’ leader is stirringly positive about the benefits immigration has brought to the UK. It goes on to advocate extending the Workers Registration Scheme to Bulgarian and Romanian immigrants, as it has been such a success.

The Telegraphs’ David Rennie once again hits the nail on the head when discussing the issue on his blog. He points out that once Romania and Bulgaria join the EU, their citizens, like every other EU citizen, will be free to travel to whichever EU country they like.

What Britain can do is limit the amount of migrants that join the Workers Registration Scheme. As Rennie points out, if the government opts to do this it will simply encourage Romanians and Bulgarians to come here, as is there right, but stay to work illegally.

A black market in labour would encourage wages below the minimum wage and exploitation, something which the Workers Registration Scheme has helped immigrants largely avoid, as well as helping British workers avoid unfair competition.

My letter to UEFA has caused quite a stir in the local media. Within five minutes of a press release being sent out, Radio Leeds were on the phone asking for an interview. As I was was on holiday I ended up speaking to them live on air from a remote beach on a nuture reserve in Sicily.

More radio interviews followed with the BBC website, teletext and the YEP devoting space (and pictures) to the story. Plenty of unofficial Leeds United websites also covered it, including one in the Czech Republic!

I have also received a variety of letters, many offering me support and thanking me, while a couple accused me of wasting tax-payers money by focussing on an insignifcant issue.

In the wider scale of things the issue is clearly insignificant but I wrote the letter on the beach (Blackberrys can be very useful) on my holiday. So, the real cost to the taxpayer was the price of a postage stamp. I think that most people would agree that 44p spent opposing corruption in sport is hardly excessive!

Equally irritating and illuminating, is the fact that this story earned such news coverage. Even a quick peak at my website illustrates the different subjects I have spent far more time working on over the past year. Yet, whether it is helping to make the EU more efficient, consumer protection, the environment, education or a myriad of other matters none are given anywhere near the media coverage a minor story about football receives!

The Daily Mail is outraged by the government’s plans to teach school children the benefits of the EU. Predictably, and right on cue, Christopher Brooker accuses Europe Minister Geoff Hoon of attempting to brainwash our children.

Of course there is no mention of the veritable mountain of lies the Daily Mail (and the rest of the Eurosceptic media) has published in its efforts to deride the EU, which far more justifiably deserves the term brainwashing.

And, of course, on closer inspection, all the government is suggesting is that the school curriculum should not just teach children how national and local government functions, but also how the EU functions. Now, why would anyone want be against that? Unless, that is, they want to hide how it works so that people continue to believe the myths and lies that they spread.

When someone eventually publishes the definitive list of Euromyths, the recent tabloid headlines and story claiming the EU intends to force Bombay Mix to be renamed Mumbai Mix should be somewhere near the top.

According to both the Sun and the Mirror, the reason for this was to avoid offending the people of India. So far, so ordinary, but what makes this myth stand out so much is its brazen disregard for even a smidgen of truth.

Many myths originate from either extreme exaggeration (health and safety legislation exists but it has never threatened the careers of busty barmaids wearing low cut tops) or a manipulation of the facts (excessively bent bananas have never been banned they are merely not sold as Class A produce).

But as revealed by David Rennie, the European correspondent of the Daily Telegraph (hardly a paper with a pro-Europe bias!), a short investigation found the Bombay Mix story to be a complete and utter fabrication. It was originally concocted by a news agency in the south of England, looking for business from the tabloids, and subsequently published by the Sun and the Mirror (and while the Yorkshire Post did not make such a gaffe by publishing the story as news, it did let itself down by publishing a letter on the issue which purported it to be fact). The press agency played the story down and for many it will be a minor issue, swiftly forgotten, but it provides an illuminating insight into just how easy a Euromyth is created, spread and believed.

There will no doubt be people quick to suggest that the reason people will readily believe these myths is the EU’s propensity for regulation but this is an argument that does not hold true. The obsession with excessive regulations many people link to Brussels is a consequence of the myths created by the media to ridicule the EU. When the EU legislates it is normally for a very good and very obvious reason, and only when this assessment is actually agreed by MEPs and by ministers from Member States in the EU Council. Hence there are stringent laws about food labeling so that, for instance, allergy sufferers can be confident about what they are eating.

Perhaps the most interesting issue which has arisen from the Bombay Mix myth is the standard of journalism the very existence of the story implies and which David Rennie’s account so well illustrates.

