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Partisanship in the UK print media over Brexit has placed a special burden on the BBC. The state broadcaster, lavishly financed through the licence fee to the tune of £3.5bn per annum, is the dominant presence in both radio and television. The newspapers are almost all lined up firmly on one side or the other, mainly pro-Brexit.
Several of them, including the Mail, Express, Telegraph and the Sun, have been banging out Europhobic propaganda for decades and their cumulative impact must have had an impact on the referendum result.
Only a few papers, notably The Financial Times, have attempted any kind of balance and people seeking hard factual detail on other sectors must resort to specialist blogs, trade papers and industry websites.
The general public cannot be expected to chase around looking for specialist blogs and relies mainly on broadcast media.
The Flat Earth Society is not entitled to 10 minutes of airtime whenever satellite images show our planet to be a sphere
The BBC has come in for heavy criticism from the Remain side of the argument since it has a statutory obligation to avoid taking sides in political coverage and to strive for balance. Any dominant state broadcaster, including RTÉ in Ireland, will always be accused of bias by political parties and the accusations are usually baseless.
The criticism of the BBC looks to be justified, not because the BBC has been editorialising for Leave or Remain, or for a softer or harder Brexit, but because it has adopted an unsatisfactory notion of “balance”.
The Flat Earth Society is not entitled to 10 minutes of airtime whenever satellite images show our planet to be a sphere. This principle has not been observed in the BBC’s coverage of Brexit. Obscure Europhobe MPs are regularly invited to dismiss factual statements from economic and business experts on matters which are simply not in dispute. They are indulged, without interrogation, as they bang out misleading tosh about not-very-technical issues which they appear not to comprehend.
A good example is the financial settlement which the UK will owe on departure, reckoned to be about €39bn. This is regularly described as an “exit fee”, not just by Brexiteers but by BBC presenters.
It is not an exit fee since it cannot be avoided by remaining in the EU.
It represents amounts due to the EU from the United Kingdom arising from spending commitments already agreed, money which would become due anyway, in or out.
UK government
The UK government has agreed the principle and the €39bn is a working estimate.
Several Brexiteers have appeared on BBC programmes recently asserting that this €39bn can be avoided in a no-deal Brexit – it is, they assert, a payment for Mrs May’s deal, a deal which they dislike and can be saved if there is a no-deal crash-out.
The UK is a net contributor to the EU budget, as are all the better-off members, including Ireland
Nobody in the UK government, on the opposition front bench or in the civil service believes any of this. It is just an unpaid once-off bill that comes due on departure, to be paid over a period of years.
The amount sounds impressive but is tiny by comparison with the possible ongoing costs to the UK budget of a bad economic outcome to Brexit.
The UK is a net contributor to the EU budget, as are all the better-off members, including Ireland.
The UK’s bill is about €10bn per annum and will no longer be payable after exit.
Paying €39bn once to avoid paying €10bn every year, if that were the end of it, sounds like a nice deal.
Another Brexiteer mantra, heard less often in recent months, was that the EU had to concede a better deal because it needs the UK’s money. Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the ultra-Brexiteers, has pronounced that the EU would be bankrupt without the money. It equates to about £9bn per annum in sterling, which conveniently works out at £20 per person per annum for the 450m citizens in the EU-27.
Remarkably, Rees-Mogg is a financial adviser and fund manager on his days off from politics.
Misleading statements
Whether the people making these statements are headbangers or conscious liars is not the key point. What matters is that misleading statements go unchallenged week after week on the BBC.
Some of the other channels are not so deferential: Channel 4 News (also a state-owned channel by the way) has been denounced by some Brexiteers since the presenters are more robust about facts.
On the factual coverage of the Brexit issues, the Irish media have been doing a better job, on slender resources, than most of their British counterparts.
This has not gone unnoticed in the UK and some Irish journalists, including RTÉ’s Tony Connolly and Fintan O’Toole of The Irish Times have acquired a select fan club across the water.
When the dust settles, the abject performance of the BBC will come under scrutiny.
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