Toby on Tuesday

'A Lie Becomes The Truth'

“When it becomes serious you have to lie!”   Those were the immortal words of Herr Juncker, President of the European Commission, when discussing the EU’s development.   And his advice has clearly been taken to heart by our very own master of spin, our Mr. Cameron, when combining fear with fiction in his preposterous work of EU propaganda that has been coming through our letterboxes at a cost to taxpayers of £9.3 million.   But of course the original master of spin, from whom both Herr Juncker and Mr. Cameron seem to have learned their craft, was none other than Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda in Germany from 1933 to 1945.   He was the one who first dreamed up guidance for today’s politicians such as, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it”, “Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will” and, “A lie told once remains a lie but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth”.   Our own admirably impartial Electoral Commission has ruled that using public money for Mr. Cameron’s document is “not in the spirit of a fair referendum and should not have been done”, which is a telling understatement.   So I thought that I would try a little truth test on the mind-numbing assertions to which we have all been subjected in a document of which Joseph Goebbels would certainly have been proud.

Let me offer you three examples from this work of fiction, which has been decried by our independent Electoral Commission and is an insult to the intelligence of the British people, and also the related facts.   The document’s very first claim is that, “The UK has secured a special status in a reformed EU.”   The truth is that, in the words of Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, Vice-President of the European Parliament, Mr. Cameron’s paltry deal is “not legally binding” and “nothing more than a deal hammered out down the local bazaar” which could soon be rejected by the European Parliament.   Of course it was the same ever-charming Graf Lambsdorff who declared that it was “a mistake to admit the British into the European Union!”   The document’s next fictitious claim is that, “we will keep our own border controls.”   This would be laughable if it were not so serious when 140 million citizens of Turkey and Ukraine are about to receive the right to visa-free travel into the EU’s 26-nation Schengen zone.   And once inside Schengen, EU passports can easily be bought in Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania, three of the most corrupt nations on the planet, entitling the purchasers to come straight into the UK just like anyone else in the EU, obtain National Insurance numbers and access exactly the same benefits as every UK citizen.   And after five years in the Schengen zone they can come here anyway.   Finally, the third example from this work of fiction is that after Brexit we would lose access to the EU’s Single Market, as if the EU were primarily an economic and not a political construct.   The fact is that on 24th June we could rejoin Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Liechtenstein in the Swiss-based European Free Trade Association, a fine organisation founded by Britain, and remain in the European Economic Area with an EU trade deal to reflect our status as its principal customer.   After all, Switzerland exports four and a half times as much per head to the EU as does the UK without needing to be a member.   These are just some of the falsehoods that litter this dismal document and those associated with it should hang their heads in shame.

But to return to the father of modern political propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.   On 22nd April, 1945 with defeat looming in World War Two, together with his wife Magda and their six children, Goebbels moved into the Berlin Fuhrerbunker to be close to Adolf Hitler.   There on 29th April Hitler appointed him Reich Chancellor.   On the following day Hitler shot himself.   Then on 1st May Goebbels and Magda administered cyanide to their children before taking their own lives.   However, Magda Goebbels left another son who survived the war, Harald Quandt, from her earlier marriage to the prominent industrialist Gunther Quandt.   And in post-war Europe the Quandts’ industrial empire went from strength to strength, based principally on their holding of some 46% of BMW, so that they are now thought to be the richest family in Germany.   And the EU’s relentless expansion into Bosnia, Turkey and Ukraine, at huge cost to the British taxpayer, is due in large measure to German industry’s incessant need to obtain and control new markets for its products, not least the Quandt family’s BMWs.   We should think on these things when the tendentious propaganda from Mr. Cameron lands on our doormats.   And the printer responsible for this tawdry document is Williams Lea, now owned by Germany’s Deutsche Post DHL, which itself receives substantial grants from the European Commission.   So welcome to the wonderful world of the new Europe!

Until next Tuesday!

Toby