I thought press agencies based their reputation on providing copy the rest of the media can rely on, but it seems that the ability to spin a good yarn is more important, at least for this particular agency. And, did anyone at the Sun and the Mirror bother to check whether the story was real? Or worse still did they discover it to be rubbish but publish it regardless? Either way, it says very little about the quality of either newspaper. (Now there’s a surprise!)

Will either paper bother to print a correction? Judging by the Sun’s website, no. The story remains online! It is unfortunately indicative of the Eurosceptic agenda against the EU: avoid a sensible debate by obscuring the real issues with a series of increasingly preposterous things “Brussels” plans to do.

Another euromyth has hit the headlines, namely that the EU is banning New Zealand butter, such as the famous Anchor brand.

This is not the case. There has been a temporary halt in imports of the goods due to a ruling by the Court of Justice that the current trading arrangements were illegal. These arrangements are being sorted out as a matter of priority and consumers shouldn’t notice a big hole in the supermarket’s butter aisle.

You can rest assured that, if Anchor is your thing, there will still be the usual 77,402 tonnes of New Zealand butter arriving in the EU in 2006.

It is interesting, however, that papers such as the Express, who often denigrate other Europeans as “foreigners”, were so outraged by the thought of New Zealand farmers missing out. It seems that only European foreigners are the object of their wrath!

The Daily Express in Scotland today leads with a grumble about the cost of interpreters in the European Parliament.

Now, I don’t expect much from the Express, and certainly not anything even vaguely pro-European, but this particular article was one of those that leaves you shaking your head.

They suggest the Parliament should abandon all but four or five languages to save tax-payers money. Good grief, imagine the headlines if the Parliament did suggest jettisoning a few languages, especially English.

The Express would be up in arms. You wouldn’t be able to nip into your local newsagents for all the blazing headlines about “Evil EU outlaws English”, “Unelected totalitarian bureaucrats annihilate our beautiful language” and “Diana death linked to EU’s ban on English”.

Many MEPs are capable of speaking English, French, Spanish or German but this is simply not the point. The European Parliament is democratic and as such, citizens should be able to vote for people who reflect their views, irrespective of the linguistic abilities of the candidates. They should also be able to follow the debates, if they so wish, in a language they understand. It may be a (relatively)costly procedure but the interpreters are indispensable for communication and democracy.

Right-wing papers like the Express often (wrongly) accuse the EU of being undemocratic and elitist. If speaking a foreign language to a level of making public speeches and conducting legal arguments in that language were to be a prerequisite of becoming an MEP then Parliament would become exactly what these papers rally against.

“Immigrants boost the economy”, is a line from which newspaper’s editorial today?

How many of you guessed the Sun?

Admittedly the "Sun Says" column does go on to complain about the odd person allegedly dodging taxes or working for less than the minimum wage (which is surely the employer’s fault) but is it a sign that Rebecca Wade’s paper is prepared to start embracing immigration?

Maybe not. Turn to page 11 and the main headline of John Gaunt’s (or “Gaunty” as he urges us to call him) column is “Sorry: Fully Up”.

He writes: “Britain is full and it’s time to secure our borders and halt all immigration until we know exactly how many people are living here and where they’ve come from.”

Gaunt, sorry “Gaunty”, is particularly critical of Britain’s decision to allow workers from the EU’s newest member states to work here. To be fair, he also acknowledged that immigration does have its advantages but he then goes on to suggest we should follow France and Germany by now barring EU citizens from eastern Europe from working here.

He should argue the reverse - that France and Germany should lift now their temporary restrictions. Had they and the rest of the EU followed the example of Britain, Ireland and Sweden – the three countries which originally took down their labour barriers – then there would have been a far more even distribution of job-seeking Poles and others in the first place.

In fact, three more countries are now lifting their restrictions, and all Member States have agreed to do so within the next few years. To advocate that we should renege on our commitments and start a stampede in the opposite direction is either ill-informed or wilfully malicious.

Anyway, other than the sheer numbers of immigrants the right-wing newspapers have had very little to complain about - the expansion of the EU has been a success. People have arrived, found jobs, started businesses, made friends, gone to school and contributed significantly to their local economies.

Perhaps an even more significant contribution being made is to Britain’s perceptions of migrants. The EU’s freedom of movement rules allow (afer a transitional period) people from any member state to work in any other member state. This has usually promoted tolerance, understanding and started eroding xenophobia.

There is still much to do but when a Sun editorial gives a nod of approval, however reticently, to freedom of movement in the EU there is hope yet.

I read a lot of newspapers. Staying in touch with the UK and particularly Yorkshire and the Humber is an important part of my job. Every MEP worth their salt does the same.

