We would be driving along roads with alien numbers: E30, E73, E92. Roads no longer lined with hedgerows full of British wildlife – these having been pulled down by farmers to increase their Common Agricultural Policy subsidies. Instead, busts of Jacques Delors would adorn our highways. We would see grocers carted off to jail for selling non-straight cucumbers and overly-bent bananas. Playgrounds would be left desolate – swings and slides having been torn down at the behest of EU pen pushers. Piling the grief on children, treasured household pets could no longer be given a proper burial unless their bodies had first been boiled in pressure-cookers.

Even a visit to the local pub for a litre of beer would be prohibited unless regulation earmuffs were worn to protect against excessive noise from music or chatter. Ordering cod and chips would have to be done in Latin because of the confusion caused to foreigners by the use of English. Feeding the ducks during a stroll in the park would be illegal unless you possessed a licence to distribute waste food. The recipient ducks would need one too.

Clearly none of the above myths, in common with the vast majority of others, have come to pass as reality in the UK. What has become all too real is the indelible impression of the EU left on the public conscience by this constant trickle of prevarication. The cumulative effect of this kind of journalism has certainly had a hugely damaging effect on the EU’s reputation within the UK. Regrettably, such an admission will be interpreted as a receipt of success for many.

As Britain marks the 30th anniversary of its membership of the European Community, this culture of misrepresentation still infuses press coverage of EU affairs. The reasons for this still-prevalent euroscepticism across the UK has many origins, ranging from the historical to thinly-veiled xenophobia, and from ignorance as well as considered economic and political analysis. Undoubtedly, the most viable and effective apparatus for expression of this panorama of europhobic opinion has been via euromyths, which are, at best, grotesque caricatures of the truth or simply pure invention of what the EU is about. By distortion and invention they are designed to belittle, ridicule or horrify, depending on the subject matter and the audience.

The event which was singularly most generative of these euromyths was the creation of the internal market. The Single European Act of 1986 set a deadline of 1992 for the single market to become operational. Inherent in the establishment of this level playing field for inter-EU trade was the harmonisation of national laws. Despite this hugely complex legislative process being administered with flexibility and sensitivity to member states’ national proclivities, it proved a fertile source of euromyths.

Platforms for dissatisfaction

Various ways of combating this were established. One of the most longlasting has proved to be Press Watch, first published in 1996 as an attempt (for that was all it could be) by the European Commission in the UK to counter this collusion of agenda-driven misrepresentation and inaccuracy. Sent out to MPs, peers, the newspapers themselves and other “opinionformers”, this periodic publication – now in its seventh year and heading towards its sixteenth issue – catalogues recent euromyths; not all, but those that have been most widely covered in the newspapers. The knee-jerk reaction most often levied at Press Watch is that the Commission – as one MP’s correspondence recently put it – should be using its resources to deal with the “real issues of substance and concern”. After all, the EU is currently undergoing an unprecedented enlargement process, with all the political, social, and economic extrapolations this entails, including reform of the organisation’s institutions. Further major changes have been necessitated within the agricultural and fisheries sectors, and the euro has just celebrated its first anniversary. Unfortunately, for much of the media it is not these “real issues of substance and concern” that are of interest – it is the banning of lemon curd, swings, islands, and church bells, along with the provision of toys for pigs. My office has to deal with the situation as it finds it.

As with all political institutions, the EU must have its workings and policies brought to light and subjected to vigorous scrutiny by the media. Even the most ardent europhile would concede that there is ample scope for constructive, considered, criticism. But if the agenda that spawns euromyths is that membership of the EU is of such damaging consequence to the UK, then surely there are more cogent arguments to be postulated than those concerning the size of peaches and the banning of corgis? If the eurosceptic argument is so strong, why does the need for insidious invention remain?

The point is often made that my office should utilise the Press Complaints Commission to respond to such articles, but it has proved an impractical and inefficient course to pursue. On the one occasion this route was taken, the protracted negotiations with both the PCC and the newspaper concerned, and the subsequent result, were beyond unsatisfactory. We pursued a case following a three-tier headline, doublepage article in The Mail on Sunday which contained a panoply of lies and misinformation on a Commission-run shop. After two months of frustrating negotiations with first, as required, the newspaper concerned, and subsequently the PCC, the upshot was the publication of a desultorily small correction and a rebuttal letter – a result diluted by its retrospection and hardly an adequate counterbalance to the impact of the initial article.

