Judas Express

Despite the above front page, the Daily Express's stance of UK exit has always been dubious. It has been little different to other papers in its coverage of EU matters making many of the same basic errors and assumptions. It ignored for example the EU's hidden hand behind many of the changes to the Royal Mail.

Today's Express editorial confirms our suspicions. It could be suggested that it has performed a U-turn but that would have required the paper to have been genuinely eurosceptic in the first place. Straight out of Cameron's handbook we get this:

[Ukip] is defined by what it is against: it wants to withdraw from the EU, retreat into a UK that no longer exists, hoist the drawbridge and turn its back on the people who are our allies and largest trading partners.

In an increasingly fractious world, with the Russian bear growling ominously in the east and conflict in the Middle East, would it not be better to stay among the people who are essentially our friends?

And we know what's coming, yup... reform:

Of course the EU is riddled with problems.

There is waste and corruption on an industrial scale, a bloated bureaucracy, unelected officials with a sense of entitlement and grotesque expense accounts, and a tendency to meddle in the affairs of member countries.

Surely it would be better to try to make reforms within the EU rather than just throwing it all away?

Should we not return to the very fundamentals of what the EU should be and work to build an institution of which we can be proud?

Despite that the EU is exactly what it set out to be; that it is designed to be unelected, designed to meddle in the affairs of member states and reform to make it different to how it was designed is a complete and utter non-starter. It is sometimes a wonder how British national newspapers can write such unmitigated crap with a straight face.

What it confirms though, as if we didn't already know, that in any referendum campaign the out side will have no friends in the media, not even the Express. One possible antidote to this of course would be to have a half-decent website...