You put up with the fact that many papers are right leaning and you even get used to reading the outrageous Euromyths conjured from the darkest recesses of a journalist’s imagination.

But sometimes, not often, but sometimes you read an article that is so dispiriting you despair.

The cause for my ire today is an unsavoury column by Bill Carmichael that tells us of his travails in getting a passport for his children.

He writes: “Naturally the passport office rejected our application… You have to laugh. Is this the same country where any terrorist, rapist, child abuser, or killer who has jumped off the back of a lorry five minutes ago is immediately offered a national insurance number, a council house and benefits beyond the dreams of avarice?”

The reason his application was rejected, he admits, was because the photos he provided were signed by a neighbour rather than a person of standing in the community.

Yet the quote reproduced above is clearly implying that too many passports and national insurances numbers are given out, so why the diatribe when passport officials do their jobs properly?

A good example of how the BBC is centred on the Westminster village and avoids giving coverage to MEPs was my treatment yesterday by BBC Newsnight.

The allegations about dubious payments by Arsenal FC to the Belgian Club Beveren was revealed on Newsnight yesterday and I, as a member of the Independent Review of Football (and knowing a thing or two about UEFA rules, Belgian football clubs and such like) had been invited to appear live on Newsnight. I duly cancelled my appearance at a meeting planned that evening as well as a dinner appointment, studied the detailed papers the BBC sent me on the case and prepared to go to their studio.

They were due to call me back to confirm which studio (Leeds or Bradford) I was to go to, but having not heard from them I rang them myself beforehand to check this final detail - only to be told that they had decided instead to take an MP rather than me as an MEP (but had not bothered to tell me about this change)!

So, despite this being a European issue, involving different EU countries, and despite it concerning UEFA rules and also despite me having served on the recent Independent Review of European Football, they preferred to stick to the Westminster village and scrap all the arrangements that they had agreed for me to comment on this matter.

Just two years ago, the BBC had an internal review of its coverage of European Affairs and decided that, although it was not biased for or against the European Union, it was insufficient in its depth and in the scope of its coverage. They pledged to improve their coverage of European matters and to increase their engagement with MEPs from all parties.

It did not take long for the Westminster village mentality to resume control! And, come the next European elections, they will be the first to say that nobody knows who the MEPs are!

Click here for more on Arsenal's links with Beveren.

It was interesting to see some plaudits coming the European Parliament's way in the press today (31st May 2006).

First, the Financial Times gave an account of the progress of the services directive (“A good day for European democracy”, Quentin Peel) in which it said "quite the most striking is the central role played by the Parliament, rather than the European Commission or Council of Ministers... The Parliament came into its own as a body divided on ideological grounds, rather than purely national lines... It has shown the maturity of the parliament producing such a complex text and one of legally high quality."

Second, The Independent's leading article states that "We also owe a particular depth of gratitude to the European Parliament" for its role in challenging legislation adopted by the Council of Ministers. Of course this refers to Parliament successfully challenging in the court a decision on the retention of personal data of air passengers travelling to the United States.

Whatever the balance of arguments on each particular issue, it does show that the European Parliament plays an ever more crucial role in determining the outcome of the EU policy making. And rightly so - it's called parliamentary democracy.

Perhaps other papers will begin to pay more attention to what happens in the European Parliament and informing their readers about what really happens there.

The Independent Review of European Football, on which I sat, presented its findings to Tony Blair yesterday but it is already having to fight off some ludicrous claims from the right-wing press.

The Sunday Telegraph published an article practically accusing the European Union of attempting a coup on football, claiming Brussels would “sieze” control of the game and “direct” it through the European Commission.

As euromyths go this one is rivalling the Sun’s “EU bans barmaids’ cleavage” for absurdity.

I have appeared on Five Live to counter the Sunday Telegraph’s article and written to several newspapers, but now, perhaps predictably, the Sun has joined in saying "English football taken over by barmpots of Brussels".

A common misapprehension appears to be that, despite having independent in its title, the Independent Review is the work of the EU. The Independent Review was set up by governments under Britain’s Presidency of the EU and is backed by UEFA. However, out of the 13 people who sat on it there were just two MEPs, including myself. Others were academics, finance professionals, civil servants and judges in the world Court of Arbitration in Sport - all with a high level of expertise in the field.

It was created to evaluate the state of the game and with its findings, make reccomendations to UEFA, leagues, the EU and national authorities, but it has no power over them.