Yet it is not merely the logistical impediments that impair the effectiveness of the PCC, but the whole ethos behind the watchdog. A key tenet of the PCC’s claims for self-regulation of the press is that the Code derives its strength because it is set and applied by those who must abide by it, i.e. the newspapers themselves. The PCC’s website claims that “self regulation works because the newspaper and magazine publishing industry is committed to it”. Thus, in theory, self-regulation produces an industry that holds the Code in such reverence that the veracity of stories is exhaustively researched, and corrections and letters of rebuttal willingly printed upon recognition of a “significant inaccuracy, misleading statement, or distorted report”. The actuality however, as experienced by my office, is substantially different.

Wilful ignorance

“It is time Ministers explained why Britain, unlike Germany, does not have a simple constitutional clause asserting that British law will always take primacy over those emanating from the European Union and its institutions.”

A mantra oft repeated by my staff is that the European Court of Human Rights is a body of the Council of Europe, an intergovernmental organisation entirely separate from the EU. Eight years on and this same distortion of fact to implicate the EU in stories with which it has no connection remains steadfastly employed by journalists. In a recent article in The Daily Telegraph entitled “Church bells silenced by fear of EU law” it transpired that the copy referred to the European Convention on Human Rights. Again, this is a body of law derived from the Council of Europe, not the EU.

This was further evidenced in the various stories concerning the demolition of a set of playground swings. According to the reports, a local council, in response to EU law, had been forced to demolish a set of swings because they did not conform to the legislation concerned. Among the emotive headlines used was the Daily Express’s cod-exasperated “You could just swing for them! – EU officials shut playground favourite”, and The Times’s confidently assertive “Children pushed off swings by EU”. Suitably lachrymose pictures of the children affected were used to further illustrate the terrible effect of EU law. Ostensibly another classic case of EU meddling; in reality, the whole affair was based around an entirely voluntary measure, set by a non-EU body, and already adopted by the British Standards Institute some years ago. But because the relevant body, the European Standardisation Committee, contained that generic affirmation of nuisance, “European”, the stories ran with the EU firmly positioned in the role of villain.

When attempting to rebut these stories, whether through letters for publication or to editors, the production of Press Watch, or via contact with individual journalists, my office is confronted with a combination of obduracy, often based around semantic obfuscation, and incredulity. Witness one conversation between a member of our press office who, on telling a Daily Express journalist that her story on alleged EU laws on street lighting was wrong, was met with the response: “Well, the EU meddles into (sic) all sorts of areas, so it wouldn’t surprise me if this was true”.

Even in instances of acknowledged factual inaccuracy there remains an unwillingness to publish letters of correction, and when this concession is granted, the correspondence often appears in edited form and is given little prominence – certainly in relation to the original stories to which they refer. When confronted over such articles, the prevailing attitude among the press seems to be that they cannot believe the EU has the temerity to respond to any allegations, however spurious. In the case of stories that I would readily agree are of a humorous nature, as opposed to those that are laughable, the accusation is levelled that the Commission is being po-faced for considering them worthy of refutation. Against a backdrop of consistently objective criticism of the EU and non-prejudicial coverage of EU affairs, it would be plausible to accept them as innocuously frivolous. When they constitute such a vast proportion of coverage, to the extent that the public perception of the EU has irrefutably come to be defined in such limited terms, they cannot be treated so magnanimously.

Worst exponents

The correlation between the national newspapers represented on the PCC’s Code of Practice Committee and those that are the worst exponents of europhobic pretence is too striking to engender confidence in the current system. But even with a more rigorous application of the principles of selfregulation it would be unlikely that the current trend of reporting of EU affairs would alter dramatically. With political procrastination over the UK’s role in Europe and a media pandering to the baser nationalistic interests of its readership, there can be no serious basis for discussion. Until stronger political leadership indicates that Britain is committed to fulfilling its role as a vital partner within the EU, there can be no expectation of a higher standard of coverage of EU affairs.