TRUTH IS NOT ENOUGH
By
Alec Paris, Managing Editor - Freedom Today
As the absorption of the United Kingdom into Europe nears its final stages, some quarter century after we started warning about it, yet more organisations have recently been launched to campaign against E&MU.
We have seen impressive prospectuses from "Business for Sterling" and "New Europe".
Their supporters, added to the existing "Free Britain" campaigners, are a list of Britain's most distinguished, people remote from the dumbing down processes which have become so dominant in public life and media.
Why so many organisations should have been formed with the same objectives is a question we should try to answer. Obviously associations such as our have failed to convince people of similar mind that we have correctly identified how most effectively to attack the plans to make Britain into a few repressible regions of a new state.
Insufficient attention has been paid to the analysis of the European integration movement, partly because it is so difficult to believe that anyone who would pursue such an objective could possibly remain in a position of power long enough to achieve his ends. It has also seemed unlikely to most reasonable people that many of our fellow countrymen could continue to believe in a project - let us not flatter it with any more serious word - so plain daft that few practical people would pay it more than a few moments' attention.
While the weight of opinion and evidence in the literature of the newer anti-E&MU organisations is a welcome contribution to the cause, it must still be said that for all the power behind them, none has yet impressed us, any more than we have them, that it has correctly analyzed the problem and worked out how to tackle it.
Regrettably, it has now to be recognised that all our responses to the problem have been similar, and have the same fault. We all see quite obvious and potentially disastrous mistaken assumptions in the plans of Europhiles. They think - or at any rate claim - that a single European state will bring its citizens economic and security benefits. We mostly believe that it will bring them, and us, even more offensive state interference, excessive state spending, economic under-performance, intolerable levels of corruption and a high likelihood, in the longer run, of internal strife as a prelude to disintegration.
One of our mistakes has been to try to use facts and reasoning as our main weapons. We have been guilty of believing that truth would necessarily win, by swaying both political minds and public perceptions.
This has not been as effective as we would wish. Careerist modern political minds are preoccupied not with facts, but with what will be easily sold to the public which - by and large - tends to think that Britain's policy decisions must be in safe hands, and prefers not to have to work at understanding the details.
Public perceptions, moreover, are largely formed by the media. But we know that journalists mostly avoid detailed argument. They are most comfortable with simple propositions - promises to eliminate fat cats, but to make everyone else prosperous and happy, for example. Single-issue pressure groups also provide journalists with attractive, easy opportunities to sound good, particularly if they seem to represent victims in the cruel commercial world.
So politicians now, for the most part, say what the media want to broadcast and publish. And the media, for the most part, just pass it on, going through the motions of questioning the most obviously vacuous and impractical suggestions.
The politico-media partnership is now well developed, to the extent that government employs specialists to fashion its statements into media-friendly shapes and sizes. Those intent of gaining power have first to learn presentation through the media; policy is not essential, just the appearance of sincerity.
The spin doctors' offices are at the heart of government.
They dictate what is to be the main focus of broadcast and published news tomorrow, this week, this month and this year. They deliver freshly hatched sound bites daily and by the hour, to make their plans credible, to excuse their failure, to divert attention from the embarrassing, to glorify their masters and demonise their critics, above all to enable their gang to stay in power.
If we were dealing only with facts, logic and truth, there would be little use for the media manipulators. It should shock us that they exist, for they can have no purpose unless it is to mislead us. It should shock us that we know it, but have come to expect nothing better.
That is not simply relevant to the campaign for Britain's independence; it is central to it. The power game, in which there is no truth, in which presentation overcomes logic, in which the laws of economics can be overcome because they are boring; this is what our campaigns must take on. Government waste, inefficiencies, officiousness, intrusion and disregard for our personal responsibilities and freedoms are the results of the root problem: the symptoms, not the disease itself. Even our entrapment in a European Union is only a sign of what must be corrected. The root of the problem is the ability of government to turn aside factual and logical criticism, making it unstoppable and unaccountable.
We are mistaken if we believe that facts and figures will influence government while our media act as its propagandists. The administration's control of the media is now so deep-rooted that it is rare for political journalists to investigate, to choose their own subjects or to exercise any real judgment outside the issues fed to them by the press offices of ministries, government and the European Union.