The bulk of the recommendations are directed at the footballing authorities. Some address governments and some are directed at the EU, mainly to request it to interpret its existing laws in a way that recognises the specific needs of sport and leaves sporting authorities maximum leeway. Where EU legislation is suggested, it is mainly to allow derogations from existing EU law.

The vast majority of clubs, fans and football authorities hold concerns for the game, with the concentration of wealth and success in the hands of just a few clubs being a major worry.

The financial management of clubs is also an issue of major importance. The huge debts incurred by the likes of Leeds and Borussia Dortmund (from chasing a Champions League place) and the implosion of ITV Digital all demonstrate just how close football has been to financial disaster.

Many of the Independent Review’s recommendations centre around these issues. Several of them amount to spreading best pracice from England to other countrties. But, as I have said, whether or not they are implemented will be mainly down to UEFA and the respective football authorities.

Todays newspapers focus on Labour´s Deputy Leader having had an affair. Not so long ago, it was revealed that former Conservative Leader John Major had had an affair, as had Liberal leader Paddy Ashdown. Nor are the minor parties immune: UKIP´s leader in the EP Nigel Farrage was revealed only a few months ago with graphic details - not to mention Godfrey Bloom's admission that he visited brothels.

So what conclusion to draw? All parties seem equally exposed, so it's hard to draw political conclusions. Nor can personal conclusions be drawn without knowing more about the private life of the individuals concerned. Would it not be better if, as in most other European countries, the press were not to focus in on salacious gossip about public figures but more on the real issues they are dealing with?

In case anyone thinks that I have it in for EUObserver, now that their close links to the anti-EU “Independence & Democracy” group have been revealed, let me advertise an interesting article they carried on the “comment” section of their web-site:

http://euobserver.com/9/21373

I see that Amanda Platell's diary in the Daily Mail last Saturday revives the old Tory tactic of massive criticism of Neil Kinnock - not of his views, but pure personal abuse. She calls him dishonest, without any attempt to back up the accusation with facts, and "one of the rudest men in politics". (The original piece isn't online, but it's selectively quoted here.)

As ever, a bit of innuendo about Europe is thrown in: "For years, his entire family has gorged on the EU gravy train."

Eh? Neil's salary as a Commissioner was comparable to that of a minister, and Glenys's, as an elected MEP, is identical to that of an MP, with broadly the same expenses. Yet one never hears the Mail or other Eurosceptic newspapers refer to anyone "gorged on the Westminster gravy train"!

Maybe politicians' salaries are too high, maybe not. But to attack just the European salaries is rank hypocrisy.

Some of you may have noticed Quentin Peel’s article in the Financial Times (paid subscription necessary), lavishing MEPs with praise for the passing of the heavily amended Services Directive. Mr Peel goes as far as saying that the European Parliament “took a core piece of EU legislation and voted to change it drastically”, and in doing so we “may well have saved it”.

It's worth pointing out that this is our job! This is what we do, usually unnnoticed, week in, week out.

It's often hard for the general public to see through the eurosceptic mist, especially with nonsense claims of “unelected bureaucrats” floating around. But now that Mr Peel has set a precedent, perhaps other journalists will follow suit?

Eurosceptics frequently complain that our newspapers' European correspondents are supposedly in bed with the European Union and therefore are not critical enough (!) of its activities. They sometimes even insinuate that such journalists are in the pay of the EU.

It was therefore all the more interesting to read in EU Reporter (pdf link) that UKIP's own political group in the European Parliament has been quietly subsidising the EUobserver website. This press website claims to be independent, but it now appears that it's in the pay of the highly Eurosceptic political group - which possibly explains why it also displays a prominent link to EUabc.com, another supposedly independent site that seems mostly to display the work of Danish MEP Jens Peter Bonde - the co-leader (with Nigel Farage) of UKIP’s political group, the Independence and Democracy Group. It also turns out that the owner and publisher of EUobserver is Lisbeth Kirk, who just happens to be married to Jens Peter Bonde!

According to EU Reporter, taxpayers’ money is being used by Eurosceptics to retain experienced journalists to write for EUobserver - which can "also rely on the salaried EU Parliament staffers to help produce a product that generates income in the private sector from advertising and sponsorship".

So it would seem the Eurosceptics are doing precisely what they complain that other parties do! Yet another example of UKIP's hypocrisy?

