EU Referendum: Flexcit, Obama And Boris

“America would welcome it if Britain should apply for full membership in the [EEC], explicitly recognising that the Rome treaty was not merely a static document but a process leading towards political unification.”(George Ball Under-Secretary of State for JFK 1961)

It's been well documented, even by its own internal Wilson report, that the UK public broadcaster is less than impartial when it comes to reporting on the EU accurately.

And it's also well documented that the United States is keen on UK membership of the European Union for reasons that are less than altruistic as the above quote illustrates very clearly. The US was always going to interfere, it wishes to have a relationship with a nation state with whom it has historical connections but which is subordinate to a supranational body.

All of the above has been perfectly evident from years of experience and from the studying

the mistakes and lessons laid bare in the wonderful 1975 Referendum book by David Butler and Uwe W. Kitzinger which with unerring and unintentional accuracy predicted many of the same problems 40 years ahead. The book is freely available on the internet,

With this in mind therefore we note this report from the BBC:

The BBC's opening website paragraph is this:

At a town hall meeting in London, US president Barack Obama told 500 young people to "reject pessimism, cynicism and know that progress is possible".

Obama hasn't mentioned specifically the EU, but the phrase of "rejecting pessimism and cynicism" makes it transparent of what his message is, given his previous statements during his current stay in the UK.

And then follows a relatively long piece BBC about Obama which includes interviews with an "international relations student" who's "a non-binary person", an "ethnic minority president of the Oxford University Conservative Association" and "a campaigner on disability and violence against women". All of which sounds very progressive and positive.

When we consider the recent fuss about the "debate" - if we can call it that - with Boris Johnson's ill informed intervention regarding Obama's comments on UK membership of the EU, describing the lame duck US President as "part-Kenyan", the inference and context of Obama's recent comments becomes obvious. The debate is being framed as a well meaning progressive Cameron against an idiot colonial and out of date Boris.

Obama is using well rehearsed emotional issues to attempt to isolate the Brexit campaigners as those who are not normal without, in this report, having to mention the EU. Thus the BBC doesn't have to show "balance" in this particular piece as part of its referendum reporting.

In this sense the referendum is going according to plan. It is a repeat of 1975. It's not like we weren't warned. We knew the BBC would be unfair, we knew the media be unfair, we knew Cameron would lie and we knew American and other countries would interfere.  We knew this.

And that was the point of an exit plan - it allowed us to launch an effective pre-emptive strike. By having a progressive positive plan we would have negated the effectiveness of an American President's intervention.

Instead we are increasingly being lumbered with Boris, a politician without a clue who this blog has long been less than convinced that he is a Eurosceptic Tory - if that term is not an oxymoron.

It's within this context it becomes increasingly difficult to tell whether Boris' current disastrous intervention in the referendum campaign is the result of idiocy or perhaps more cynically an attempt to hijack the leave campaign and deliberately ruin it, The latter would be very much in keeping with his and his family's well established pro-EU views.

The outcome though as it currently stands is the leave campaign loses, Failing to learn these lessons of the obvious mistakes of the past are now coming to pass....again.

EU Referendum: Like A Candle In The Wind

Above is a screen print of a recent American publication - National Enquirer - which has made forthright allegations regarding the songwriter Elton John's private life, more specifically the circumstances over his married life.

It is an issue which has now become a Westminster one - vexing the UK media who are currently unable to report explicitly the implied sordid details as they are obviously desperate to do so.

Conversely the National Enquirer is able to be so publicly indiscreet by virtue of being protected by the American Constitution, it can go where the UK media fears to tread, restricted by domestic privacy law - a law heavily inspired from Brussels but fully enforced by a very compliant British establishment.

This lack of ability to report what is common knowledge worldwide on the internet has lead to a series of articles in the UK media, particularly the Daily Mail, spitting feathers at its inability to name Elton John and crucially his married partner Furnish, as part of an injunction.

With this in mind we note that the website PopBitch gives a detailed insight on how newspapers, and therefore readers, can circumvent injunctions by laying down many clues for the readers to follow while not being in contempt of court.

However and much more interesting for this blog is not Elton John's private life - we couldn't care less about that - it is the observation of the vigorous manner the media have attempted to frame the issue as one of free speech, a deceptive attempt for the media to portray itself as upholding the principles of the fourth estate.

This is contentious. Instead it seems that it is details of Elton John's private life which is the media's concern not the responsibility holding the establishment to account which the fourth estate apparently prides itself on doing.

Free speech is something this blog fully embraces, it is the sunlight that exposes the powerful. But we are left in a position where we have to question the direction of the sunlight from the legacy media. Where is the Super Trooper being aimed at? Celebrities? Or trying to inform us on how our country is governed.

The answer resides in the so- called journalistic principles regarding Cameron lying about "vetoing" an EU treaty in 2011 which never happened, or that Cameron's so called negotiations earlier this year were less than impressive and involved directly lying to Parliament or that there's an exit plan which is doing the rounds in Whitehall which is being comprehensively ignored.

In addition why, for example, has the Daily Telegraph have a editorial block on the word "Flexcit" - the only publicly available feasible EU exit plan - being used in its articles by Telegraph paid authors and why has the media failed to report that the Electoral Commission has allowed itself to be completely bullied regarding the time scale of the referendum to the extent it fully capitulated with no fuss.

The legacy media cannot be unaware not least due very often to the comments under the articles which robustly alert them to their mistakes; comments which are often patronisingly dismissed as"below the line". Perhaps in this context can we consider it more than a coincidence that the revamped pro-EU Telegraph website no longer accepts comments. A change which has occurred just before an EU Referendum?

We are tempted to conclude therefore that regarding the UK media if Elton John truly wants a private life then all he needs to do is have a photograph of him prominently holding up a copy of Flexcit. The self censorship of the media will do the rest for him.

It would have been more effective and would have been a hell of a lot cheaper.