Freelance writer and editor
Robert Reich, a key figure in President Clinton’s first administration, had this to say in a recent blog post:
It’s always easier to stir up fear and anger against something that’s amorphous than to stir up enthusiasm for it.
He’s talking about US healthcare proposals, but he could just as easily be talking about anything to do with the EU.
Richard Vinen’s trashing of Stephen Pollard’s new book in the Sunday Times concludes with this memorable putdown:
… even the most Cromwellian republican among us might — on reading Pollard’s description of Prince Charles’s public statements as “the inappropriate rantings of a singularly ignorant bore” — feel that the words “pot” and “kettle” come to mind.
Interestingly, Pollard draws attention to this review on his blog – making the point that if you dish it out, as Pollard has done on many occasions in the past, then you should be able to take it.
Rod Liddle, former editor of the Today programme, claims his erstwhile colleague Andrew Gilligan was
the first journalist to uncover the plans for a European Union constitution.
This sounds weird to me. Did those plans need “uncovering”? When were they ever a secret? It took months to draft that damn thing, and Giscard and his pals in the “Praesidium” never tried to hide what they were doing. Perhaps Liddle actually means Gilligan was the first to “notice” the plans. He would still be wrong, but his claim might at least make sense.
This is typical of UK reporting of the EU. We generally ignore everything that is being planned in Brussels until it’s too late to make any changes, and then try and claim there is some kind of secret plot to sneak measures through without telling us. Charlemagne makes a similar point today about the EU’s plans to regulate hedge funds. Pesky foreigners, eh?