While researching yesterday's blog entry, I found the following interesting tidbit on a media and journalism forum:

“In the UK, a recent series of articles in The Daily Express reporting that ‘hordes of Gypsies’ are ready to ‘flood in’ to the country on 1 May provoked a strong reaction. The Minister for Europe, Denis McShane, called it a ‘rancid hate campaign’, with other MPs condemning it as ‘obscene’ and ‘racist’. What is particularly striking about this, though, is that the newspaper’s own journalists reported the stories to the Press Complaints Commission (PCC). They sought help from the PCC to protect them by introducing a ‘conscience clause’ to protect those who resist pressure to produce stories they regard as racist.

“Editorial pressure and interference — such as the fact that the newspaper’s editor, Peter Hill, admits that proprietor Richard Desmond contributes to editing the front pages — restricts the ability of journalists to write fair, balanced and truthful articles and stories. The fact that Peter Hill is a member of the very same PCC to which the journalists complained denies journalists adequate protection. The PCC ruled that it has no jurisdiction to respond to the journalists’ call. The issue has now been taken up as a campaign by the NUJ and a group of Labour Party MPs.”

When the Express's own journalists rebel against what they're being asked to write, surely some alarm bells should be set ringing…!

The myth that the EU wants to stamp out the British pint of milk has resurfaced this week, along with a new twist: apparently the eurocrats also want to ban our sliced bread! The story has been generated by the British Retail Consortium and the usual Tory suspects have jumped on the bandwagon. (Examples are here, here and here.)

This story is easily rebutted. Simply put: the European Parliament is about to pass new laws on consumer protection and packaging, but these laws will not endanger the traditional British pint. Just as they didn't endanger it last time this old euromyth came around. ("Another sliver of the British way of life bites the dust", according to the Telegraph in 2001.) In fact, Parliament's report specifically provides protection for traditional pint measures.

Does nobody notice that these cheap inventions, endlessly recycled by the tabloids, never actually come true? Does it not cross the sub-editor's mind, when they write yet another headline like EU BANS BRITISH PINTA (or EU MILKING US FOR WHAT WE'RE WORTH, or UK BOTTLES OUT OF EU DEBATE, or whatever dubious pun they go for), that we've been here before? Has nobody noticed that the doorstep pint still exists, for crying out loud?!

The facts about this myth, like virtually all the others, are easily accessible and in the public domain. So why have so many papers published a completely false report? At the very best, it's shoddy journalism. More likely it reveals the overt europhobe agenda of our written media.

The press are getting more and more shameless in their willingness to endorse fabrications which ridicule Europe - just as they did with the lies about putting the EU flag on car number-plates, the lies about banning walnuts, and the original, classic lies about straight bananas.

And finally - why are these same papers not queueing up today to print corrections?

A clanger in Friday's Daily Express:

"Cows are being given luxury beds to sleep on in the hope it will make them more productive. Farmers in Norway are forced under a new law to give their cows £80 mattresses. The idea, promoted by the EU, is to stimulate the animals to produce up to 10 per cent more milk."

It's good to know at least someone at the Express is still in touch with the old school of euromyths, namely the 'gloriously silly fantasy' variety (as opposed to the new-style 'pernicious eurosceptic invention' variety).

Needless to say, no EU law requires cows to be given mattresses, and even if it did, this could not affect Norway as it's not an EU member. Sigh.

Their good work is ignored by the media - yet they are at the receiving end when the tabloids, or even serious newspapers, wrongly blame them with their far-fetched fantasies.

Sound familiar? But this time I'm not talking about MEPs - but about Britain's Food Standards Agency. This month's Prospect magazine contains an interview with John Krebs, the scientist who headed the Agency for the last five years. He too knows what it is like to be rubbished by second rate journalists.

His explanation? That media is more geared to "villans and heroes than of providing equal weight to all sides":

A good media story, like a good film or a good play, works best with villains and heroes… People like conspiracies too and I think you have to accept that is the way the world works.

No doubt. But if you combine that liking with a deliberate agenda on the part of a substantial proportion of the media to go out and get you, then you have an uphill struggle to get any sympathy - whatever the facts.

It's so unusual that it's worth a mention: a reasonably accurate portrayal of the EU's powers by a UK newspaper! So, newspapers can print things other than Eurosceptic scare stories…

"The EU's spectre is manifestly not haunting Europe

"In most areas of public life, acts of parliament are still passed in Westminster and Holyrood, without reference, or much reference, to Brussels. Most [EU] regulation is, however, directed to ensuring that the single market (essentially a British creation) works fairly and effectively.

