After The Prize Rush

Following the news of the EU being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize has come the agenda driven copy and the pundits, most of which, especially those out there on the right, have passed severely adverse comment on the event, not least because it does not accord with their outlook. Chief among these has been the habitually dishonest Bruno Waterfield at the Telegraph.

And, given the agenda of the Tel right now, merely reporting the event would be passing up the opportunity for a quick smear. So readers are told of “the looming prospect of an acrimonious break-up” of the EU. This casual smear is pure bullshit, but it’s par for the course for Waterfield, as is “the economic defects of the Euro have laid waste to many southern European countries”.

We then get the usual “there are demonstrations in Greece and Spain”, while the Tel does not bother to tell its readers that, not so long ago, demonstrating in those countries would have been illegal and met with brutal and possibly even lethal force – and living standards for much of those countries’ populations were ones of miserable poverty. But Waterfield goes to Douglas “Kamikaze” Carswell for a quote.

Strangely, the Express also goes with the “looming break-up”, which gives you a clue as to where they lifted their copy. The piece asserts that the award was given “in a bid to play down the Eurozone debt crisis”, so yet more invention, then. And the Mail has the “prospect of an acrimonious break-up of the Euro”. Really? Oh yes, it’s a “Collapsing currency”. I wouldn’t be so sure about that.

For starters, this post is being typed in a Eurozone country where nothing to do with the currency is collapsing. Goods and services are being priced, bought and paid for in Euros. The exchange rate versus Sterling is where it has been for much of the past week, with a Pound buying around €1.24. With so many Brits travelling around the Eurozone, the impact of such dishonesty is minimal.

But the dishonesty is not confined to the “news” pages, as Dan, Dan the Oratory Man shows with another exhibition of false assertion. He states that the EU’s “ruling dogma” is “that nationalism causes war”. Baloney, Dan. Show me where in the Treaty of Rome or any of the successor treaties that is even mentioned. Hannan then implies that the EU is a single state. See previous assessment.

But at least Dan does not pretend that the EU is not democratic – well, not this time, anyway. Fortunately Adrian Hilton at the Mail makes up for him by asserting that the EU “is fundamentally anti-democratic”. That’s why we have elections for the European Parliament, then. This is lame stuff. Had anyone outside the UK pointed at demonstrations in Thatcher’s Britain as demonstrating “no peace”, the tune would have changed smartish. You’ll have to do better than this, folks.