A Brexit Collection update

Regular readers may recall an earlier post on BBC Radio 4's Brexit Collection.

Radio 4's Brexit Collection is a gathering-together of Brexit-related programmes, presumably intended to act as a showcase for the station.

All the items were listed and described in that post and, taken in the round, offered such an overwhelmingly negative take on Brexit that I ended by writing:

My ruling? The exhibits exhibited here by the Defence are the most damning gathering of exhibits I've ever seen. The BBC has gifted the Prosecution. The verdict is beyond reasonable doubt: The BBC is guilty of bias. Case closed.

If you've reviewed them too (and are being fair-minded) I really don't think you could possibly disagree with that (if I say so myself). The overall level of overall bias (against Brexit) was absolutely astonishing.

Six more exhibits have since been added to the Collection (some of which we've already written about here at ITBB):

Emma Jane Kirby's Brexit Street reports for PM

David Aaronovitch's The Briefing Room: Why Did People Vote Leave?

Front Row's The Cultural Response to Brexit special

Anne McElvoy's How We Voted Brexit

Gus O'Donnell's Brexit: The Leavocrats

Gary Younge's East Europeans in Brexitland

All - except for (Remain-supporting) Anne McElvoy's fine and completely fair documentary - had an anti-Brexit bias.

Regular readers will know all about Brexit Street and its ongoing painting of untypical Leave voters as racist morons (one of the most skewed and wrong-headed pieces of BBC reporting in a long time).

They may also recall The Leavocrats as being an openly personal and very one-sided piece from a strong Remain supporter. 

Another strong Remain supporter, Gary Younge of the Guardian, got two half-hour programmes to focus on claims of post-Brexit racism, without providing much in the way of actual direct evidence. (David Keighley and Ken MacIntosh both slammed this colossal smear on Leave supporters over at The Conservative Woman.)

A further strong Remain supporter, David Aaronovitch of The Times, was more subtle on his two-part The Briefing Room (a companion episode looked at Remain voters), though his expert guests inclined towards Remain and towards a thesis which, controversially, connected Leave voters with people who wanted hanging and flogging (yes, both!). The Remain supporters got more time and much less 'scrutiny'.

And, finally, Front Row's discussion wasn't without a couple of Brexit-friendly (left-wing) guests (for balance!), but had a panel heavily loaded against Brexit....the worst, I'm ashamed to say, being Morecambe's very own Wayne Hemingway, who pretty much called for riots to keep us in the EU....and, not unusually for the BBC, an audience that was even more loaded against Brexit. It pretty much amounted to one big sigh about Brexit.

So, all in all, that's another avalanche of anti-Brexit-biased BBC broadcasting to swell the already vast snowy plain of anti-Brexit bias found in BBC Radio 4's Brexit Collection. 

Except for those two A Point of Views from Roger Scruton and John Gray, the whole thing provides clear proof that the BBC has a severe post-Brexit bias on the subject of Brexit, against Brexit.

*******

And it's a bias that evidently isn't fading with time....

The latest Radio 4 Brexit special (not yet included in the Brexit Collection) came via this week's In Business - the first post-Brexit edition of the programme to tackle the issue of Brexit.

And what angle did they choose?:

And, yes, it was largely negative about the Brexit vote and the possible consequences of Brexit.

Quite where the idea of 'BBC impartiality' can be found in the vast majority of this I'm at a complete loss to say.

"It most certainly does not have a veto over any legislation"

Thursday night saw Radio 4 broadcasting its second major documentary of the year relating to a possible Brexit - In Business, with Jonty Bloom. The programme was called Norway's European Dream. 

I think it's fair to say that quite a lot of 'Leave' supporters weren't impressed by its 'impartiality' - or its accuracy.

Take, for example, Dateline London's Alex Deane:

There's also a write-up of the programme by Jonty Bloom on the BBC website headlined How does Norway's relationship with the EU work?

The case against Jonty Bloom is laid on on various blogs - the clearest statement (so far) being at LeaveHQ under the title Another pack of BBC lies. 

Its main point is that Jonty was wrong to write that Norway "most certainly does not have a veto". Norway's agreement with the EU (through the EAA), however, says otherwise - see Section 6.1.4 The right of veto which begins:

According to the principle of unanimity applied in the EEA Joint Committee, all the EFTA states must agree in order for new EU legislation to be integrated into the EEA Agreement and for it to apply to cooperation between the EFTA states and the EU. If one EFTA state opposes integration, this also affects the other EFTA states in that the rules will not apply to them either, neither in the individual states nor between the EFTA states themselves nor in their relations with the EU. This possibility that each EFTA state has to object to new rules that lie within the scope of the EEA Agreement becoming applicable to the EFTA pillar is often referred to as these parties’ right of veto. 

So far, this right has not been exercised. This is partly because when EU legislation is to be integrated into the EEA Agreement it is submitted to the EEA Joint Committee at the final stage of an extensive process of information and consultation between the contracting parties. The purpose of this process is to ensure that agreement is reached on such decisions. During the negotiations on the EEA Agreement, compromises were found if a state had constitutional objections to the content or could invoke fundamental national interests. Even though constitutional problems are unlikely to arise in the day-to-day EEA work, the will to reach necessary compromises must still be regarded as a basic condition for cooperation.

The interesting thing in comparing what LeaveHQ quotes from the BBC website article and the BBC website article article itself is that the passage LeaveHQ especially takes issue with -

It most certainly does not have a veto over any legislation and yet the consequences can be huge.

- isn't actually to be found in the BBC website article. Indeed, the word 'veto' is entirely missing from the piece.

The invaluable Newsniffer site provides the answer. 

The article has been through several versions since it was first published on Thursday, yet only one paragraph has ever been changed - and that's the one quoted by LeaveHQ (and other anti-EU blogs)! 

It originally said exactly what they quote:

It most certainly does not have a veto over any legislation and yet the consequences can be huge.

I'm guessing Jonty received some strongly-worded emails or tweets as that bold (and wrong) assertion was fairly swiftly (stealth-)edited out of the article. 

The first edit changed it to something that's considerably more accurate:

In theory it has a veto over any legislation but it has never used it, and yet the consequences of using the veto could be huge.

The final version, however, marks a step-back:

Now, as Norway is not a member of the EU, it has no say over these or any other EU rules. 

It can lobby against them, but it does not sit round the table when they are proposed, discussed, amended, debated, or voted into law.
The consequences can be huge.

That's very carefully (you might say 'knowingly' put). It skirts around the fact that Norway does have a say through the EEA agreement at certain stages outside of the EU's structures and can veto legislation (though it chooses not to).

This is evidence that someone at the BBC, probably Jonty himself, realised that he'd got it wrong and went it to edit the article and remove the offending passage - which had already been getting him into serious trouble with anti-EU bloggers.

Of course, you won't see a message at the bottom of the BBC article informing readers that the article has been amended. That would be far too honest!