"We have a European Parliament with less power than the Scottish Parliament - it can't make law on its own as Holyrood can; a European civil service (the Commission) which may have too great a power of initiative, but which again is not an autonomous law-making body; and the Council of Ministers. That body has real powers, but these are limited by the various treaties."

Amazingly, this comes three days after an FT leader said:

"Criticism of Europe's Central Bank is misplaced

"… The ECB'S institutional framework looks increasingly superior to the competing models in the UK, America and Japan."

Despite the recent media focus on reforming the CAP and reducing agricultural spending - as one of the trade offs in the mega budget deal being brokered by Tony Blair - I notice that the press has given relatively little coverage to a major step forward in CAP reform achieved last week, namely the reform of the sugar market. This amounts to a 36% price reduction in sugar, bringing in market forces to play in this too-protected area, a significant budgetary saving and an end to the dumping of our sugar surpluses on the Third World.

If the government was really any good at spin doctoring, it would be shouting this from the rooftops. It amounts to another major step in CAP reform on top of those achieved already in recent years.

Sometimes out media and our ministers fail even to point out, let alone take credit for, the major reforms already achieved in the CAP!

Watching Tony Blair appear on BBC's Football Focus was interesting (direct link to BBC online video here). Will the press pick up on his tongue-in-cheek references the fact that Alan Shearer announced his retirement at the end of last season but has since persuaded to stay on, which he has done to great acclaim? Or will the newspaper’s lobby correspondents consider football programmes to be beneath them, thereby missing this potentially telling analogy?

They will also have missed the BBC digging out of their archives the full original interview with Blair, from ten years or so ago, following which he was pilloried for having claimed to remember watching Jackie Milburn play for Newcastle when he was a kid. The press claimed this was an outrageous example of spin, as Blair was too young to remember that - only four when Milburn retired. Well, it now turns out that what Blair actually said was that he started watching Newcastle play as a kid after the Milburn era. He had never made the claims quoted in the press at all! So, far from this being a casebook example of political spin, it was in fact a casebook example of media distortion…

Blair's visit to Parliament today once again managed to set the cat among the pigeons. Conservative MEPs actually asked to have a private meeting with him, while the Lib Dems didn't and organised what appeared to be some sort of demonstration instead. The Tories' meeting left several of them muttering audibly about how none of their leadership contenders could ever match him for ability. Others wondered what the point of their meeting was (as, no doubt, did Blair) and speculated that Tim Kirkhope, their leader in the European Parliament, was after a peerage!

Meanwhile, Blair's speech to Parliament had to be seen to be believed - just like last time, you certainly wouldn't know who to believe in the press! Remarkably, even Eurosceptic newspapers with the same ownership couldn't agree on how to handle it: the Sun said he was “heckled and booed” whereas the Times reported that his speech was “punctuated by frequent applause”. Take your pick...

I was the keynote speaker at a regional conference today on Europe. I stayed on for the rest of the conference and was struck by the strength of support for the European Union expressed by a wide variety of participants.

A local government leader from a South Yorkshire district spoke of how, when the coal mines closed and his area was hit by mass unemployment, only the European Union seemed interested in doing something to turn around the situation with its regional funding – something the people in his area would never forget.

A council leader from a West Yorkshire district (not Labour) praised EU programmes to alleviate poverty and regenerate her patch - and even a Conservative leader of yet another Council praised the economic benefits of belonging to Europe. Similarly, speakers from business, universities and others were positively gushing in their praise for the EU.

This underscored something I have been struck by in the past: outside the arena of national politics and the media, those who actually deal with the European Union tend to have a positive view of it. Those who don’t, and those whose views of the EU are shaped only by what they read in the newspapers, tend to be more negative.

It's inconceivable that the expert political journalists who work for the Daily Express should make such an elementary error as to confuse the European Court of Human Rights with the EU. I have no doubt that its writers – if not its readers – are perfectly well aware that the Court is an entirely separate institution which has nothing to do with Britain's EU membership.

So how are we to explain the brazenly inaccurate headline on page two of Friday's Express: 'EU gives convicts in British jails right to vote'?

Every other news source in the UK managed to recognise that it was the Strasbourg court, not the EU, that made the ruling in question. So I suppose we must conclude that this was a simple slip of the Express pen which will soon be corrected.

After all, I'm sure it couldn't be, oh, I don't know, an attempt to spread further inventions about the insidious bureaucrats of Brussels interfering in our daily lives? Such inventions would surely not be in keeping with the standard of political journalism for which the Express is rightly renowned.

