The BBC’s Nick Robinson may have had fun on the Today programme last Tuesday morning trying to pin down Michael Gove, the chairman of Vote Leave, on precisely how Britain would manage to leave the EU (apparently without invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty) while retaining unrestricted access to the single market. But it is a pity there was no one to put Mr Robinson himself on the spot over his two-part documentary on the history of Britain and the EU, "Europe: Them or Us", the conclusion of which was broadcast that evening.
As so often when the BBC strays from honest reporting into propaganda, the key to Robinson’s account lay not just in what he did say but even more in what got left out...
What Nick Robinson and the BBC left out in its biased history of EU
Christopher Booker
24 April 2016
The Telegraph
Winston Churchill was adamant that Britain could not agree to Jean Monnet’s plan for a 'supranational’ European government. Credit: PA
The BBC’s Nick Robinson may have had fun on the Today programme last Tuesday morning trying to pin down Michael Gove, the chairman of Vote Leave, on precisely how Britain would manage to leave the EU (apparently without invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty) while retaining unrestricted access to the single market. But it is a pity there was no one to put Mr Robinson himself on the spot over his two-part documentary on the history of Britain and the EU, "Europe: Them or Us", the conclusion of which was broadcast that evening.
As so often when the BBC strays from honest reporting into propaganda, the key to Robinson’s account lay not just in what he did say but even more in what got left out. In fact, much of it was based on a longer and much more balanced series made for the BBC 20 years ago, The Poisoned Chalice.
Former BBC political editor Nick Robinson
One familiar example was the way in which he tried to portray Winston Churchill as “the father of European unity”. As usual, this could only be done by glossing over the crucial difference between the vision of a “United States of Europe” put forward by Churchill after the war, which led to the Council of Europe, and that promoted by Jean Monnet, the true “father of Europe”, which was to lead eventually to the European Union.
Churchill’s vision of a “United States of Europe” was based on intergovernmental co-operation, in which, as he repeatedly made clear, he saw no direct part for Britain. Monnet’s, put forward in the declaration he wrote for Robert Schuman in 1950, was for a wholly new “supranational” form of government, with the power to overrule the wishes and interests of nation states. Churchill was vehemently opposed to this, as when he said of Monnet’s proposal for “a supranational authority”, in the Commons on June 27 that year: “It is quite certain that we could not agree to become members of it.”
An even more glaring example of how woefully Robinson watered down and distorted even the version given in The Poisoned Chalice was how he skated round the way Margaret Thatcher was tricked in 1985 into believing that the second major European treaty, the Single European Act, was chiefly about the creation of a “single market”. In fact, as its name should have told her, it was about so much more than that: a further major step towards creating a “Single Europe”.
It was understandable that The Poisoned Chalice could not tell the full story behind this, because that was only pieced together some years later. In a book I co-authored, The Great Deception (reissued last week by the publishers), we were able to show how secret plans were drawn up for a further move towards “ever closer union” so ambitious that it would require not just one new treaty but two. The first, the Single European Act, transferred huge new supranational powers to Brussels by eliminating a great tranche of national vetoes and extending its reach to cover new areas of policy such as “the environment”.
Jean Monnet signs the Schuman Declaration in 1950. It proposed the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community, the forerunner of the EU. Credit: KEYSTONE-FRANCE /KEYSTONE-FRANCE
The second treaty, already planned in the mid-Eighties, was that signed six years later at Maastricht, transforming the European Community into the “European Union”, with its own currency, foreign and defence policies and, again, much more. Not only did Robinson say nothing of all this, but he tellingly omitted a remarkable interview in The Poisoned Chalice with Jacques Delors, who recalled how, on becoming president of the European Commission in 1985, he proposed “three themes: a common defence policy, a single currency, a change to the institutions which would lead to political integration”.
Only when Mrs Thatcher woke up to how seriously she had been deceived about all this did her possible veto become such a threat to the plans for Maastricht and a single currency that the Europhiles in Westminster and Brussels ganged up to get rid of her. But again, in this as in so much else, Robinson’s version of history was even further adrift from reality than anything for which he had mocked Michael Gove only hours earlier.