The odds are stacked against any journalist who would kick against the system.
The government announces a trade, health or education initiative, for example. The experienced journalist often know that this is a recycling of old ideas, issued to keep him occupied and out of mischief. But the customs of his trade make him publish it regardless of its merit. He may have seen countless similar schemes fail in the past; he may not believe a word of it. He will know he is being used but will not fight. Is he going to explain to his boss that next morning, theirs is going to be the only newspaper in the country not to print anything on the government's new scheme - given several minutes on prime-time radio and TV the previous evening - to revitalise education in Britain by giving local education authorities more powers and new guidelines? Of course not.
The flow of such slanted 'news' fills most available time and space. In this way, government makes supposedly independent media its publicity tools. Failed policies are excused and perpetuated, attention is diverted from disasters, truth is distorted, incompetents stay in power, public money is wasted and government departments enjoy irreversible growth. The taxpayer has no chance; he is hardly represented. Those of us who get as far as the comment and financial pages of our papers or stay up after midnight may enjoy the arguments of the commentators whose logic should destroy the false promises, but it is too little, too late.
Does it matter? Emphatically, yes. It is this system that has enabled public spending to grow far, far beyond cost-effectiveness, that has nourished and perpetuated the world's near-worst education system, that has develped welfare from a necessity to a dependency, that allows official intrusion into what should be our personal decisions, and that is strangling the commercial enterprises that are the only source of all our incomes.
It is serious that the processes set in motion by government and its ministries are subject to no monitoring worth the name, and have become irreversible. Even Margaret Thatcher's government failed to turn the tide of bureaucratic expansion, or to stop the flood of legislation by statutory instrument.
Without compliant media, Britain could not possibly have been fooled as it has been into the European Union. It is also true that unless our media start to represent the taxpayer, we will not get out of it.
The painful message to all of us who campaign against the EU as a collective, designed to fail, is that the new organisations are on no more effective a track than the old.
If we study how news is created and processed, though, we will see that there is an opportunity.
The media mostly try to be fair with what they are given. But too much of what they receive comes from government departments and direct from politicians. And now, of course, from the Brussels propaganda machine and its Europe-wide branches. There is simply no independent, well-organised professional organisation providing our media with 'straight' information, as opposed to carefully selected, spun and slanted propaganda on all matters poliltical. Even the great news agency, Reuters, is run by Europhiles, and has international financial connections that make British national interests irrelevant.
Just recently, the EU propagandists have demonstrated conclusively how theirs is the one area in which the Commission has real competence. In recent months, journalists have successfully been distracted from giving due prominence to:
The resignation of the European Commissioners has been presented as evidence of their concern for standards. But their mass resignation enabled them to remain in office for several more months, enjoying all normal privileges.
And it remains to be explained how, under the noses of such righteous public servants, it was possible for several £billions to be spirited away, year after year, without any of them taking action? It has yet to be explained how these 'honest' people failed, year after year, to do anything at all about the corruption in the organisation that they were supposedly running, while we taxpayers, despite all EC attempts at censorship, were well aware that the European Pariliament was refusing to agree the budget, that crooks all over Europe were making a fat living off our taxes and that even the BBC was broadcasting programmes about EU corruption.
Only when our serious media are failing in their job is such inattention to public duty possible.
So, Lords Ashburton, Hanson, Healy, Hoerner, Marsh, Owen, Pearson, Prior, Sainsbury, Shore, Wolfson, Young and others, please note that what is needed is not another set of glossy brochures, expensive journals and exclusive conferences. If you have access to funds, put them in to a real news agency, a professional, authoritative and truly independent source that would give our media what is now omitted. Only then will we succeed. And when we do, we will not only escape from EU, but we will escape from all the other bureaucratic 'black holes' we have been dragged into in the past 50 years.
Thank you. You are visitor number since 0600 (GMT), 2Jul99.
For comments on this page, please contact Briame Gerdan.
For further reading at this site, please return to Briame Gerdan's "Public" Home Page.