I suppose it’s still the silly season, and even the broadsheets — which seem to shrink by the day, as the Guardian becomes the latest quality daily to announce it’s going tabloid (or 'Berliner', to be precise) — are scrabbling around for stories. An article in the Times today takes a brief remark from President Barroso, the kind of remark that might normally have made a two-line story on page 30, and constructed a vast, hyperbolic exegesis about the death of the constitution from it, complete with tabloid-style interpretations of to “startling admissions” and “genocide stalking the Continent”.

The Guardian also jumped on board:

The last rites were finally delivered to the European Union constitution yesterday when Jose Manuel Barroso, the commission president, declared that there were “no magic formulae” to revive the measure. …This is the first time that a European leader has all but declared the constitution dead. … Arch-federalists… will be disappointed.

Talk about making mountains out of molehills! What Barroso actually said was that he couldn’t see a “magic formula” for reviving the constitution, which is quite different from saying that there’s no possible way ahead; and that there will be no new constitution in the near future, which is quite different from saying that EU reform is now impossible. On top of that, Barroso’s remarks carry no official weight anyway, since the European Commission has no say in what EU countries choose to do regarding the constitution.

In other words, the Guardian and the Times are engaging in some rather irresponsible hype, following the very British trend of ramming nails into coffins before the coroners have even given their verdicts.

One of my biggest bugbears about the way European issues are debated in this country is the way both politicians and the media deliberately avoid discussing the issues themselves, instead deflecting attention onto bogus stories which aim to make the EU look silly.

Nowhere is this kind of deflection more prominent than in the reporting of health and safety legislation. In 2002, when we considered ways to address the growing problem of occupational exposure to noise in places such as factories and airports, the Tories and the media had a choice between joining the debate as adults or inventing childish stories to shout from the sidelines. The adult option would have been to make a contribution, perhaps suggesting ways in which the huge problem of occupational deafness — the most common occupational disease in Europe — should be addressed. They could have debated what kind of industrial noise levels are considered safe for how long, and who should be responsible for ensuring that workers in more dangerous conditions are offered adequate protection.

But they didn’t. Instead, they went for the childish option. The Tories put about all kinds of ludicrous lies which were lapped up by the media, including the claim that bagpipes would be banned (Times), clubbers would have to wear ear-plugs (News of the World), football fans would have to keep their voices down (Sunday People), and Beethoven symphonies could never be played in the EU again (Times again). All of these were bare-faced and screamingly obvious fabrications, of course, but when the laughter had died down the fabrications had done what they were intended to do: reinforced anti-European prejudices and distracted attention from what was really a very serious debate.

Exactly the same thing happened two years later when we discussed what should be done about the frighteningly large mortality rate of workers falling off high scaffolding. Rather than making a grown-up contribution, the Tories dubbed the proposal ‘the ladders directive’—suggesting that Brussels would force manufacturers to emblazon warning messages at the top of ladders. And they even suggested, via the BBC, that bureaucrats would have to scale mountains:

“A Euro MP claims new EU laws to prevent falls at work will mean UK mountain pursuit centres having to warn people that they are ‘high up’… Welsh Tory MEP Jonathan Evans said…’This is madness—most people know that when they climb a mountain they will be up high!’”

Same childish reaction; same damaging result.

Finally, we can thank The Sun for the most recent example of health and safety issues being ridiculed rather than discussed:

“The EU has declared a crackpot war on busty barmaids – by trying to ban them from wearing low-cut tops. Po-faced penpushers have deemed it a HEALTH HAZARD for bar girls to show too much cleavage. And in a daft directive that will have drinkers choking on their pints, Brussels bureaucrats have ordered a cover-up.”

As ever, the European Commission tried diligently to stem the tide:

“New EU rules on optical radiation, due to be voted on by ministers and MEPs (including those from the UK) in September 2005, do not tell people what they can wear, or ban low-cut tops or, heaven forbid, dirndls.

“They instead require bosses to assess the risk of skin and retina damage for employees who work in the sun all day. This is a pressing concern, given that in the UK alone there 69,000 new cases of skin cancer diagnosed each year. How the risk to employees will be assessed, and what measures should be taken if there is deemed to be one, will be decided at local level – in the UK by the Health and Safety Executive. Of course, bar managers can always use their common sense by handing out sun cream.”

But what made this particular euromyth extraordinary was the reaction of The Sun to being corrected. We all know not to expect an apology for such inventions — or the tabloid press would contain little else — but it takes a particular species of bare-faced cheek to try this one:

“The Sun has saved Britain’s busty barmaids. EU killjoys have backed down over plans to make our girls cover up by banning low-cut tops. The Brussels bureaucrats surrendered in the face of The Sun’s double-barrelled attack... We vowed to give big-boobed barmaids all the support they would need to beat the ban. It was due to be rubber-stamped by the EU parliament next month under the Optical Radiation Directive.”