What Nick Robinson and the BBC left out in its biased history of EU
As so often when the BBC strays from honest reporting into propaganda, the key to Robinson’s account lay not just in what he did say but even more in what got left out...
What Nick Robinson and the BBC left out in its biased history of EU
Christopher Booker
24 April 2016
The Telegraph
Winston Churchill was adamant that Britain could not agree to Jean Monnet’s plan for a 'supranational’ European government. Credit: PA
The BBC’s Nick Robinson may have had fun on the Today programme last Tuesday morning trying to pin down Michael Gove, the chairman of Vote Leave, on precisely how Britain would manage to leave the EU (apparently without invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty) while retaining unrestricted access to the single market. But it is a pity there was no one to put Mr Robinson himself on the spot over his two-part documentary on the history of Britain and the EU, "Europe: Them or Us", the conclusion of which was broadcast that evening.
As so often when the BBC strays from honest reporting into propaganda, the key to Robinson’s account lay not just in what he did say but even more in what got left out. In fact, much of it was based on a longer and much more balanced series made for the BBC 20 years ago, The Poisoned Chalice.
Former BBC political editor Nick Robinson
One familiar example was the way in which he tried to portray Winston Churchill as “the father of European unity”. As usual, this could only be done by glossing over the crucial difference between the vision of a “United States of Europe” put forward by Churchill after the war, which led to the Council of Europe, and that promoted by Jean Monnet, the true “father of Europe”, which was to lead eventually to the European Union.
Churchill’s vision of a “United States of Europe” was based on intergovernmental co-operation, in which, as he repeatedly made clear, he saw no direct part for Britain. Monnet’s, put forward in the declaration he wrote for Robert Schuman in 1950, was for a wholly new “supranational” form of government, with the power to overrule the wishes and interests of nation states. Churchill was vehemently opposed to this, as when he said of Monnet’s proposal for “a supranational authority”, in the Commons on June 27 that year: “It is quite certain that we could not agree to become members of it.”
An even more glaring example of how woefully Robinson watered down and distorted even the version given in The Poisoned Chalice was how he skated round the way Margaret Thatcher was tricked in 1985 into believing that the second major European treaty, the Single European Act, was chiefly about the creation of a “single market”. In fact, as its name should have told her, it was about so much more than that: a further major step towards creating a “Single Europe”.
It was understandable that The Poisoned Chalice could not tell the full story behind this, because that was only pieced together some years later. In a book I co-authored, The Great Deception (reissued last week by the publishers), we were able to show how secret plans were drawn up for a further move towards “ever closer union” so ambitious that it would require not just one new treaty but two. The first, the Single European Act, transferred huge new supranational powers to Brussels by eliminating a great tranche of national vetoes and extending its reach to cover new areas of policy such as “the environment”.
Jean Monnet signs the Schuman Declaration in 1950. It proposed the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community, the forerunner of the EU. Credit: KEYSTONE-FRANCE /KEYSTONE-FRANCE
The second treaty, already planned in the mid-Eighties, was that signed six years later at Maastricht, transforming the European Community into the “European Union”, with its own currency, foreign and defence policies and, again, much more. Not only did Robinson say nothing of all this, but he tellingly omitted a remarkable interview in The Poisoned Chalice with Jacques Delors, who recalled how, on becoming president of the European Commission in 1985, he proposed “three themes: a common defence policy, a single currency, a change to the institutions which would lead to political integration”.
Only when Mrs Thatcher woke up to how seriously she had been deceived about all this did her possible veto become such a threat to the plans for Maastricht and a single currency that the Europhiles in Westminster and Brussels ganged up to get rid of her. But again, in this as in so much else, Robinson’s version of history was even further adrift from reality than anything for which he had mocked Michael Gove only hours earlier.
What Nick Robinson and the BBC left out in its biased history of EU