A long rant about the battles that we are still fighting and have been doing so since the thirties onYour Freedom and Ours. Enjoy.
The crap, the spotter, the antidote here and a commentary here - with another one here. Iain Dale picked it up, Devil's Kitchen takes them apart, Mr Eugenides adds a treasured comment and our Canadian and Spanish friends are on to it. Witterings from Witney gets it and even some less astute bloggers half get the point.
You wonder, though, whether the hacks begin to realise what complete fools they've made of themselves.
Obviously not, because the turd-eaters at The Daily Telegraph have just joined in (headline pictured above). I just knew they wouldn't be able to resist it, although none of their gifted hacks have been brave enough to put their names to their crap.
COMMENT THREAD
The increasingly dire Daily Telegraphtoday purports to offer us an in-depth assessment of the EU's "health and worth".
Written by Adrian Michaels, formerly theFinancial Times' Milan correspondent, and now group foreign editor at the Telegraph Media Group, the tenor immediately becomes apparent from the reliance on quotes from the great eurohole, Timothy Garton Ash.
But the piece de resistance is the "timeline" giving the "history" of the EU. Following exactly the EU's own hagiography, it perpetuates the myth that the origins of the EU lie in the post-Second World War period – as opposed to the reality that the intellectual genesis stems from the wreckage of the First World War.
The distinction is vitally important as it explains how a very small group of people, including Jean Monnet and Arthur Salter, constructed a paradigm to deal with the geopolitical structures of the 1920s, aimed at doing precisely what the politicians then failed to do – to prevent the Second World War.
That they failed did not deter them. After Nazi Germany had been defeated, they dusted off the same plans and applied them to a completely different geopolitical situation, as a means of preventing further war in between Germany and France – something which then (and now) was never going to happen.
It is that flawed (and failed) paradigm which now dominates European politics, and underlines the fatuity of the very essence of the European Union.
This, we explain in detail in The Great Deception, which we summarised on the blog, pointing out that the EU was already an idea whose time has gone.
But the likes of Adrian Michaels do not need to read books such as ours – they already know it all. And if they need to fill in any details, they can always call up Garton Ash to put them straight. These are the people who seek to keep us informed. The know nothing, they learn nothing. They are the enemy.
Pic: the first meeting of the European Coal and Steel Community Assembly – the fore-runner to the EU parliament. It was at this meeting that Monnet announced that they were setting up a "government of Europe". Nothing has changed since.
COMMENT THREAD
The turd-eaters are in full flow this morning, trilling about "product placement" on the idiots' lantern.
One of many consuming the fare is Jo Adetunji of The Guardian, who follows the "corporate line", under the headline "UK to follow US lead by allowing product placement on television."
Fresh from successes such as these, our little hackette breathlessly tells us that, "while product placement is rife in film, British television programmes have long had to make up fictional products." But, she writes, "That is all likely to change this week after a decision that is expected to allow commercial broadcasters to show sponsored products for the first time."
And why is that "all likely to change"? Well, according to this turd-eater, it is because culture secretary Ben Bradshaw is to announce a three-month consultation on the changes in a Royal Television Society speech this week.
Despite, in March, the then culture secretary, Andy Burnham, saying that lifting the ban raised "very serious concerns" and was "blurring the boundaries between advertising and editorial", Bradshaw avers – according to la Adetnji - that the "climate has changed" and has accepted lifting the ban "in principle".
That "climate", of course, is the EU's Directive 2007/65/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 December 2007 amending Council Directive 89/552/EC on the coordination of certain provisions laid down by law, regulation or administrative action in Member States concerning the pursuit of television broadcasting activities.
This is now known as the Audiovisual Media Services Directive, updating the 1997 "Television without Frontiers" directive, not that you would expect an airhead like Adetunji to realise this.
Nor indeed do the other turd-eaters, crunching on the same set of press releases, not least Jason Beattie of the Daily Mirror who reports under the headline: "Product placement could mean £100m windfall for TV". This feeble hack cites (as do many) Richard Lindley, chairman of the independent Voice of the Listener and Viewer, who moans that product placement it would "contaminate" TV and inevitably lead to placements on news and current affairs programmes.
No it will not, Mr Lindley, because the rules are made by the EU and specifically prohibit "placements on news and current affairs programmes", which actually makes the comment not worth printing. But nothing is too bad, too irrelevant or too misleading for our idle hacks to print, if it fills a space.
Actually, while product placement is permitted by the new directive, it is not compulsory – in theory. On the face of it, member states are "allowed" to make a choice.
That is the theory, but with broadcasters such as BskyB beaming their trash from Luxembourg, taking advantage of EU law, domestic broadcasters such as ITV would be heavily disadvantaged if the UK decided to go it alone. Thus, the UK government would very quickly find itself in the ECJ, defending an expensive law suit. Thus, it really has not option but to accede to the change in the "climate".
Not to be outdone though, in the Financial Times, it takes two hacks, Tim Bradshaw and Jim Pickard, to chew on the turd, telling us that: "Television advertisements are set to escape the confines of the commercial break as the government reverses its opposition to product placement." There is no mention of the EU, of course.
Nor will you get that from turd-eater Peter Taylor in The Daily Telegraph who, like the rest of the diners, solemnly informs us that: "Troubled ITV stands to reap tens of millions of pounds in new revenue under Government plans to allow US-style product placement on television."
The nearest we get to any recognition of the elephant in the room is from Suzy Jagger and Patrick Foster in The Times, and pair who feel the need to hold hands while they munch. They boldly pronounce that, "There's a time and a placement for everything as TV aims to cash in." You have to go way down in the heap of excrement offered to find the reference to "A European Parliament directive" (whatever that is) that "came into force almost two years ago". It, we are told, "permits product placement in sport and light entertainment programmes, if national governments allowed it. Most other EU nations have decided to lift restrictions."
And that's it. The BBC ran the story on its broadcast news yesterday, with nary a mention of the EU, and all the other little turd-eaters have piled in with the same line. One might suggest they are all up their own northeast passage.