In other words, The Sun is taking credit for forcing the Commission to “back down” over something that was never in the pipeline in the first place! Now that tactic really is straight out of the junior school playground.

It must have been a painful dilemma for Eurosceptic newspaper editors when they were faced with a choice between having a go at the EU and having a go at Tony Blair. When the Prime Minister made a slip in an otherwise excellent speech and said that a seesaw had been dismantled because of spurious EU regulations, there was no clear line from the right-wing press about how to report the error.

The Evening Standard went one way, sacrificing accuracy at the altar of reactionary Euroscepticism:

"Tony Blair today launched an unprecedented attack on Brussels… [Mr Blair] raised the case of a Cotswold village required to pull up a seesaw because it was judged a danger under an EU directive on outside playgrounds."

Meanwhile, you can almost hear the teeth grinding in the editor's office as the Telegraph decides to point the mistake:

"Tony Blair was caught out yesterday for falsely claiming that a European Union directive had forced a Cotswolds village to rip out its playground seesaw - when no such directive exists. Playgrounds are, in fact, not regulated by the EU."

Fortunately, the European Commission is on hand to break the deadlock.

"This little tale first surfaced in 2000 and found a home in a number of newspapers willing to peddle it. Now the Evening Standard has jumped on the merry-go-round [boom, boom] of blaming non-existent EU rules for depriving children of their seesaws, while the prime minister appears to have, albeit unintentionally, recycled an old euromyth.

"There is no EU Directive on Playground Equipment for Outside Use. No village in the Cotswolds has been forced to take down its seesaws, or swings or slides.

"The prime minister may have been referring to European Standard EN 1176-5, drawn up by the European Committee for Standardisation. This is a non-EU body made up of standards institutions from 28 European countries, including the British Standards Institution. It sets guidelines for products in order to improve consumer safety. But these guidelines are entirely voluntary."

Yesterday, Tony Blair appeared before the European Parliament to outline his priorities for the UK’s presidency of the European Council, which starts on 1 July. His speech was excellent (the full text is here) and he maintained a refreshingly positive tone. The British presidency will be a great opportunity to address current challenges in the EU.

Back in Yorkshire today, I was astonished by the media’s wide range of interpretations of the Prime Minister’s reception at Parliament. Were they at the same debate?!

Financial Times:

"Tony Blair, prime minister, won unexpected support in Brussels yesterday with his vision of a revitalised European Union that could embrace free markets and face up to the challenges of globalisation… Mr Blair was praised by EU MPs for a passionate speech which sought to chart a route out of the continent's political malaise… [His] speech was consensual in tone and received applause from a parliament that had been expected to give him a rough ride."

and:

"As a political performance it was brilliant; as an argument, compelling. Watching Tony Blair speak to the European Parliament in Brussels yesterday was to remember why this British prime minister is Europe's most successful leader."

Independent:

"Mr Blair escaped unscathed from a debate in the European Parliament… [Y]esterday most Euro-MPs seemed won over by a speech in which Mr Blair described himself as a 'passionate pro-European' while making a powerful plea for reform to deal with the forces of globalisation."

Times:

"It was a vintage performance… the clapping became more and more frequent."

Sun:

"He won new allies as they applauded him 15 times during the 30-minute keynote address."

Le Monde:

"The new strongman of Europe"

Then, on the other hand, Guardian:

"His speech… prompted a few jeers and catcalls from MEPs."

Telegraph:

"BLAIR DOES A THATCHER TO THE EU, ONLY RUDER

…He was met with scattered applause, some heckling and long periods of sullen silence from MEPs."

Finally, somehow the Daily Express manages to come up with an utterly inverted analysis, reporting on the performance of the self-proclaimed ‘passionate pro-European’ as follows:

"Tony Blair took his new Eurosceptic agenda into hostile territory yesterday as he unleashed a devastating attack on the European Union."

Bit of a shocker in the Times a couple of days ago, which refers to:

"a constitution that would have institutionalised the poverty of the vulnerable and provided bragging rights for a sanctimonious élite."

That's it. No attempt at argument, no analysis or discussion, just that. Trashing the EU constitution with a few empty soundbites is something I've come to expect from Eurosceptic campaigners, but it has no place in a Times leader.